ABSTRACT 

This talk is based on the speakers’ recently published edited volume The Unfinished Arab Spring: Micro-Dynamics of Revolts between Change and Continuity. Adopting an original analytical approach in explaining various dynamics at work behind the Arab revolts and giving voice to local dynamics and legacies rather than concentrating on debates about paradigms, we highlight micro-perspectives of change and resistance as well as of contentious politics that are often marginalized and left unexplored in favor of macro-analyses. First, we re-examine the stories of the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Morocco and Algeria through diverse and novel perspectives, looking at factors that have not yet been sufficiently underlined but carry explanatory power for what has occurred. Second, rather than focusing on macro-comparative regional trends – however useful they might be – we focus on the particularities of each country, highlighting distinctive micro-dynamics of change and continuity. ​

SPEAKERS BIO

Fatima el Issawi is a Reader in Journalism and Media Studies at the University of Essex. Her research focuses on the intersection between media, politics and conflicts in transitional contexts to democracy in North Africa. She is the Principal Investigator for the research project “Media and Transitions to Democracy: Journalistic Practices in Communicating Conflicts- the Arab Spring” funded by the British Academy Sustainable Development Programme, looking at media’s impact on communicating political conflicts in post uprisings in North Africa. Since 2012, el Issawi has been leading empirical comparative research projects on the interplay between media and political change, funded by Open Society Foundation and the Middle East Centre/LSE, covering Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Libya and Algeria. El Issawi’s expertise crosses journalism, public communication, policy and academia. She has over fifteen years of experience as international correspondent in conflict zones in the MENA region. She is the author of “Arab National Media and Political Change” investigating the complex intersections between traditional journalists and politics in uncertain times of transitions to democracy.

Francesco Cavatorta is full professor of political science and director of the Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherche sur l’Afrique et le Moyen Orient (CIRAM) at Laval University, Quebec, Canada. His research focuses on the dynamics of authoritarianism and democratization in the Middle East and North Africa. His current research projects deal with party politics and the role of political parties in the region. He has published numerous journal articles and books.

This event is part of the Asia Health Policy Program (AHPP) 2020-21 Colloquium series "Health, medicine, and longevity: Exploring public and private roles"

Non-state actors contribute to health systems in many ways that are vital for health and well-being, especially for those most vulnerable. We will hear from three distinguished speakers on non-government organizations and public-private collaborations in Asia: Dr. Karki, Executive Director of PHASE Nepal; Mr. Choub, Executive Director of KHANA, Cambodia; and Dr. Huntington of Johnson & Johnson, Singapore, prefaced by video interviews of many others. They will share about the trade-offs in contracting for health services in Asia and beyond, from the conceptual foundations to the daily reality of practitioners, and what COVID-19 has taught about “building back better” in the future.

Speakers:

Dr Jiban Karki is a development professional with a PhD in Public Health, a master’s degree in Rural Development and bachelor’s degrees in Civil Engineering and Business Administration. He has over 20 years of experience in leading development organizations and managing projects in Nepal and over 9 years of experience in academic research in South Asia. He is currently working with the University of Sheffield. He also leads PHASE Nepal, an NGO he founded in 2006 in Nepal which works with multiple partners at the grassroot level in the health, education and livelihoods improvement sector where other organizations rarely go because of the remoteness of the areas.  His research interests range from community led primary health care to provision of Assistive Technology to Person with Disabilities. 

Mr. Sok Chamreun Choub is the Executive Director of the Khmer HIV/AIDS NGO Alliance (KHANA) in the Kingdom of Cambodia, which focuses on prevention and treatment for HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, sexual reproductive health, other non-communicable diseases, as well as promoting human rights and health coverage for vulnerable populations in Cambodia. Chamreun’s professional background is in social science, but he has been devoted to public health work for 27 years in government, the UN and NGOs—more than two decades with KHANA, but also in many other roles. For example, he currently also serves as the Chief of Party for the five-year USAID-funded Community Mobilization Initiative to End TB (COMMIT); the Chair of the Steering Committee of the Health Action Coordinating Committee for the Cooperation Committee for Cambodia; Vice-Chair Civil Society Representative for The Global Fund Country Coordination Committee for Cambodia; Co-Chair of the Activists Coalition on TB for Asia and the Pacific; and the Developing Country NGOs Representative of the Stop TB Partnership Board.  

