-

For winter quarter 2022, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. 

                                                                                           

About the Event: Freddy Chen has developed a domestic political theory to explain the consequences of economic shocks for foreign policy. He argues that political leaders have incentives to improve their perceived competence by linking economic grievances to foreign countries. This linkage, in turn, increases public desire for more hawkish foreign policy. Nonetheless, leaders’ ability to make such connections depends on whether they can successfully manipulate information about the culpability for economic shocks. Therefore, the extent to which leaders can control the information environment determines whether an economic shock leads to more aggressive foreign policy. Survey experiments fielded on the American public and a unique sample of U.S. foreign policy analysts show that the information environment shapes elites’ expectations about leaders’ political behavior, public perceptions of leader competence, perceived culpability for the economic shock, and public preferences over foreign policy. Moreover, a cross-national analysis demonstrates that an economic shock tends to increase foreign policy hawkishness if the shock is more foreign-related or if the public has less access to a potential voice of the opposition. This article advances our understanding of the relationship between economic shocks, foreign policy, and public opinion as well as the interactions between domestic politics and international relations, with important implications for both political science research and policymakers.

About the Speaker: Frederick Chen is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and currently a Pre-doctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. His research focuses on how economics and security can interact to influence international relations, particularly through domestic political mechanisms. His work has appeared in the Journal of Politics and Conflict Management and Peace Science. He received the David A. Lake Award for best paper from the International Political Economy Society. He earned his M.A. in International Relations from Peking University (2016) and B.A. in International Politics from Tsinghua University (2013).

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to William J Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person. 

Frederick R. Chen CISAC
Seminars
0
narayan_headshot_-_ashray_narayan.jpg

Ashray Narayan is an M.A. candidate in International Policy at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute whose work bridges technology policy, media, and democracy. He previously managed programs at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation with Professor Andrew Grotto, led marketing and launch strategy for the Sequoia‑backed startup Rox, and held senior creative roles at Buck Mason and Bode. Earlier experiences include the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs and research at UC Berkeley. Ashray earned a B.A. in Economics from USC. 

Master's in International Policy Class of 2027
Date Label

Image
Facebook's Faces event flyer on blue and red background with photo of Chinmayi Arun
Join us on Tuesday, March 1 from 12 PM - 1 PM PT for a panel discussion on “Facebook’s Faces” featuring Chinmayi Arun, Resident Fellow at the Yale Law School in conversation with Nate Persily of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center. This weekly seminar series is jointly organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet and the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.

About The Seminar: 

Scholarship about social media platforms discusses their relationship with states and users. It is time to expand this theorization to account for differences among states, the varying influence of different publics and the internal complexity of companies. Viewing Facebook’s relationships this way includes less influential states and publics that are otherwise obscured. It reveals that Facebook engages with states and publics through multiple, parallel regulatory conversations, further complicated by the fact that Facebook itself is not a monolith. Arun argues that Facebook has many faces – different teams working towards different goals, and engaging with different ministries, institutions, scholars and civil society organizations. Content moderation exists within this ecosystem.
 
This account of Facebook’s faces and relationships shows that less influential publics can influence the company through strategic alliances with strong publics or powerful states. It also suggests that Facebook’s carelessness with a seemingly weak state or a group, may affect its relationship with a strong public or state that cares about the outcome.

To be seen as independent and legitimate, the Oversight Board needs to show its willingness to curtail Facebook’s flexibility in its engagement with political leaders where there is a real risk of harm. This essay hopes to show that Facebook’s fear of short-term retaliation from some states should be balanced out by accounting for the long-term reputational gains with powerful publics and powerful states who may appreciate its willingness to set profit-making goals aside in favor of human flourishing.

About the Speakers:

Image
Chinmayi Arun
Chinmayi Arun is a resident fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, and an affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center of Internet & Society at Harvard University. She has served on the faculties of two of the most highly regarded law schools in India for over a decade, and was the founder Director of the Centre for Communication Governance at National Law University Delhi. She has been a Human Rights Officer with the United Nations and is a member of the United Nations Global Pulse Advisory Group on the Governance of Data and AI, and of UNESCO India’s Media Freedom Advisory Group.

Chinmayi serves on the Global Network Initiative Board, and is an expert affiliated with the Columbia Global Freedom of Expression project. She has been consultant to the Law Commission of India and member of the Indian government’s multi stakeholder advisory group for the India Internet Governance Forum in the past.

