Stanford University

Katarzyna Stokłosa

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA  94305-6165

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Visiting Associate Professor at The Europe Center, 2014-2015
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Katarzyna Stokłosa is Associate Professor in the Department of Border Region Studies at the University of Southern Denmark in Sønderborg (Denmark). She finished her PhD at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder (Germany) and her habilitation thesis at the University of Potsdam (Germany). She has published various books and articles on European border regions in comparison, dictatorships and on European history.

Voluntary Disengagement from Terrorism: Why Doing Nothing is a Good Policy Option for Handling (Some) Returning Foreign Fighters

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Abstract: The hundreds of young Westerners who have gone to fight with the group Islamic State in Syria/ Iraq have caused alarm among security practitioners and policy makers.

Data on Western fighters in past conflicts indicate that a little more than ten percent later turned to terrorism. The rest did not. The unprecedented and growing number of Western fighters in Syria/Iraq threatens to overwhelm the resources of the security agencies of smaller European countries. They can hardly afford to risk pushing returnees, who would otherwise have disengaged, back into the arms of extremist groups. But how to shape countermeasures so they do not work at cross-purposes with the natural disengagement processes, that appear to be at work?

This talk is based on a comprehensive review of case studies, which document voluntary disengagement from violent extremism in a Western context. It identifies broad patterns in terms of how and why individuals disengage, discusses the applicability of these insights to the returnees and discusses policy implications in terms of how to handle the homebound fighters. 

 

About the Speaker: Anja Dalgaard-Nielsen served as an executive director at the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) from 2008 to 2014. Her areas of responsibility comprised intelligence fusion and strategic terrorism threat analysis, preventive efforts to counter terrorism and violent extremism, exit-interventions, and protective security efforts.

Previously, she worked as a research manager and Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS). In this capacity she was embedded with Danish armed forces in Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan in 2006.

Dalgaard-Nielsen is a non-resident fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). She serves on the board of advisor of the Global Center on Cooperative Security, Washington DC and on the Board of Advisors of the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the National Defence College in Sweden.

She holds a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University SAIS, an MA in political science from the University of Aarhus, and an executive MA of public management and governance from Copenhagen Business School and the University of Copenhagen. She has published widely on topics such as terrorism, radicalization, homeland security, peace-keeping operations, and transatlantic relations. 

"Promoting Exit from Violent Extremism: Themes and Approaches,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 36:3, 99-115
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Voluntary Disengagement from terrorism
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Anja Dalgaard-Nielsen Visiting Scholar Speaker CISAC
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Can we feed the world in the 21st century?

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In a recent speech, Stanford professor Rosamond Naylor examined the wide range of challenges contributing to global food insecurity, which Naylor defined as a lack of plentiful, nutritious and affordable food. Naylor's lecture, titled "Feeding the World in the 21st Century," was part of the quarterly Earth Matters series sponsored by Stanford Continuing Studies and the Stanford School of Earth Sciences. Naylor, a professor of Environmental Earth System Science and director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford, is also a professor (by courtesy) of Economics, and the William Wrigley Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

"One billion people go to bed day in and day out with chronic hunger," said Naylor. The problem of food insecurity, she explained, goes far beyond food supply. "We produce enough calories, just with cereal crops alone, to feed everyone on the planet," she said. Rather, food insecurity arises from a complex and interactive set of factors including poverty, malnutrition, disease, conflict, poor governance and volatile prices. Food supply depends on limited natural resources including water and energy, and food accessibility depends on government policies about land rights, biofuels, and food subsidies. Often, said Naylor, food policies in one country can impact food security in other parts of the world. Solutions to global hunger must account for this complexity, and for the "evolving" nature of food security.

As an example of this evolution, Naylor pointed to the success of China and India in reducing hunger rates from 70 percent to 15 percent within a single generation. Economic growth was key, as was the "Green Revolution," a series of advances in plant breeding, irrigation and agricultural technology that led to a doubling of global cereal crop production between 1970 and 2010. But Naylor warned that the success of the Green Revolution can lead to complacency about present-day food security challenges. China, for example, sharply reduced hunger as it underwent rapid economic growth, but now faces what Naylor described as a "second food security challenge" of micronutrient deficiency. Anemia, which is caused by a lack of dietary iron and which Naylor said is common in many rural areas of China, can permanently damage children's cognitive development and school performance, and eventually impede a country’s economic growth.

