Stanford University

French Presidential Election Roundtable

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Beyond selecting the new President, the second and final round of the 2007 French Presidential election will raise many questions about the meaning of the results for France, and for the EU and trans-Atlantic relations. This roundtable event is scheduled to follow soon after the election to give the benefit of review. Panelists from wide-ranging disciplines will each comment on what can be learned from the campaigns, the final voting patterns, and prospects for French and Francophone politics, culture, and society.

About the Panelists

Patrick Chamorel has been a visiting fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution since 2005. He is currently based at the Stanford Center in Washington, D.C., and will soon be the Center's Resident Scholar. He has written extensively on U.S. and European politics and U.S.-European relations. As a political scientist, Chamorel has taught and done research on comparative U.S. and European politics on both sides of the Atlantic. He is currently focusing on French politics on the eve of the 2007 presidential election.

Margaret Cohen is the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization, and director of the Center for the Study of the Novel at Stanford University. She is author of Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution and The Sentimental Education of the Novel. Her research interests involve rethinking the literature and culture of modernity from the vantage point of its waterways. She is currently working on a book concerning how the history and representation of global ocean travel informed the development of the modern novel.

Jean-Pierre Dupuy is professor of French and political science at Stanford University and social and political philosophy at Ecole Polytechnique, Paris. He is author of The Mechanization of the Mind: On Origins of Cognitive Science and Self-Deception and Paradoxes of Rationality. His current research projects are: the paradoxes of rationality or the classical philosophical problem of the antinomies of Reason at the age of rational choice theory, analytics philosophy, and cognitive science; the ethics of nuclear deterrence and preemptive war; the philosophy of risk and uncertainty; and the philosophical underpinnings and the future of societal and ethical impacts of the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science.

Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi is professor of French and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. She is also director of the Program in Modern Thought and Literature and the Undergraduate Studies in French program. She is author of Beyond Dichotomies: Histories, Identities, Culture, and the Challenge of Globalization and Remembering Africa. Her research interests include cultural relations between Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean; literature, intellectuals, and society; and women writers.

Tyler Stovall is professor of history at University of California, Berkeley. He is author of Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light and The Rise of the Paris Red Belt. He is coeditor, with Sue Peabody, of The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France. He has written numerous articles on French history and has been president of the Western Society for French History. His work on African Americans living in Paris is of special importance to contemporary understanding of both French and American culture.

Sponsored by Stanford University's Forum on Contemporary Europe, History Department, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies

Oksenberg Conference Room

Patrick Chamorel Visiting Fellow at Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Resident Scholar Speaker Stanford Center, Washington, D.C.
Margaret Cohen Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization and Director of the Center for the Study of the Novel Speaker Stanford University
Jean-Pierre Dupuy Professor of French and Political Science at Stanford University and Social and Political Philosophy Speaker Ecole Polytechnique, Paris

Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi

111 Pigott Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 723-1947
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Professor of Comparative Literature, Emerita
Professor of French and Italian, Emerita
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Professor Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi is affiliated with both the French & Italian and Comparative Literature departments. Her teaching and research interests include cultural relations between Europe, Africa and the Caribbean; literature, intellectuals and society; and women writers. Before coming to Stanford in 1995, Professor Boyi taught at universities in the Congo and Burundi, as well as Haverford College and Duke University. She was a Visiting Professor in the French Department of the Graduate Center, CUNY in 1994 and in 1995 a Professeur Invité at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. In 1999-2000 Professor Boyi was a Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. In 2002-2003 Professor Boyi was the president of the African Literature Association, a non-profit society of scholars dedicated to the advancement of African Literary Studies. She served as a member of the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association, where she represents the field of French (2003-2006), and as the Director of the interdisciplinary Program in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford (2005-2008).

Publications

Among Mudimbe-Boyi's publications are Jacques-Stephen Alexis: une écriture poétique, un engagement politique (1992); "Post-Colonial Women Writing in French (1993);"  Beyond Dichotomies: Histories, Identities, Culture, and the Challenge of Globalization (2002); Remembering Africa (2002); Essais sur les cultures en contact: Afrique, Amériques, Europe (2006). Her latest book is Empire Lost: France and Its Other Worlds (2009).

Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Director of the Program in Modern Thought and Literature and the Undergraduate Studies in French Program Speaker Stanford University
Tyler Stovall Professor of History Speaker University of California, Berkeley
Panel Discussions

Islam in Indonesia, Fear in America - A Child's and a Country's Horizons

Authors
Donald K. Emmerson
News Type
Commentary
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Anyone who has followed the US presidential race knows that Senator Barack Obama, if he runs and wins, will be the first African-American to live in the White House. Fewer know that, if that happens, he will also become the first US president to have lived in Indonesia as a child and to have had an Indonesian stepfather.

