Stanford University

Emotional Labor and the Power of International Bureaucrats: The ASEAN Secretariat in Comparative Perspective

-

Bureaucrats become powerful when they stage emotionally calibrated performances as “servants” before state principals, earn their trust, and carve out space for action through “whispering,” “propagating,” cultivating patrons, and building coalitions behind the scenes and on the sidelines of official interaction. These servant performances involve what sociologist Arlie Hochschild calls “emotional labor,” that is, the management of feelings when fulfilling the requirements of a job. Prof. Nair will develop a theory of emotional labor in international bureaucracies that explains why bureaucrats perform such work and how, if skilfully done, it can empower them. He will test the theory with an ethnography of the Secretariat of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Jakarta—a “hard” case that does not fit prevailing theorizations of bureaucratic power. Prof. Nair will also show how his theory can be applied to other, Euro-American bureaucracies.

deepak 4x5
Deepak Nair researches the everyday practices and performances that produce international relations. His writings include ASEAN-related articles in journals such as International Political Sociology on topics that include golf, sociability, and diplomacy; on the practices of face-saving in diplomacy in the European Journal of International Relations; and on institutions, norms, and crisis in Asian Survey and Contemporary Southeast Asia. He earned his PhD and BA at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Delhi University, respectively.

Deepak Nair Assistant Professor of Political Science, National University of Singapore
Seminars

Does credit affect stock trading? Evidence from the South Sea Bubble

-

This workshop is part of the Economic History Workshop series in the Department of Economics and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

351 Landau Economics Building
579 Serra Mall
Stanford, CA 94305-6072

Fabio Braggion Tilburg University
Seminars

Pacific Settlement of Disputes in East Asia: Inter-State Arbitration and Judicial Diplomacy

-

Resolution of economic disputes are well established in East Asia where economic growth and prosperity are common goals among the nations. However, other types of disputes have long plagued among East Asian countries. These include conflicts that have deep historical roots, or ones that involve state sovereignty, territorial disputes, and claims deriving from historical wrongs. These issues have harmed the regional security in East Asia for a long time, threatened its peace and security and hindered further progress, thus putting tension on the diplomatic relations among the East Asian countries. Attempts to resolve these disputes via politics or diplomacy have not been much successful. Compliance of the outcome of the dispute might prove to be challenging if the losing party decides that the benefit of resisting the unfavored outcome outweighs the cost of reputational harm.

eyp 3x2web small crop
Eun-Young Park will present that, despite the difficulty, such disputes can be resolved fairly, provided that an independent neutral dispute resolution mechanism is securely in place. In this model, the states themselves voluntarily submit their disputes to a neutral third party capable of making fair and equitable decisions on the merits of the cases before it. There are advantages in opting for the region-wide system of independent and neutral dispute resolution in handling the Gordian Knot that is the complex and difficult problem of sovereignty and history of conflicts in East Asia. He will explore the possibility of establishing an inter-state arbitration system based on the fact that the East Asian countries already possess a good deal of social and legal capital that is readily applicable in resolving sensitive transnational disputes. He will also touch upon a permanent arbitral or claims tribunal in East Asia to deal with claims arising out of the Korean Unification; a monumental event after which much chaos—legal and otherwise—will most certainly ensue. Establishing a system of international dispute resolution system in East Asia is certain to pave the way in forming the East Asian legal community in which claims and grievances may be adjudicated fairly and brought without escalating political tensions among countries.

Eun-Young Park is Vice President of the London Court of International Arbitration and currently a visiting scholar at Stanford Asia-Pacific Research Center. Previously, he served as a Judge in the Seoul District Court of Republic of Korea. After leaving the bench, he has advised Korean Financial Supervisory Commission in establishing governance system in the public and private sector under the auspices of the World Bank and the IMF as a result of IMF bail-out of Korea during the Asian Financial Crisis. He has practiced law at Kim & Chang as a partner and Co-Chair of the International Arbitration and Litigation Practice Group, and focused on international dispute resolution including trade sanctions, transnational litigation, and international arbitration. He has served as a board member of the Singapore International Arbitration Centre (SIAC) and is currently a member of the Court of Arbitration of the SIAC. He has taught in various universities including Sungkyunkwan University School of Law as an adjunct professor. He holds a J.S.D. and L.L.M. from NYU School of Law, and is admitted to the New York Bar, the Korean Bar, and the Singapore International Commercial Court.