Hunger knows no boundaries

Although hunger is more prevalent in the developing world, food insecurity knows no geographic boundaries, said Naylor. Every country, including wealthy economies like the United States, struggles with problems of food availability, access, and nutrition. "Rather than think of this as 'their problem' that we don't need to deal with, really it's our problem too," Naylor said.

She pointed out that one in five children in the United States is chronically hungry, and 50 million Americans receive government food assistance. Many more millions go to soup kitchens every night, she added. "We are in a precarious position with our own food security, with big implications for public health and educational attainment," Naylor said. A major paradox of the United States' food security challenge is that hunger increasingly coexists with obesity. For the poorest Americans, cheap food offers abundant calories but low nutritional value. To improve the health and food security of millions of Americans, "linking policy in a way that can enhance the incomes of the poorest is really important, and it's the hard part,” she said.” It's not easy to fix the inequality issue."

Success stories

When asked whether there were any "easy" decisions that the global community can agree to, Naylor responded, "What we need to do for a lot of these issues is pretty clear, but how we get after it is not always agreed upon." She added, "But I think we've seen quite a few success stories," including the growing research on climate resilient crops, new scientific tools such as plant genetics, improved modeling techniques for water and irrigation systems, and better knowledge about how to use fertilizer more efficiently. She also said that the growing body of agriculture-focused climate research was encouraging, and that Stanford is a leader on this front.

Naylor is the editor and co-author of The Evolving Sphere of Food Security, a new book from Oxford University Press. The book features a team of 19 faculty authors from 5 Stanford schools including Earth science, economics, law, engineering, medicine, political science, international relations, and biology. The all-Stanford lineup was intentional, Naylor said, because the university is committed to interdisciplinary research that addresses complex global issues like food security, and because "agriculture is incredibly dominated by policy, and Stanford has a long history of dealing with some of these policy elements. This is the glue that enables us to answer really challenging questions." 

 

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Bertrand Patenaude

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Lecturer in History and International Relations
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Bertrand M. Patenaude teaches history, international relations, and human rights at Stanford, where he is a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Innovation in Global Health (CIGH) and a Lecturer at the Center for Biomedical Ethics (SCBE). His first book, The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921 (Stanford University Press, 2002), won the 2003 Marshall Shulman Book Prize and was the basis of a PBS documentary film broadcast in 2011. His most recent book, Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary, published by HarperCollins in 2009, was serialized for radio by the BBC. His previous work, A Wealth of Ideas: Revelations from the Hoover Institution Archives (Stanford University Press, 2006), is a generously illustrated large-format book featuring rare documents, photographs, posters, and artifacts from the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford.

Patenaude is the editor of several books, including The Russian Revolution and Stalin and Stalinism. His documentary film credits include associate producer of the Emmy Award-winning PBS film Inside the USSR and of the FRONTLINE documentary A Journey to Russia, and story editor of Stalin's Ghost, an NBC News Special Report. He was educated at Boston College and the University of Vienna and received his PhD in History from Stanford in 1987. He taught for eight years (1992-2000) in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, where his outstanding performance as a classroom instructor was recognized with the Schieffelin Award for Teaching Excellence for two consecutive years (1998, 1999). Patenaude has lectured throughout Europe for Stanford Travel/Study, Smithsonian Journeys, and Lindblad Expeditions.

Military Conflict and the Rise of Urban Europe

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Massimiliano Onorato will present new evidence  about the relationship between military conflict and city population growth in Europe from the fall of Charlemagne's empire to the start of the Industrial Revolution. Military conflict was a main feature of European history. He and his co-author Mark Dincecco (University of Michigan) argue that cities were safe harbors from conflict threats.  To test this argument, they constructed a novel database that geocodes the locations of 1,091 conflicts and 676 cities between 800 and 1799.  They found a significant, positive, and robust relationship that runs from conflict exposure to city population growth.  Their analysis suggests that military conflict played a key role in the rise of urban Europe.