Image
Nate Persily
Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and FSI.  Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.  He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration.  He is codirector of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, which supported local election officials in taking the necessary steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide safe voting options for the 2020 election. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age.

 

Seminars
-

Image
David Molitor
David Molitor is an Associate Professor of Finance and Economics at Gies College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). His research explores how location and the environment shape health and health care delivery in the United States. He is a Principal Investigator of the Illinois Workplace Wellness Study, a large-scale field experiment of workplace wellness conducted at the University of Illinois. His work has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Social Security Administration, JPAL North America, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Molitor's research has been published in leading academic journals including The American Economic Review, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, and The Review of Economics and Statistics and has been covered by media outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.

You are invited to a Zoom meeting. 

Zoom Link 

Meeting ID: 990 6232 4907

Password: 764436

Seminars
-

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
-

Never in history has a democracy succeeded in being both diverse and equal, treating members of many different ethnic or religious groups fairly. And yet achieving that goal is now central to the democratic project in countries around the world. It is “the great experiment” of our time.

Why is it so hard to build diverse democracies? Would principles and policies do we need to adopt to maximize the chances of making them work? And how good are the chances of success? The project of building thriving diverse democracies may well fail. But the chances of success, this talk argues, are better than the pessimism which is now dominant suggests.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Image
yascha_mounk.jpg
Yascha Mounk is a Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University, a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic, a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Founder of Persuasion. The host of The Good Fight podcast, his latest book is The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure.

 

 

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Didi Kuo

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Yascha Mounk Professor of the Practice of International Affairs Johns Hopkins University
Seminars
-

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. 
 

SEMINAR RECORDING

Virtual only.

Sylvie Kauffmann
Seminars
-

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
collage showing cory doctorow, Dr. Tomicah Tillemann and Michelle Finck

Join us on Tuesday, February 22 from 12 PM - 1 PM PT for a panel discussion on “The Policy Implications of Web3”, featuring Tomicah Tillemann of KRH Partners, Cory Doctorow of Craphound.com, and Michèle Finck of the University of Tübinge in conversation with Marietje Schaake of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center. This weekly seminar series is jointly organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet and the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.

The year 2021 marked an important moment for web3. Proponents believe the potential of web3 to democratize, decentralize and improve the internet is huge. Others argue that evangelists have yet to deliver results, and that web3 will inevitably tend towards centralization. Few however have explored the policy and political implications of the concept: how should regulators approach a potential web3 explosion? How should lawmakers think about the wider internet infrastructure? Is web3 an opportunity to reimagine the internet, or will it present even more challenges to policymakers? This webinar will explore these angles and foster a reflection on public policy by leading technologists and academics. The session is open to the public, but registration is required.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

 

Image
cory doctorow
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently Radicalized and Walkaway. He maintains a daily blog at Pluralistic.net. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is a MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate, a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Open University, a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of North Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

Image
Michele Finck
Dr. Michèle Finck is Professor of Law and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Tübingen, an Affiliated Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich and the Centre for Blockchain Technologies at University College London as well as a Visiting Professor at LUISS University in Rome. She previously worked at the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics.

 

 

 

Image
tomicah tillemann
Dr. Tomicah Tillemann is a partner and Global Chief Policy Officer at KRH Partners, a new crypto venture fund led by former a16z General Partner Katie Haun, where he builds public policy architecture to support the next generation of the Internet. Until recently, he was the Global Head of Policy for an arm of Andreessen Horowitz. He worked in collaboration with the Rockefeller Foundation, the World Bank, MIT, and governments around the world to develop a new generation of open source technology platforms to power the public sector. He also oversaw the work of the Blockchain Trust Accelerator and the Responsible Asset Allocator Initiative.

Image
Marietje Schaake
Marietje Schaake (Moderator) is international policy director at Stanford University Cyber Policy Center and international policy fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. Between 2009 and 2019, Marietje served as a Member of European Parliament for the Dutch liberal democratic party where she focused on trade, foreign affairs, and technology policies. Marietje is an (Advisory) Board Member with a number of nonprofits including MERICS, ECFR, ORF and AccessNow. She writes a monthly column for the Financial Times and a bi-weekly column for the Dutch NRC newspaper.

Seminars
Subscribe to The Americas