Dr. Dale Huntington is currently Senior Director, Health Care Systems for Emerging Markets with Johnson and Johnson, based in Singapore where he serves as the primary Global Health Policy lead in Asia and the Pacific. In this role, he is responsible for developing and implementing a strategy to advance Johnson & Johnson’s Enterprise objectives and Government Affairs & Policy platform priorities – with a particular focus on shaping healthcare systems to expand access to quality healthcare in key emerging markets. Prior to joining Johnson and Johnson he was with the WHO, working as the Director of the Asia Pacific Observatory on Health Policy and Systems, based in the WHO Western Pacific Regional Office, Manila, and as a Scientist with the Department of Reproductive Health and Research in Geneva. Before joining WHO he was a Senior Health Specialist at the World Bank – focused on South and East Asia. He holds a Doctorate in Science degree from the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health, specializing in health services research and evaluation. He has lived and worked in developing countries for over 25 years. He has an extensive publication record and is proficient in French.

About the Event:  Increasing access to higher education is often seen as a threat to authoritarian regimes. Accordingly, authoritarian rulers would limit access to avoid the spread of anti-regime sentiments. Turkey suggests an interesting case. The consolidation of single party-rule overlapped with an impressive expansion of higher education, by 170 percent, from 76 in 2002 to 206 in 2020. This paper examines these two trends in connection with each other by focusing on universities' role as infrastructural mechanisms for both democratic culture and state coercion.  

* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

 

Seminar Recording:  https://youtu.be/ISsBNJEKP70

 

About the Event: This chapter builds on my earlier writing during the West African Ebola outbreak, in which I argue that health security paradigms and militarized health interventions engender “defensiveness” in landscapes of care, while they also intensify already securitized landscapes and relationships of development and humanitarian aid. In this chapter, I include insights about the US-authored Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA), to suggest that the Government of Sierra Leone’s 2014 adoption of the agenda has helped to strengthen containment and control paradigms at the expense of care, and to prioritize the collection and management of disease event data over other pressing concerns related to health care delivery (cf. Benton 2015). Specifically, I analyze global health security policy discourse and practice outlined in the GHSA and militarized health interventions as they travel and settle in four disparate sites: a rural clinic in eastern Sierra Leone (see Kardas-Nelson and Frankfurter 2018); abandoned and repurposed treatment centers; the Imperial War Museum’s temporary exhibit “Fighting Extremes: From Ebola to Isis;” and US and Sierra Leonean political rhetoric explicitly linking Ebola virus disease and terrorism (whether by metaphor, analogy, or literal means). Reading across these sites, I show how projects of counter-terrorism and humanitarianism subtend global health policy, and become institutionalized in and through the everyday management of public health provision.

 

About the Speaker: Adia Benton is an associate professor of Anthropology and African Studies at Northwestern University, where she is affiliated with the Science in Human Culture Program. She is the author of the award-winning book, HIV Exceptionalism: Development through Disease in Sierra Leone, and is currently writing a book about the West African Ebola outbreak.

About the Event: Do programmatic policies always yield electoral rewards? A growing body of research attributes the adoption of programmatic policies in African states to increased electoral competition. However, these works seldom explore how the specifics of policy implementation condition voters’ electoral responses to programmatic policies over time, or changes in electoral effects throughout policy cycles. We analyze the electoral effects of both the promise and implementation of a programmatic policy designed to increase secondary school enrollment in Tanzania over three election cycles. We find that the incumbent party benefited from a campaign promise to increase access to secondary schooling, but incurred an electoral penalty following implementation of the policy. We do not find any significant electoral effects by the third electoral cycle. Our findings illuminate temporal dynamics of policy feedback, the conditional electoral effects of programmatic policies, and the need for more studies of entire policy cycles over multiple electoral periods.