Massimiliano G. Onorato

 

Massimiliano G. Onorato is an Assistant Professor in Economics and Institutional Change at IMT Lucca, Italy. He was awarded a Ph.D. in Economics in 2010 at Bocconi University in Milan. Prior to his appointment at IMT Lucca, he was a Post Doctoral Associate at the Leitner Program in International and Comparative Political Economy at Yale University. His research interests include Political Economy, Comparative Politics and Economic History.

 

Co-sponsored by Comparative Politics.

Military Conflict and the Rise of Urban Europe
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Massimiliano Onorato Assistant Professor of Economics and Institutional Change Speaker Institute for Advanced Studies, Lucca
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European Governance Seminar Series
European Governance

The Luxury Goods Vote: Why the Left Loses from Asymmetric Electoral Accountability

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Voters often punish incumbent parties for poor economic performance; whether they treat left and right governments differently is less clear.  The literature hosts multiple disconnected and often contradictory theories of partisan accountability. We leverage both observational and survey experiment data to establish an empirical regularity: voters, on average, punish left-of-center incumbents more severely for economic downturns than their counterparts on the right.  A luxury-goods model of voting best explains this regularity.  When times get tough, voters prioritize social spending for basic economic security over spending on socially desirable but less necessary "luxury goods" policies (e.g., environmental protection).  Parties associated with luxury goods policies, mostly left parties, are shunned in downturns.  Thus, many incumbent parties of the left face double jeopardy:  voters punish all incumbents for a weak economy; they punish many left incumbents additionally for their policies.

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Mark Kayser teaches applied quantitative methods and comparative politics at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. His research primarily focuses on elections and political economy.  Current major projects focus on cross-national comparisons in the formation of economic perceptions and voting decisions, media reporting of the economy, and the effect of electoral competitiveness on incumbent behavior. Before coming to the Hertie School of Governance, he served as an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Rochester and as a postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. He is the co-author of a book on the effect of electoral systems on regulation and price levels (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and the author or co-author of articles in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science and other leading journals.

Mark Kayser Professor of Applied Methods & Comparative Politics Speaker Hertie School of Governance, Berlin
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European Governance Seminar Series
Europe and the Global Economy Seminar Series

The Europe Center October 2014 Newsletter

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The Europe Center Graduate Student Grant Competition

Call for Proposals:

The Europe Center is pleased to announce the Fall 2014 Graduate Student Grant Competition for graduate and professional students at Stanford whose research or work focuses on Europe. Funds are available for Ph.D. candidates from across a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to prepare for dissertation research and to conduct research on approved dissertation projects. The Europe Center also supports early graduate students who wish to determine the feasibility of a dissertation topic or acquire training relevant for that topic. Moreover, funds are available for professional students whose interests focus on some aspect of European politics, economics, history, or culture; the latter may be used to support an internship or a research project. Grants range from $500 to $5000.

Additional information about the grants, as well as the online application form, can be found here.  The deadline for this Fall’s competition is Friday, October 17th. Recipients will be notified by November 7th. A second competition is scheduled for Spring 2015.
 

Highlights from 2013-2014:

In the 2013-2014 academic year, the Center awarded grants to 26 graduate students in departments ranging from Linguistics to Political Science to Anthropology. We would like to introduce you to some of the students that we support and the projects on which they are working. Our featured students this month are Michela Giorcelli (Economics) and Orysia Kulick (History).

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elli’s project, “The Effects of Management and Technology on Firms’ Productivity: Lesson from the US Marshall Plan in Italy,” explores the role of productivity in the process of economic growth and development. It is typically difficult to isolate the causal effect of management training programs and technology transfer programs on business productivity because these measures are often endogenous to other unobservable factors. To overcome this concern, Giorcelli employed a unique research design to analyze the effects of the Marshall Plan’s transfer of US management and technology to Italian firms in the aftermath of WWII. 

