The Program on Human Rights (PHR) at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) will be phasing out its program in 2015 with the retirement of PHR’s Director Helen Stacy.
Upcoming talk by Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Philip M. Breedlove.
"Europe at the Crossroads"
Date: November 9, 2015
Time: 12:00PM to 1:30PM
Location: Koret Taube Conference Center, Room 130
RSVP by 5:00PM November 5, 2015.
General Breedlove has served in the United States Air Force since graduating from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1977. Immediately prior to assuming his current position, General Breedlove served as Commander, U.S. Air Forces in Europe; Commander, U.S. Air Forces Africa; Commander Headquarters Allied Air Command, Ramstein; and Director, Joint Air Power Competence Centre, Kalkar Germany. We invite you to visit ourwebsite for additional information about this event.
We would like to introduce you to some of the faculty members that we support and the projects on which they are working. Our featured faculty member this month is Jens Hainmueller, who is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science.
Jens earned his Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University in 2009 and joined the faculty at Stanford University in 2014. His research interests include statistical methods, immigration, political economy, and political behavior. An example of Jens's research on immigration and migrant integration is his recent co-authored work with Dominik Hangertner at the London School of Economics and Giuseppe Pietrantuono at the University of Zurich, which examined the effect of naturalization on migrant political integration into the host society. Establishing the effects of naturalization on political integration is complicated by an unobservable selection process; a non-random sample of migrants chooses to apply for naturalization and a non-random sample of naturalization applicants is approved. As a result, previous work has neither been able to establish the direction of the relationship between naturalization and poitical integration nor isolate the effect of naturalization on political integration vis-à-vis alternatives. In order to limit the bias induced by this dual-selection process, Jens and his coauthors analyzed data from Switzerland, where some municipalities used referendums to make decisions on naturalization applications. By limiting the sample to those applications that were approved or rejected by only a few votes, the authors were able to establish treatment and control groups that were otherwise equivalent, thereby removing selection bias from their data. Using this unbiased sample, Jens and his coauthors found that naturalization indeed has a positive effect on migrant political integration by increasing political participation, political knowledge, and political efficacy, among others. This research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. We invite you to visit our website for additional information about this research.
Publication Details: Hainmueller, Jens, Dominik Hangartner, and Guiseppe Pietrantuono. 2015. "Naturalization Fosters the Long-Term Political Integration of Immigrants." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 112(41):12,651-12,656.
We would like to introduce you to some of the students that we support and the projects on which they are working. Our featured student this month is Jason Weinreb (Political Science). Jason is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University.
Jason is a political economist who is interested in political risk, the politics of public finance, and economic history. His dissertation examines how newly-independent states finance themselves, focusing on former British colonies. Analysis of the London Stock Exchange in the quarter century following World War II reveals a surprising trend: colonial debt bond prices remained remarkably stable throughout decolonization. In his research at the British National Archives in London, funded in part by The Europe Center, Jason found that price stability was an insufficient indicator of investor confidence. Far from reflecting investors unperturbed by the uncertainty of decolonization, Jason's research uncovers evidence that investors were indeed concerned about the effects of independence on their investment. In fact, investor concerns manifested in higher interest rates, fewer colonial debt bond issues, and lower subscription rates relative to earlier periods. His archival research further uncovers factors that explain why colonial debt bond prices fail to reflect investor sentiment. Chief among these was the British government's intervention in the market. Its strategic purchase and holding of colonial debt bonds ensured price stability despite investor concerns.
Pictured: Renée Firestone, Hermine Liska, and Bernhard Rammerstorfer
In his recent visit to Stanford University, former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen painted a bleak picture of global politics. The hope of the Arab Spring has been replaced by new authoritarian regimes, civil war, and ISIS. Russia is becoming more internally authoritarian and externally aggressive. According to one measure, global levels of freedom have been in decline for the past nine consecutive years. "It looks", he said, "as if a Pandora's box of religious, ethnic, and political strife has been opened, and many nations have plunged into chaos and extremism." According to Rasmussen, successfully navigating these global challenges requires a concerted effort among liberal democratic states, spearheaded by American leadership. In order to create a strong global community of liberal democracies, he advocated strengthening the Transatlantic alliance. In addition to the existing military alliance forged through NATO, he proposed the creation of a Transatlantic Free Trade Area (TAFTA) and a Transatlantic peoples program, which would foster educational, scientific, and cultural exchanges among the partner states. More than 150 people attended the talk, which was held on September 25. To watch Rasmussen's talk in full, please visit our website.
Please join us in congratulating the winners of The Europe Center Fall 2015 Graduate Student Grant Competition:
November 5, 2015
6:30PM - 9:30PM
Romanian Film Festival (Stanford, Day 1)
"Travelling Shorts:Families Beyond Boundaries"
East Asia Library, Room 224, Lathrop Library Building
Please visit our website for additional information.