 

About the Speaker:  Dr. Ken Opalo is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. His research interests include the political economy of development, legislative politics, and electoral accountability in African states. Ken’s current research projects include studies of political reform in Ethiopia, the politics of education sector reform in Tanzania, and electoral accountability under devolved government in Kenya. His works have been published in Governance, the British Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Democracy, and the Journal of Eastern African Studies. His first book, titled Legislative Development in Africa: Politics and Post-Colonial Legacies (Cambridge University Press, 2019) explores the historical roots of contemporary variation in legislative institutionalization and strength in Africa. Ken earned his BA from Yale University and PhD from Stanford University.

 

About the Event:  In the wake of the racial unrest of 1968, the federal government  embarked on a series of social programs designed to  respond to the cries of Black communities demanding an end to police brutality, access to quality housing, and economic investment in schools and jobs.  Often, these cries were not fully heeded, and the marketplace became a terrain on which corporate America and the state argued that Black lives could be improved.  In this presentation on her most recent book, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, historian Marcia Chatelain links the rise of black capitalism with the fracturing of the mid-century civil rights struggle and eclipsing of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of economic justice.  In lieu of policies that could enhance the quality of life in America’s cities, many Black neighborhoods were offered fast food outlets, low-wage work, and an enmeshed relationship with corporate benevolence.

About the Event:  Why have conservatives decried “activist judges”? And why have liberals - and America's powerful legal establishment - emphasized qualifications and experience over ideology? This transformative text tackles these questions with a new framework for thinking about the nation's courts, 'the judicial tug of war', which not only explains current political clashes over America's courts but also powerfully predicts the composition of courts moving forward. As the text demonstrates through novel quantitative analyses, a greater ideological rift between politicians and legal elites leads politicians to adopt measures that put ideology and politics front and center - for example, judicial elections. On the other hand, ideological closeness between politicians and the legal establishment leads legal elites to have significant influence on the selection of judges. Ultimately, the judicial tug of war makes one point clear: for good or bad, politics are critical to how judges are selected and whose interests they ultimately represent.

About the Speaker:  Adam Bonica is an Associate Professor of Political Science. His research is at the intersection of data science and politics, with interests in money in politics, campaigns and elections, judicial politics, and political methodology.

* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

 

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/GZwdR1cNPAg

 

About the Event: In recent years, the world has increasingly witnessed international conflict along ideological fault lines. Western policymakers warn that authoritarian countries like Russia and China are seeking to exploit divisions within democratic societies to promote autocratic tendencies, while for decades, authoritarian countries have accused the West of doing the same—of manufacturing domestic uprisings as a way to force liberalism upon them. While history is filled with examples of conflicts along these types of ideological lines, there is little consensus among scholars or policymakers about whether states’ governing ideologies matter for their foreign policy behavior and if they do, why.

This presentation will focus in on British and U.S. reactions to the Haitian Revolution to advance our understanding of the relationship between ideology and international conflict. I show that Britain and the United States both initially isolated Haiti due to fears that the Haitians would promote or otherwise inspire the spread of slave rebellions throughout the Caribbean and U.S. South. However, after outlawing slavery in its colonies, Britain’s foreign policy towards Haiti quickly diverged from that of the United States. Britain formally ended its regime dispute with Haiti, deepened its economic links with the country, and even began cooperation with Haitian leaders to police the Atlantic slave trade. Taken together, the case strongly suggests that British and U.S ideological stance on slavery was a primary source of their disputes with the Haitian regime.