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Giorcelli collected and digitized balance sheets data for 6,035 Italian firms eligible to receive the US management and technology support between 1930 to 1970. She then exploited an exogenous change in policy implementation that randomly determined which firms actually received Marshall Plan support. Preliminary results show that all firms that received either support significantly increased their productivity. Moreover, firms that received both sets of support simultaneously showed an additional increase in productivity, suggesting that management and technology are complementary in production. (Inset: The archives where Giorcelli conducted her research)

Kulick’s project, “Regionalism in Ukraine and the Long Collapse of the Soviet Union, 1954--2014,” used original historical evidence collected from Ukrainian archives to study the political nexus between party elites in Kiev and in Moscow. For example, Kulick gleaned insights about the political economy of postwar industrial reconstruction from local archives in Dnipropetrovsk, a metallurgical powerhouse in the region. Previously inaccessible primary sources indicate that as the Soviet economy grew more complex, the state apparatus became more independent. Consequently, managerial specialists needed more autonomy to meet deadlines and quotas, making them--rather than the party--the source of innovation in postwar Ukraine. 

According to Kulick, “my research this summer opened up new ways of thinking about the relationship between the party and the institutions that made up the Soviet state and economy.” Kulick used insights from Soviet-era KGB documents to shed new light on the current propaganda emanating out of the Kremlin. For example, she found that the long-term pull toward greater improvisation has had ongoing consequences. The current conflict is not just about Ukraine’s geopolitical orientation; it is also the byproduct of the dissolution of intransigent and poorly understood late Soviet-era institutions. (Inset: Kulick documents military mobilization during her summer in Ukraine)
 

Undergraduate Internship Program: Highlights

The Europe Center sponsored four undergraduate student internships with leading think tanks and international organizations in Europe in Summer 2014.  Laura Conigliaro (International Relations, 2015) joined the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), while Elsa Brown (Political Science, 2015), Noah Garcia (BA International Relations and MA Public Policy, 2015), and Jana Persky (Public Policy, 2016) joined Bruegel, a leading European think tank. Our featured student this month is Laura Conigliaro.

During her time at CEPS, Conigliaro worked on a 68-page research paper on genetically modified organisms (GMO) policy in the European Union. In the paper, she traces E.U. legislation and policy development on GMOs from 1990 onward, and also offers conclusions for the future trajectory of the E.U.’s GMO policy. Conigliaro argues that the evolution of the E.U.’s GMO policy is a topic of extreme relevance--and difficulty--because it is the source of high-level trade conflicts between Europe and the United States. Consequently, the study of GMO policymaking can help advance our understanding of E.U. institutions, E.U. “comitology” (policy process), and E.U.-U.S. bilateral relations. 

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Conigliaro plans to incorporate the summer fellowship experience into her Stanford academic career, for example, by presenting research findings at Stanford’s Symposia of Undergraduate Research and Public Service (SURPS). Looking ahead, she writes: “I hope to use the knowledge and experience gained of the E.U. Institutions and policy process through the lens of the GMO issue to broaden and diversify my potential career opportunities and areas from my traditional area of concentration, East Asia, to also include the European Union.”

Recap:  Panel on Europe-Russia Relations and EU expansion

On September 30, 2014, Miroslav Lajčák, the Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister of Foreign and European Affairs of the Slovak Republic, participated in a panel discussion in which he shared his thoughts and opinions about Europe’s relationship with Russia, and about the E.U.’s management of its future membership and associations. The Minister’s viewpoints were of particular interest, given his role in the E.U. foreign policy establishment, and the Slovak Republic’s role in the E.U. and NATO.

“The fact is that E.U.-Russia relations have worsened dramatically. That cannot be denied. But it’s not E.U. enlargement that played a major role in this.”  According to the Minister, Russia did not view E.U. enlargement with hostility, in part, because enlargement remained a transparent process. “But it all changed when Europe decided to enter into Russia’s immediate neighborhood...the former Soviet Republics. And this was something that

Miroslav Lajčák
was seen by Russia as a hostile activity, and this was what Russia fiercely resisted.” The Minister spoke candidly about the potential conflicts of concepts between the E.U.’s Eastern Partnership policy, Russia’s Near Abroad policy, and the idea of a Eurasian Union. A fundamental and ongoing source of tension pertains to the geopolitical position of Russia’s immediate neighbors: “The fact is that Russia never accepted the full sovereignty of the former Soviet Republics.” Apart from discussing the escalation of tensions between the E.U. and Russia, the Minister spoke about the role of sanctions and reforms as a path for moving forward and achieving lasting peace in Europe.

