Stanford University

Russian Political Warfare: Past, Present, and Future

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Seminar recording: https://youtu.be/fYUK-ALGqAE

 

Abstract:  Russian influence operations during the 2016 US elections, and the investigations that followed, revealed the broad scope of Russian political warfare against Western democracies. Since then, Russian operations have targeted the UK, France, Germany, Ukraine, and others. Other state and non-state actors, motivated by politics or profit, have also learned and adapted the Kremlin’s tool-kit. With the 2020 elections a year away, what have we learned about foreign information operations? How has the transatlantic community responded and what are the threats we are likely to face?  Drawing on extensive research on transatlantic relations, disinformation, and Russian foreign policy, Dr. Polyakova will discuss the state of policy options to address disinformation, analyze Russian intentions, and highlight emerging threats.

 

Speaker’s Biography:

alina polyakova
Alina Polyakova is the founding director of the Project on Global Democracy and Emerging Technology and a fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, where she leads the Foreign Policy program’s Democracy Working Group. She is also adjunct professor of European studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. Her work examines Russian political warfare, European populism, digital authoritarianism, and the implications of emerging technologies to democracies. Polyakova's book, "The Dark Side of European Integration" (Ibidem-Verlag and Columbia University Press, 2015) analyzed the rise of far-right political parties in Europe.  She holds a master’s and doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, and a bachelor's in economics and sociology with highest honors from Emory University. 

Alina Polyakova Director, Project on Global Democracy and Emerging Technology The Brookings Institution
Seminars
European Security Initiative

Change and Persistence in the Age of Modernization: Saint Germain D'Anxure, 1730-1895

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Romain Wacziarg is a professor of economics at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). The paper that he will be presenting is co-authored by Guillaume Blanc, Brown University.

This talk is part of the Economic History Seminar Series, and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

Change and Persistence in the Age of Modernization: Saint-Germain-d’Anxure, 1730-1895
Download pdf

Economics Building
Room 351

Romain Wacziarg Professor of Economics Speaker UCLA Anderson School of Management
Seminars

French Culture Workshop: "Manumission Through Marriage: Subversion, Opportunity, and Politics in Late Colonial Haiti (partie française de Saint-Domingue)”

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Please RSVP by emailing Phoebus Cotsapas by October 24, 2018.

The French Culture Workshop is co-sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, the DLCL Research Unit, the France-Stanford Center, and the Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute.

 

Pigott hall (language corner) RM 252

450 Serra Mall, Bldg. 260

Stanford University

Rob Taper Fayetteville State University
Workshops

French Culture Workshop with Rebecca Powers

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Please RSVP by emailing Phoebus Cotsapas by October 3, 2018.

The French Culture Workshop is co-sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, the DLCL Research Unit, the France-Stanford Center, and the Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute.

Pigott hall (language corner) RM 252

450 Serra Mall, Bldg. 260

Stanford University

 

Rebecca Powers Speaker University of California - Santa Barbara
Workshops

The unbearable lightness of luck. Three sources of overconfidence in the manageability of nuclear crises

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Overconfidence in the controllability of nuclear weapons creates danger. The passing of the last elite witness of the most dangerous nuclear crisis, i.e. the “Cuban Missile Crisis”, and the Trump administration only make this more salient. In this context, this article reviews the scholarly literature about the limits of predictability and controllability of nuclear crises and investigates three failures of learning from them. Given that France displays in particularly acute form some of the sources of overconfidence in the controllability of nuclear crises that can been found in other nuclear armed states, this article offers the first study of the French experience and evolving interpretation of the Cuban missile crisis in comparative perspective, based on untapped primary material. In security studies, this article makes three contributions. First, the publication and interpretation of primary sources is a contribution in itself given the frequent misconceptions about nuclear dynamics due to theory-driven extrapolations. Second, it challenges a widespread assumption of automaticity linking a fear-induced deterrent effect and the presence of nuclear weapons. Third, empirically, this article studies part of a regime of valuation of nuclear weapons. It finally outlines a research agenda to take luck seriously in security studies.

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European Journal of International Security
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Benoît Pelopidas
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Patrick Chamorel

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Senior Resident Scholar at the Stanford Center in Washington
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Patrick Chamorel conducts research on elections, populism, political movements and cleavages in Western democracies; Comparative US/European politics; Transatlantic relations; European politics; French politics, economic and foreign policy. He was most recently a Research Scholar at the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), Stanford University.

Chamorel teaches comparative American and European politics, public policy and political economy, as well as transatlantic relations both at Stanford in Washington and at FSI’s Ford Dorsey Master in International Policy. He has also taught at the Stanford in Paris campus, the Reims Euro-American campus of Sciences-Po Paris, the University of California (Berkeley and Santa Cruz), George Washington University, and Claremont McKenna College where he was the Crown Visiting professor of Government in 2001-5.

Patrick Chamorel was a Fellow of the Institute for Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley, the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC and the Hoover Institution at Stanford, as well as a Congressional Fellow of the American Political Science Association (Offices of Harry Reid in the U.S. Senate and Norman Mineta in the House of Representatives).

Patrick Chamorel has written and lectured extensively on US and European politics. His research has focused on US and European elections and the rise of populism; US strategic, political and economic relations with Europe; American and European political and business elites; the impact of globalization on government, business and civil society, as well as the rise of Euro-skepticism in America.

He regularly contributes to the media, including the Wall Street Journal, Die Welt, Les Echos, Atlantico.fr, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Al-Jazeera, i24news, RMC, Talk Media News, BFM-TV, Le Figaro TV and CNN International. He is also a regular consultant to the US State Department.