Until now, this bit of biography might have mattered only to fans of political trivia. But elements of the conservative press have made an issue of Obama's links to Indonesia by insinuating that during his time there he might have absorbed radical Islamist ideas at a Muslim school. "Hillary's Team Has Questions about Obama's Muslim Background" ran the headline in Insight Magazine that started the flap. The editor may have wished to kill two birds - the presidential hopes of both Obama and his main rival for the Democratic nomination - with a single stone. Readers who believed the report would have thought twice before supporting Obama, while those who considered it false would have thought less of Hillary for stooping to plant it.

Official spokespeople for Obama and Clinton, respectively, quickly denied the allegation as "completely false" and "an obvious right-wing hit job." But not before the charge had been repeated by Fox News and debated in the blogosphere.

Barack Obama's parents met at the East-West Center in Honolulu. He was born in 1961. Two years later his parents divorced. His mother remarried. His new stepfather was Indonesian. In 1967, when Barack was six years old, the family moved to Indonesia's capital, Jakarta. There, as described in his 1995 biography, Barack attended a private Catholic school and, later, a "predominantly Muslim" one. In 1971, when he was ten, his mother sent him back to Hawaii to continue his schooling.

Investigative reporting by CNN, the Associated Press, and other responsible media has established that the notion that Obama was influenced by a radical Islamist agenda is absurd. He was never enrolled in a madrasah. Nor is it surprising that students at the secular public school he did attend were "predominantly Muslim" - nearly nine-tenths of all Indonesians are. The atmosphere in Jakarta in 1967-69 was basically secular. Muslim head scarves, for example, were rare. I know because I lived there then.

Obama was sent to a Catholic and then to a secular public school. His parents, of modest means, could not afford tuition at the international school. At the public school, which welcomed pupils of various faiths, Obama's parents registered him as "Muslim" only for convenience. The Indonesian Communist Party had just been destroyed, and atheistic Marxism outlawed. Pupils were required to state an affiliation with a major world religion. When enrolling a child, the common practice was to list the father's faith.

Obama's stepfather, Soetoro, was only nominally Muslim. Like many if not most other ethnic-Javanese Indonesians at that time, he was a "statistical Muslim." That label was applied to those who, if required by a school registrar or a census taker to state their religion, would say "Islam," but who were Muslims far more from habit or heritage than by practice or conviction.

Should we be glad that this smear has been so quickly put to rest, and move on? Yes. But not before noting - and regretting - an irony: Precisely when tides of disregard for the United States and its policies are sweeping the world, when Americans more than ever before need to understand Muslim societies, American fears of Islam are being evoked and stoked.

Far from being seen as a detriment to his presidential candidacy, Barack Obama's prior exposure to a foreign culture should be counted as an asset.

At the same tender age as Obama's when he was in Jakarta, I was in Moscow attending a Soviet elementary school. I remember my teacher frowning at me when, on the anniversary of Lenin's death, unlike my Russian classmates, I couldn't manage to cry. My parents, my sister, and I could have lived in the building that housed the American Embassy - a "golden ghetto." But my father wanted us to learn the Russian language and experience Russian life. I am grateful that he did.

The idea that Americans, children or adults, should wrap themselves in familiar cocoons and avoid encounters with anything strange, including Indonesian Islam, is worse than just bad parenting. It is a willful parochialism that the United States as a country cannot afford. Not in this post-9/11 world. Not if we wish to engage with that world as it actually is - rather than as we might, in fearful isolation, imagine it to be.

This opinion piece was printed in the San Jose Mercury News on February 1, 2007 under the title "Obama's international background an asset, not a flaw." To read the version that was printed in the Mercury News please click on the link below. It was also printed in Yale Global Online. There is a link below to that version.

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The Authoritarian Dilemma: Explaining Strategies of Electoral Manipulation

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Andreas Schedler is Professor of Political Science and Head of the Department of Political Studies at CIDE in Mexico City. His extensive work on political concepts includes journal articles, edited books and book chapters on politics and antipolitics, political disenchantment, democratic transition and consolidation, public accountability, vote buying, electoral authoritarianism, and democratic support. His current empirical research focuses on processes of democratization by elections worldwide since 1980. His latest (edited) book is Electoral Authoritarianism: The Dynamics of Unfree Elections (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 2006).

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CISAC Conference Room

Andreas Schedler Professor of Political Science Speaker CIDE, Mexico
Seminars

Project Timeline: Program for the Study of Biofuels, Poverty and Food Security

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A concept note about setting up an international program for studying the effects of the emergence of biofuels on global poverty and food security. 