November 8, 2015
1:00PM - 8:45PM
Romanian Film Festival (Stanford, Day 2)
"Travelling Shorts:Families Beyond Boundaries"
Cubberley Auditorium
Please visit our website for additional information.
November 9, 2015
12:00PM - 1:15PM Mart Kuldkepp, Scandinavian Studies, University College London
"Russian deserters to Sweden in World War I"
Reuben Hills Conference Room, Encina Hall East
Open to Stanford affiliates only.
RSVP requested
This seminar is organized by the Center for Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies and co-sponsored by The Europe Center.
November 9, 2015
12:00PM - 1:30PM
General Philip M. Breedlove, Supreme Allied Commander Europe and Commander, US European Command, NATO
"Europe at the Crossroads"
Koret-Taube Conference Center, Room 130, Gunn-SIERP Building
RSVP by 5:00PM November 5, 2015.
November 10, 2015
5:30PM - 7:00PM
Lilia Shevtsova, Non-Resident Fellow, Brookings Institution and Associate Fellow Russia-Eurasia Program, Chatham House - The Royal Institute of International Affairs
"Russia as a Global Challenge"
Bechtel Conference Center, Encina Hall
RSVP requested
Save the Date: January 5, 2016
Sergei Guriev, Professor of Economics, New Economic School, Moscow and Visiting Professor of Economics, Sciences Po, Paris
November 16, 2015
6:30PM - 8:15PM
"In the Crosswinds" (2014) Film Screening
Cubberley Auditorium, Cubberley Education Library
RSVP requested
For more information, please visit the event website.
We welcome you to visit our website for additional details.
This conference aims to further our understanding of the institutional cultures, funding schemes and power structures underlying transnational institutions, with a particular focus on heritage bureaucracies. We bring together scholars working at the intersection of archaeology, anthropology, sociology and law to offer a broader understanding of the intricacies of multilateral institutions and global civic society in shaping contemporary heritage governance. Speakers will provide ethnographic perspectives on the study of international organizations, such as the UN and EU, in an effort to show the entanglement of political and technical decision-making.
A 2-day international conference organized by Claudia Liuzza and Gertjan Plets.
Speakers:
Brigitta Hauser-Shäublin (Institute of Ethnology, Göttingen University)
Ellen Hertz (Institute of Ethnology, University of Neuchâtel)
Miyako Inoue (Department of Anthropology, Stanford University)
Claudia Liuzza (Department of Anthropology, Stanford University)
Brigit Müller (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris)
Elisabeth Niklason (Department of Archeaology, Stockholm University)
Gertjan Plets (Stanford Archaeology Center, Stanford University)
Cris Shore (Department of Anthropology, The University of Auckland)
Ana Vrdoljak (Department of Law, University of Technology, Sydney)
Co-sponsored by Stanford Archaeology Center, Cantor Arts Center, Department of Anthropology, Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies, Stanford Humanities Center, The Europe Center, France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, The Mediterranean Studies Forum.
Contact: heritagebur@gmail.com
Stanford Archaeology Center (BLDG 500)
488 Escondido Mall
Stanford University
The deadly terrorist attacks in Paris last Friday that killed 129 people and wounded around 350 more signaled a significant change in strategy for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the radical jihadist organization that has claimed responsibility.
“It underscores that this threat is real and that ISIS is not going to be content to consolidate its power in Iraq and Syria,” said Joe Felter, a former Colonel in the U.S. Army Special Forces and senior research scholar Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).
“They have demonstrated their ability to project power into foreign countries and conduct what I would call an “asymmetric strategic bombing capacity” in the form of these home-grown Western citizens who are willing to strap on suicide vests and blow up targets in support of ISIS directed objectives.
“They’re able to launch attacks with centralized planning and decentralized execution in a way that makes anticipating and interdicting them very difficult.”
French President François Hollande said that the attacks were “planned in Syria, organized in Belgium, perpetrated on our soil with French complicity.”
CISAC senior fellow Martha Crenshaw said the Paris attacks represented “a shift in strategy” for ISIS with the group “taking a more Al Qaeda-like stance and striking Western countries.”
However, she emphasized that the carefully planned nature of the coordinated strikes, where multiple teams carried out simultaneous attacks in three locations across downtown Paris, indicated that this new strategy had been secretly underway for some time.
“These attacks were planned a long time ago,” said Crenshaw, whose Mapping Militants Project includes more information on groups like ISIS.
“You shouldn’t think they’re reacting to very recent circumstances…It’s not like we bombed them one day and the next day they planned these attacks.”
ISIS has long advocated a plan of provoking the West into a larger confrontation that would lead to an apocalyptic victory for Islam, according to Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford and an affiliate at the Center for Democracy Development and the Rule of Law.