Minister Lajčák’s brought a variety of experiences to the panel. He served as the European Union Chief Negotiator for the E.U.-Ukraine and E.U.-Moldova Association Agreements, and was the European Union Special Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Sarajevo. Additionally, he was previously the Ambassador of the Slovak Republic to the Former Republic of Yugoslavia, Albania and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. 

After Minister Lajčák spoke, he was followed by comments by Michael McFaul, Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow, Hoover Institute and Freeman Spogli Institute; Norman Naimark, the Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor in East European Studies in the History Department and The Director of Stanford Global Studies; and Kathryn Stoner, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and Faculty Director of the Susan Ford Dorsey Program in International Studies.

Introducing “Immigration and Integration in Europe” Policy Lab

The Europe Center would like to introduce a new research project entitled, “Immigration and Integration in Europe:  A Public Policy Perspective,” led by Professors David Laitin and Jens Hainmueller. Duncan Lawrence has recently joined Stanford University to help direct the project. The project is part of the new Policy Implementation Lab at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

The social and economic integration of its diverse and ever growing immigrant populations is one of the most fundamental and pressing policy issues European countries face today. Success or failure in integrating immigrants is likely to have a substantial effect on the ability of European countries individually and collectively as members of the European Union to achieve objectives ranging from the profound such as sustaining a robust democratic culture to the necessary such as fostering economic cooperation between countries. Various policies have been devised to address this grave political dilemma, but despite heated public debates we know very little about whether these policies achieve their stated goals and actually foster the integration of immigrants into the host societies. (Inset: David Laitin)

Professor Jens Hainmueller.The goal of this research program is to fill this gap and create a network of leading immigration scholars in the US and Europe to generate rigorous evidence about what works and what does not when it comes to integration policies. The methodological core of the lab’s research program is a focus on systematic impact evaluations that leverage experimental and quasi-experimental methods with common study protocols to quantify the social and economic returns to integration policies across Europe, including polices for public housing, education, citizenship acquisition, and integration contracts for newcomers. This work will add to the quality of informed public debate on a sensitive issue, and create cumulative knowledge about policies that will be broadly relevant. (Inset: Jens Hainmueller)

The Europe Center Sponsored Events

We invite you to attend the following events sponsored or co-sponsored by The Europe Center:

Additional Details on our website
October 8-10, 2014
“War, Revolution and Freedom: the Baltic Countries in the 20th Century”
Stauffer Auditorium, Hoover Institution
9:00 AM onward

Save the Date
April 24-25, 2015
Conference on Human Rights

A collaborative effort between the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic at Stanford Law School (IHRCRC), the Research Center for Human Rights at Vienna University (RCHR), and The Europe Center. The conference will focus on the pedagogy and practice of human rights. 

Save the Date
May 20-22, 2015
TEC Lectureship on Europe and the World 
Joel Mokyr
Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Economics and History, Northwestern University

We welcome you to visit our website for additional details.

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Benjamin Valentino

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Benjamin Valentino is a Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and Chair of the Government Department. His research interests include the causes and consequences of violent conflict and American foreign and security policies. At Dartmouth he teaches courses on international relations, international security, American foreign policy, the causes and prevention of genocide and serves as co-director the Government Department Honors Program. He is also the faculty coordinator for the War and Peace Studies Program at Dartmouth’s Dickey Center for International Understanding. Professor Valentino’s book, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century, received the Edgar S. Furniss Book Award for making an exceptional contribution to the study of national and international security. His work has appeared in outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, The American Political Science Review, Security Studies, International Organization, Public Opinion Quarterly, World Politics and The Journal of Politics. He is currently working on several research projects focusing on public opinion on the use of force and developing early warning models of large-scale violence against civilians.

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Rules of War

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CISAC Senior Fellow Scott Sagan and Affiliated Faculty Member Allen Weiner of the Stanford Law School teach "Rules of War," a Thinking Matters course that investigates the legal rules that govern the resort to, and conduct of war, and study whether these rules affect the conduct of states and individuals. The class will confront various ethical, legal, and strategic problems as they make decisions about military intervention and policies regarding the threat and use of force in an international crisis. The class culminates in one of CISAC's signature simulations in which students are assigned roles within the presidential cabinet.

 

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