The recent global expansion of biofuels production is an intense topic of discussion in both the popular and academic press. Much of the debate surrounding biofuels has focused on narrow issues of energy efficiency and fossil fuel substitution, to the exclusion of broader questions concerning the effects of large-scale biofuels development on commodity markets, land use patterns, and the global poor. There is reason to think these effects will be very large. The majority of poor people living in chronic hunger are net consumers of staple food crops; poor households spend a large share of their budget on starchy staples; and as a result, price hikes for staple agricultural commodities have the largest impact on poor consumers. For example, the rapidly growing use of corn for ethanol in the U.S. has recently sent corn prices soaring, boosting farmer incomes domestically but causing riots in the streets of Mexico City over tortilla prices. Preliminary analysis suggests that such price movements, which directly threaten hundreds of millions of households around the world, could be more than a passing phenomenon. Rapid biofuels development is occurring throughout the developed and developing world, transforming commodity markets and increasingly linking food prices to a volatile energy sector. Yet there remains little understanding of how these changes will affect global poverty and food security, and an apprehension on the part of many governments as to whether and how to participate in the biofuels revolution.

We propose an international collaborative effort to:

  • Understand and quantify the effects of expanding biofuels production on agricultural commodity markets, food security, and poverty;
  • Develop training programs and policy tools to harness the benefits and mitigate the damages from such expansion on both local and global scales; and
  • Build an international network of scholars and government officials devoted to studying and managing biofuels development and its social consequences
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Publication Type
Working Papers
Publication Date
Authors
Scott Rozelle
Rosamond L. Naylor
Kenneth Cassman

The Irish Peace Process and the Changing Political Landscape

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Paul Arthur is professor of politics and course director of the graduate program in peace and conflict studies at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland. He has been a senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace and a consultant to the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict and the United Nations Research Institute on Social Development.

He has published widely on the Northern Ireland conflict. He wrote Special Relationships: Britain, Ireland, and the Northern Ireland Problem and Memory, Forgiveness, and Conflict: Trust-building in Northern Ireland. His latest work focuses on what he calls the "consequences of peace" in post-conflict truth and reconciliation processes.

Professor Arthur has lectured widely in the United States and Europe. He is the Irish Fulbright in residence at Stanford this winter-spring.

Sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europe, the Western Institute of Irish Studies, and the Irish Studies Foundation.

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Paul Arthur Fulbright Scholar in Irish Studies, Department of History, Stanford University Speaker
Seminars

Joshua Teitelbaum

CDDRL
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Senior Research Fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University
JoshuaTeitelbaum082007.jpg PhD
A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Dr. Joshua Teitelbaum took his B.A. in Near Eastern Studies at UCLA and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of two acclaimed books: Holier Than Thou: Saudi Arabia's Islamic Opposition (Washington Institute for Near East Policy), and The Rise and Fall of the Hashemite Kingdom of Arabia (New York University Press), a study of the early modern history of Saudi Arabia. His edited volume - for which he has written the introduction - Political Liberalization in the Persian Gulf is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. He has published numerous scholarly articles on the modern Middle East and his work has also appeared in The New Republic and The Jerusalem Report. Dr. Teitelbaum is a Senior Research Fellow at Tel Aviv University's Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, where he studies the politics and history of Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries, as well as Palestinian issues. He is CDDRL Rosenbloom Visiting Associate Professor for the Spring quarter of 2008.

Teitelbaum was a legislative aide to Congressman Paul N. McCloskey, Jr., of California's 12th District.

He has been a visiting professor in Cornell University's Department of Near Eastern Studies and at the Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, and a Visiting Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He has spoken at the Council on Foreign Relations, San Francisco's Commonwealth Club, the Middle East Institute, the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, the US Naval Postgraduate School, the Department of State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the US Army War College, the Italian Ministry of Defense, Israel's National Security Council, the Israeli Foreign Ministry, and most major university Middle East centers in the US and Canada. His comments and expertise have been sought by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Reuters, the Associated Press, the Baltimore Sun, the Jerusalem Post, Ha'aretz, Ma'ariv, Yediot Aharonot, the Straits Times and the Voice of America. He regularly reviews scholarly manuscripts for Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, New York University Press, Palgrave, and C. Hurst & Co.

Dr. Teitelbaum is an Associate of the Proteus Management Group, US Army War College Center for Strategic Leadership, under the sponsorship of the Office of the Director, National Intelligence.

CDDRL Visiting Associate Professor, Spring Quarters 2007, 2008 & 2009

Renowned nuclear scientist named CISAC co-director

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News Type
News
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Siegfried S. Hecker, a prominent U.S. expert on nuclear technology and policy, was appointed co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation, in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University on Jan. 16. He also assumed positions as a professor (research) in the Stanford School of Engineering's Department of Management Science and Engineering and a senior fellow at FSI.

Hecker's "scientific achievements as a metallurgist, his leadership and talent as the head of a renowned U.S. Department of Energy laboratory and his decades-long dedication to improving global security make him an extraordinary choice to help direct CISAC in the years ahead," FSI Director Coit D. Blacker said, announcing the appointment.