In the 1990s, Patrick Chamorel was a Senior Advisor to the Minister of Industry and in the Policy Planning Office of the Prime Minister in Paris. He is a graduate of Sciences-Po in Paris where he also earned his Ph.D. in Political Science after doing research at UC Berkeley and Stanford University. He holds a Master in Public Law from the University of Paris.

 The Illusions of Disillusion

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 Three-quarters of 1 percent: that was the vote tally
 that Jean-Marie Le Pen managed to eke out the first time he ran for the presidency of France in the early 1970s. In the late hours of election night, May 5, 1974, the 45-year-old leader of the far-right National Front downplayed the disappointing results with his usual bravado. Sporting a gangster-like eye patch and a plaid tie (legend has it that he lost his left eye in a political brawl), his black suit bursting at the seams around his massive frame, the former paratrooper boasted: “This political campaign gave us the occasion to rise from oblivion, to get our name out, as well as our ideas, those of the social, popular and national right we represent.”

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The Nation
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SGS Summer Film Festival: "Intouchables" (2011, dir. Olivier Nakache, Eric Toledano; French)

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Intouchables is a 2011 French film directed by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano. When Driss, an ex-con from the projects, is hired to take care of an eccentric French aristocrat named Philippe, his newfound job quickly becomes an unpredictable adventure. Speeding a Maserati through Paris, seducing women and paragliding over the Alps is just the beginning, as Driss turns the often humorous world of upper-class Parisian society upside-down. As this unlikely duo overcome adversity of every flavor in this true story, they also shatter their preconceptions of love, life, and each other. Based on the #1 international best-selling book, You Changed My Life.

The film will be moderated by The Europe Center faculty affiliate David Laitin, the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science and an affiliated faculty member at FSI's Center for International Security and Cooperation. His specialty is comparative politics. In that field he conducts research on political culture, ethnic conflict, and civil war. His field expertise spans Somalia, Nigeria, Catalonia, Estonia and France. His latest book is Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies.

Intouchables is the second film in the annual SGS Summer Film Festival running from June 28th to September 13th. The film will be presented with English subtitles. This year's festival features nine films from around that world that focus on the theme “Finding Place: Immigration, Refugees, and Borders Across the World.”  

The film festival will run most Wednesdays at 7 p.m., from June 28 to September 13, and feature a post-screening discussion. 

Admission is free and open to the community. No RSVP required.

Films will be screened in the Geology Corner, Building 320, Room 105. Click here for a map.

The Geology Corner (Bldg. 320), Room 105
450 Serra Mall

David Laitin

Department of Political Science
Stanford University
Encina Hall, W423
Stanford, CA 94305-6044

(650) 725-9556 (650) 723-1808
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James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science
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PhD

David Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science and a co-director of the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford. He has conducted field research in Somalia, Nigeria, Spain, Estonia and France. His principal research interest is on how culture – specifically, language and religion – guides political behavior. He is the author of “Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-heritage Societies” and a series of articles on immigrant integration, civil war and terrorism. Laitin received his BA from Swarthmore College and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

Affiliated faculty at the Center for International Security and Cooperation
Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science Moderator
Film Screenings

Patrick Chamorel: "The French Elections and the Rising Political Divide"

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Due to the overwhelming interest in this event, we are now booked to full capacity and unable to take further reservations.

Please contact khaley@stanford.edu if you would like to be placed on the wait list.

 

This is a watershed French presidential election marked by the collapse of the main political leaders and established political parties as well as the amplification of corruption scandals by social networks.  The French electorate is torn between disengagement from politics, anger and confusion.  In the first ballot on April 23rd, voters are likely to reject the traditional Right/Left divide and stage the run-off campaign as a stark choice between far-Right populist leader Marine Le Pen and 39 year old pro-European centrist Emmanuel Macron.  These candidates and their ideas are the most emblematic incarnation of the clash that increasingly defines Western politics, pitting anti-immigrant and anti-trade nationalists against the more cosmopolitan elites.  Will France vote more like the Dutch or the British and Americans?  With what consequences for herself, Europe and the transatlantic relationship?

Image of Patrick Chamorel, Senior Resident Scholar at the Stanford University Center in Washington DC.

Patrick Chamorel is Senior Resident Scholar at the Stanford University Center in Washington DC. He teaches Political Science, with an emphasis on comparative American and European politics, public policy and political economy, as well as transatlantic relations. He has taught Transatlantic Relations on Stanford’s California campus as well as French Politics at the Stanford in Paris campus. Over the last few years, he has been teaching a semester course and an intensive seminar at the Reims Euro-American campus of Sciences-Po Paris. In addition to Stanford, he has taught at the University of California (Berkeley and Santa Cruz), George Washington University, and Claremont McKenna College where he was the Crown Visiting professor of Government. He was a Fellow of the Institute for Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley, the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC and the Hoover Institution at Stanford, as well as a Congressional Fellow of the American Political Science Association (Offices of Harry Reid in the U.S. Senate and Norman Mineta in the House of Representatives).

Patrick Chamorel has written and lectured extensively on US and European politics. His research has focused recently on US strategic, political and economic relations with Europe and the EU, American and European political and business elites, the impact of globalization on governments, business and civil society, Euro-skepticism in America, and US and French presidential elections. He regularly contributes to the media, including the Wall Street Journal, Die Welt, Les Echos, Atlantico.fr, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and CNN International.

In the 1990s, Patrick Chamorel was a Senior Advisor to the Minister of Industry and in the Policy Planning Office of the Prime Minister in Paris. He is a graduate of Sciences-Po in Paris where he also earned his Ph.D. in Political Science after doing research at UC Berkeley and Stanford University. In addition, he holds a Master in Public Law from the University of Paris.

Patrick Chamorel Senior Resident Scholar and Professor of Political Science Speaker Stanford University Center in Washington, DC
Seminars
European Governance
European Governance Seminar Series
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