“There’s a lot of method to this madness,” Milani said.
“If you read their literature, they have always talked about creating this sort of mayhem.”
ISIS’s propaganda magazine Dabiq, which is available online in Arabic and English, is named after a village in Syria with important symbolism for jihadists.
“They claim that the prophet has predicted that if you can get the West to come and fight the Muslims at Dabiq, then Islam will conquer the world,” Milani said.
Unlike France’s earlier battles against extremists in Algeria, it cannot rely on a proxy state to take the fight to the terrorists, according to Crenshaw.
“When terrorism in France has its origins in Algeria, France could rely on the Algerian state to crack down on these groups,” she said.
“Now you’ve got a situation where the planners are in a country where you don’t have a reliable state to go in and get them for you and wrap up their networks.”
With French warplanes already bombing targets in the Syrian city of Raqqa, Felter warned against the limits of air power in the fight against ISIS.
“There’s a risk that as we ramp up the bombing campaign and increase civilian casualties, this does play into the narrative of these extremists,” he said.
“It’s a very difficult targeting process. ISIS has occupied urban areas full of non-combatants and civilians…It’s the ultimate human shield.”
Felter acknowledged that increasing the number of US ground forces sent to interdict ISIS in Iraq and Syria may ultimately be necessary, but also that this increased presence, if not managed carefully, could backfire.
“At some level, they want to bring Western military forces to occupy these lands, because that will help turn popular opinion against the West and aid in their propaganda and recruitment,” he said.
The fight against ISIS is not limited to the territories it claims in the Middle East. It must be a global effort and include increased international cooperation and information sharing across intelligence, law enforcement and other agencies around the world, Felter said.
ISIS wants to drive a wedge between Europeans and the growing Muslim communities in their countries, so recruiting French citizens to participate in the Paris attacks served a dual purpose, Milani said.
“Using French citizens helps them with logistics, but it also helps them in terms of their strategy in that it makes it difficult for Muslims to live in a non-caliphate context,” he said.
In the wake of the attacks, European nations are working to create legislation that would toughen criminal penalties for citizens who travel abroad to fight with designated terrorist organizations such as ISIS, or strip them of their citizenship, according to CISAC affiliate Anja Dalgaard-Nielsen, a former executive director of the Danish Security and Intelligence Service.
Individuals who are seen as inciting people to travel to Syria and Iraq to join the jihad could also face tougher sanctions, she said.
The emergence of ISIS and its nihilistic theology is a symptom of broader underlying problems in the Middle East, which is grappling with failed and failing states across North Africa and in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to Milani.
“ISIS is the most militant and brutal manifestation of something deeper that’s going wrong,” he said.
“I honestly have never seen the Middle East as perilously close to complete chaos as it is now… [and] I don’t think we’ve seen the worst of it yet.”
Get more background on the Islamic State and its leaders from Martha Crenshaw’s Mapping Militants Project
Is There a Sunni Solution to ISIS? – The Atlantic | By Lisa Blaydes & Martha Crenshaw
Airstrikes Can Only Do So Much to Combat ISIS – New York Times | By Joe Felter
The Super Smart Way to Dismantle ISIS – The National Interest | By Eli Berman, Joe Felter & Jacob Shapiro
The Rise of ISIS and the Changing Landscape of the Middle East – Commonwealth Club of California | Abbas Milani
On November 10, CDDRL and the WSD Handa Center for Human Rights and International Justice welcomed Human Rights Watch's Director of Emergencies Peter Bouckaert and Sareta Ashraph, senior analyst on the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, for a discussion on the ongoing human rights and refugee crises in Syria. The talk was moderated by Stanford Law School's Beth Van Schaack, Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor in Human Rights.
NATO must bolster its presence in Europe as a way to counter Russian aggression in the region.
That was the message from General PHILIP M. BREEDLOVE, the supreme allied commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), when he visited Stanford on Monday.
“Europe is clearly at a crossroads,” he said.
Breedlove addressed the need for a strong NATO amid the evolving geopolitical climate in Europe. Of great concern are Moscow’s intrusions into Ukraine, Crimea and Georgia in Eastern Europe in recent years.
“We have to recalibrate what we’re thinking,” he said. NATO is building up its troop rotations to deal with hostile moves in the region, for example.
Breedlove spoke to a couple hundred people at the Koret Taube Conference room in the Gunn Building. Breedlove’s speech was sponsored by The Europe Center in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI).
“Highly dynamic” is how Breedlove described Europe’s security situation as a resurgent Russia seeks to “rewrite” the rules of international order. “They have been aggressive and coercive in their use of diplomatic, military and economic tools,” he said.