 

 

About the Speaker: Lindsay Hundley holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. Her primary research examines why states fight over the leadership and institutions of other countries, and her book project explores the role of political ideology in shaping both how leaders perceive threats from other states and their willingness to resort to subversion. In other research, Lindsay leverages advances in political methodology to shed new light on enduring questions in international politics, with a particular emphasis on experimental tests of formal models and the use of machine learning techniques to process and analyze political texts. Her work has been published at the Journal of Politics and International Studies Perspectives.

Before joining CISAC, Lindsay was a pre-doctoral research fellow with the International Security Program at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. At Stanford, she was a Gerald J. Lieberman Fellow -- one of the University's highest distinctions awarded to doctoral students for outstanding accomplishments in research, teaching, and academic leadership.

* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

 

Seminar Recording:  https://youtu.be/RZZT4lXaG1w

 

About the Event: What lies at the origins of major wars?

I argue that major wars are caused by the attempts of great powers to escape their two-front war problem: encirclement. To explain the causal mechanism that links encirclement to major war, I identify an intervening variable: the increase in the invasion ability of the immediate rival. This outcome unfolds in a three-step process: double security dilemma, war initiation, and war contagion.

Encirclement is a geographic variable that occurs in presence of one or two great powers (surrounding great powers) on two different borders of the encircled great power. The two front-war problem triggers a double security dilemma (step 1) for the encircled great power, which has to disperse its army to secure its borders. The surrounding great powers do not always have the operational capability to initiate a two-front war (latent encirclement) but, when they increase their invasion ability (actualized encirclement), the encircled great power attacks (war initiation, step 2). The other great powers intervene due to the rival-based network of alliances for preventing their respective immediate rival from increasing its invasion ability (war contagion, step 3).

I assess my theory in the outbreak of WWI. This article provides ample support to the claim that major wars are caused by a great power that has the limited goal of eliminating its two-front war problem. These findings have important implications for the prospects of major wars, since I anticipate that in the long term China will face the encirclement of India and Russia.

View Draft Paper

 

About the Speaker: Andrea Bartoletti holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago. His research interests span on international security and IR theory with a focus on the origins of major wars, polarity and war, U.S. grand strategy in the Indo-Pacific region, and great powers' intervention in civil wars.

* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

 

Seminar Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olaPuZ0L4fg

 

About the Event: The creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 1998, hailed in a triumphant language, was to finally usher in an era of accountability for atrocity crimes and an end to impunity of such crimes of concern to the international community. Two decades later, that optimism is waning and even the supporters of the ICC have publicly aired their frustration. Amidst a string of high-profile acquittals of defendants, flawed investigations, dismissed charges, lengthy proceedings, and controversial rulings, it has become clear that the Court has not lived up to its promise. Why is it that the ICC seems able to deliver justice only on behalf of states rather than for victims and communities affected by atrocity crimes? International courts operate in a world made primarily of states, which try to leverage the legal institutions and processes, in pursuit of their political and security interests. Even states that do not wield global power are able to use international courts in pursuit of those interests, while the international justice project reframes its mission as delivering “justice for victims”. Moreover, as calls to “fix” the Court gain ground, the broader question of the imperial and the liberal world order that sustain the international justice project remain at the margin of the deliberations.

Book Purchase: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1108488773?pf_rd_r=KSYYMSPN9JJKSS2GTW0Y&pf_rd_p=a712d25e-094e-4a8b-b495-0be41c4dbcc9

 

About the Speaker: Oumar Ba is an assistant professor of political science at Morehouse College. His primary research agenda focuses on international criminal justice norms and regimes, and the global governance of atrocity crimes. He also studies worldmaking and visions for and alternatives to the current international order, from Global South perspectives. He is the author of States of Justice: The Politics of the International Criminal Court (Cambridge University Press, 2020). His publications have appeared in scholarly journals such as Human Rights Quarterly, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, African Studies Review, Journal of Narrative Politics, Africa Today, and African Journal of International Criminal Justice.