Political science Professor Scott Sagan, whom Hecker joins as a co-director of CISAC, said he is "thrilled to have Sig Hecker as a partner" in leading the center. "Hecker follows in a long line of distinguished scientists--Sidney Drell, William Perry, Michael May, and Christopher Chyba--who have become leaders of CISAC's efforts to produce cutting edge policy-relevant research," Sagan noted. "Stanford University is extremely fortunate to be able to have a scholar-practitioner of Sig Hecker's stature coming to CISAC to help guide our multidisciplinary efforts to address the tough security challenges facing the world right now."

The center, traditionally co-directed by a scientist and social scientist since its founding in 1983 by physicist Drell and political scientist John Lewis, draws from a range of disciplines to focus on current problems in international security.

An emeritus director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, Hecker has fostered U.S. cooperation with Russian nuclear laboratories for 15 years to secure the vast stockpile of former Soviet nuclear weapons and materials. At CISAC, where he has been a visiting professor since fall 2005, Hecker has contributed to international projects to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and secure materials for making them.

Looking forward to the new assignments, Hecker said, "I have enjoyed the Stanford environment--the students, faculty, and the great range of international issues being examined. I look forward to the new challenge of leading CISAC with Scott Sagan, as well as teaching and research in management science and engineering."

With Lewis, Hecker has made three visits to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in the last three years, gaining rare access to and expertise on North Korea's nuclear weapons program. His reports on the program's status provide valuable insights to U.S. diplomats and scholars seeking to resolve the nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula. With Sagan, Hecker has participated in meetings with security experts from China, India, Pakistan, Russia, and the United States to secure nuclear weapons and materials and lessen tensions in South Asia.

Last fall, Hecker co-taught Stanford's popular management science and engineering course, Technology and National Security, with CISAC and MS&E colleague Perry. Hecker lectured on nuclear weapons history and technical fundamentals, nuclear terrorism, and North Korea.

"Dr. Hecker has added 'outstanding professor' to his list of many accomplishments," Perry said. "I am delighted he has accepted this appointment and look forward to working with him."

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Who Pays for Economic Adjustment? The Working Class and Economic Reform in Spain, Chile and Argentina

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The talk will explore and explain the emergence of alternative sets of winners and losers within the working class in three cases of sweeping industrial and market liberalization.

Sebastian Etchementdi is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Department of Political Science and International Studies, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. from the Department. of Political Science at University of California at Berkeley working with Ruth and David Collier.

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Sebastian Etchemendy Speaker Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Seminars

Aftermath: Feminism and the Militarization of Women

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Enloe and Painted Crow will discuss the implications of the militarization of women's lives in the context of the increasing escalation of US militarism. They will also dialogue about their views on various approaches to peace, bringing to bear their respective experiences as feminist-scholar and former-woman soldier. There will be an opportunity for audience members to participate in the roundtable discussion.

Cynthia Enloe

Cynthia Enloe, who grew up on Long Island and received a Ph.D. from the University of California/Berkeley, has served as chair of Clark's Government Department and Director of Women's Studies. Professor Enloe is currently a Research Professor in the Department of International Development, Community, and Environment (IDCE) and teaches the intensive seven-week seminar, "Gender, Militarization, and Development." She has been awarded Clarks "Outstanding Teacher of the Year" three times and has been named the University Senior Faculty Fellow for Excellence in Teaching and Scholarship.

Enloe's feminist teaching and research has focused on the interplay of women's politics in the national and international arenas, with special attention to how women's labor is made cheap in globalized factories (especially sneaker factories) and how women's emotional and physical labor has been used to support governments' war-waging policies-- and how many women have tried to resist both of those efforts. Racial, class, ethnic, and national identities and pressures shaping ideas about femininities and masculinities have been common threads throughout her studies.

In recent years, Enloe has been invited to lecture and give special seminars on feminism, militarization, and globalization in Japan, Korea, Turkey, Canada, Britain and numerous colleges across the U.S. She has written for Ms. Magazine and Village Voice and has appeared on National Public Radio and the BBC. She serves on the editorial boards of several scholarly journals, including Signs and the International Feminist Journal of Politics. Among her nine books are: The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War (1993), Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (2000), Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives (2000 ), and The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire , (2004).

Eli Painted Crow

Eli Painted Crow, of the Yaqui Nation in Tucson, Arizona, is a mother of two sons who served in the military and has seven grandchildren. An army veteran of 22 years, she retired at the rank of Sergeant First Class E-7. She served assignments in Honduras in 1988 as an interpreter and communications specialist and in Kuwait and Iraq in 2004 as a Training NCO, Transportation NCO and Support Operations Sergeant.

Philippines Conference Room

Cynthia Enloe Research Professor Panelist Clark University
Eli Painted Crow Panelist
Panel Discussions
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