Lies and distortions characterize Russia’s attempt to change borders and bully its neighbors, Breedlove added. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s greater goal is to destabilize NATO and chip away at the alliance. Russia is acting in the east, south and north of Europe, including forays into the Arctic Circle and near Japan.
“This is all about extending Russian control” over its neighbors, Breedlove said.
Massive, seemingly endless migration coming from the Middle East into Europe poses a monumental crisis, he added. “The situation is creating serious political problems for political leaders” in European countries, he said. On top of this, possible terrorists and foreign fighters within the sheer numbers of migrants are extremely difficult to track, he added.
These European and NATO challenges intersect in the case of Syria and Russia’s involvement there, Breedlove said. “Russia’s striving to project [itself] as a world power.”
Syria is an opportunity for Putin to shift the world’s attention from his country’s aggressions in the Ukraine to the Middle East, he said. Breedlove disputed Putin’s rationale – fighting ISIS and terrorism – for intervening in Syria. “There’s a clear gap between his words and actions.”
Time will tell if Russia overextends itself in its adventurism, Breedlove said. For NATO, it must “rebuild its capacity” to address such threats. “Defend territory, people and values” is how he defined NATO’s mission.
A free, peaceful and prosperous Europe is much more attractive to the world than a menacing Russia that lacks similar values and attributes, he noted.
The security of Europe is Breedlove’s “daily business,” said MICHAEL MCFAUL, director of FSI. “You could not have a more well informed person speak about European security.”
McFaul noted that a new initiative series on European security, sponsored by the Europe Center, will bring other speakers and events to campus.
Breedlove, a distinguished graduate of Georgia Tech’s ROTC program, has flown combat missions, mostly in the F-16 jet, and has served as vice chief of staff for the U.S. Air Force and commander of the U.S. Air Force in Europe and Africa.
“I feel right at home, because this is the type of weather we have in Belgium,” he quipped on a rainy day at Stanford.
This article was originally published in The Stanford Report on November 9, 2015.
The Russian System of personalized power has been demonstrating an amazing capacity for survival even in the midst of decay. It has defied many predictions and ruined many analytical narratives. Today the Russian authoritarian rule is trying to prolong its life by turning to repressions at home and by containing the West. Russia, kicking over the global chess board with the war in Ukraine, returns to the international scene as a revisionist and revanchist power. The Russian Matrix demise will be painful, and it already has brought about Russia’s confrontation with the West. The challenge posed by Russia’s decaying petro –nuclear state is huge, and it is sure to be one of the dominant problems of the twenty-first century.
Lilia Shevtsova is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution (Washington), and an Associate Fellow at the Russia-Eurasia Program, Chatham House - The Royal Institute of International Affairs (London). She is the member of the boards of the Institute for Humanities (Vienna), the Finnish Centre for Excellence in Russian Studies (Helsinki), the Liberal Mission Foundation, and the New Eurasia Foundation (Moscow); a member of the International Forum for Democratic Studies’ Research Council(Washington); a member of the Editorial Boards of the journals: “American Interest,”“Journal of Democracy,” and “New Eastern Europe.“ Shevtsova was Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Washington) and the Moscow Carnegie Center, founding chair of the Davos World Economic Forum Council on Russia’s Future, and a member of the Council on Terrorism. “Foreign Policy” magazine included Shevtsova in the list of 100 Global Public Intellectuals. She was a participant at the Bilderberg Club meetings; served as Chair of the Program on Eurasia and Eastern Europe, SSRC (Washington) and member of the Social Council for Central and Eastern European Studies. She contributes to global leading media, including: Foreign Policy, FT, Washington Post, Le Monde, Monde Diplomatique, Die Zeit, Fokus, El Pais, American Interest, Survival, Journal of Democracy, Diplomaatia.
Shevtsova is author of twenty books, including Yeltsin’s Russia: Myths and Reality; Putin’s Russia; Russia –Lost in Transition: The Yeltsin and Putin Legacies; Lonely Power (Why Russia Has Failed to Become the West and Why the West Is Weary of Russia), Russia: Change or Decay (in co-authorship with Andrew Wood), Crisis: Russia and the West in the Time of Trouble.
A common assumption in political economy is that voters are self-regarding maximizers of material goods, choosing their preferred level of social spending accordingly. In contrast, students of American politics have emphasized the key role of an other-regarding motive that makes support for social transfers conditional on the perceived deservingness of recipients. The two motives often conflict as large portions of the poor (rich) find recipients undeserving (deserving). I argue that material self-interest overruns perceptions of deservingness when the share of income affected by social transfers is high. Using European data, I show that low (high) income individuals are less (more) likely to be driven by considerations of deservingness. Cross-nationally, the more working-age benefits are evenly spread across income groups, the less deservingness considerations permeate public debates on welfare state reform. This framework has important implications for understanding attitudinal change in two high inequality countries, the United States and Great Britain.