 

Eun Young Park Visiting Scholar, Shorenstein APARC, Stanford University
Seminars
Korean Studies Colloquium Series

Can Nationalism Be A Resource for Democracy? Lessons From Asia

-

Abstract:

Inequality has long been widely and rightly seen as one of the greatest threats to democracy. For political scientists, the most lethal kind of inequality for democracy is some form of economic inequality. In this project, I adopt a more historical and ideological approach to the question of how inequality threatens democracy. Specifically, focusing on twentieth-century post-colonial contexts, I argue that inequalities of citizenship that are historically grounded in founding narratives of nationalism are also detrimental to a country’s democratic prospects across time.

 

Speaker Bio:

maya tudor 7
Maya Tudor is Associate Professor in Politics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. Her research investigates the historical origins of stable, democratic and effective states across the developing world, with a particular emphasis upon South Asia. She was educated at Stanford University (BA in Economics) and Princeton University (MPA in Development Studies and PhD in Politics and Public Policy). She has held fellowships at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Oxford University’s Centre for the Study of Inequality and Democracy and currently, at Stanford University's Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. She is the author of “The Promise of Power: The Origins of Democracy in India and Autocracy in Pakistan.” She is currently writing a comparative study of nationalisms and democracy.

Maya Tudor Associate Professor in Politics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford
Seminars

Rights Make Might: Global Human Rights and Minority Social Movements in Japan

-

 



EMERGING ISSUES IN CONTEMPORARY ASIA

A Special Seminar Series

RSVP required by Tuesday, May 7, 2019

RSVP Now

 

ABSTRACT: Why have the three most salient minority groups in Japan - the politically dormant Ainu, the active but unsuccessful Koreans, and the former outcaste group of Burakumin - all expanded their activism since the late 1970s despite the unfavorable domestic political environment? My investigation into the history of the three groups finds an answer in the galvanizing effects of global human rights on local social movements. Drawing on interviews and archival data, I document the transformative impact of global human rights ideas and institutions on minority activists, which changed the prevalent understanding about their standing in Japanese society and propelled them to new international venues for political claim making. The global forces also changed the public perception and political calculus in Japan over time, catalyzing substantial gains for the minority movements. Having benefited from global human rights, all three groups repaid their debt by contributing to the consolidation and expansion of international human rights principles and instruments. The in-depth historical comparative analysis offers rare windows into local, micro-level impact of global human rights - complementing my other projects on the relationship between international human rights and local politics, which employ cross-national quantitative analyses - and contributes to our understanding of international norms and institutions, social movements, human rights, ethnoracial politics, and Japanese society. 
 
Kiyoteru Tsutsui
PROFILE:   Kiyoteru Tsutsui is Professor of Sociology, Director of the Center for Japanese Studies, and Director of the Donia Human Rights Center at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research on globalization of human rights and its impact on local politics has appeared in American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Social Problems, Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and other social science journals. His book publications include Rights Make Might: Global Human Rights and Minority Social Movements in Japan (Oxford University Press 2018), and a co-edited volume (with Alwyn Lim) Corporate Social Responsibility in a Globalizing World (Cambridge University Press 2015). He has been a recipient of National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, National Science Foundation grants, the SSRC/CGP Abe Fellowship, Stanford Japan Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship, and other grants as well as awards from American Sociological Association sections on Global and Transnational Sociology (2010, 2013), Human Rights (2017), Asia and Asian America (2018), and Collective Behavior and Social Movements (2018).
 

 

McClatchy Hall, Building 120, Studio 40
450 Serra Mall
Stanford University

Kiyoteru Tsutsui Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan
Seminars

The War Scare That Wasn’t

-

Seminar recording: https://youtu.be/NUJqthUIGiU

 

Abstract: Did the Cold War of the 1980s nearly turn hot? Much has been made of NATO’s November 1983 Able Archer 83 command post exercise, which the literature typically casts as having nearly precipitated a nuclear war. Warsaw Pact policy-makers, according to the conventional wisdom, suspected that the exercise was more than just a rehearsal of nuclear escalation and concluded that a surprise nuclear attack was imminent, nearly launching a preemptive strike of their own. This article overturns this narrative using new, international evidence from the political, military, and intelligence archives of the Eastern bloc. First, it shows that the much-touted Warsaw Pact intelligence effort to assess Western intentions and capabilities, Project RIaN, which supposedly triggered Eastern fears of a surprise attack was nowhere near operational at the time of Able Archer 83. Second, it presents an account of the East’s sanguine observations of Able Archer 83 disproving accounts which allege that the exercise nearly escalated to nuclear war. In doing so, it advances debates not only in the historiography of the late Cold War, but also pertaining to the stability of the nuclear peace and the role of perception and misperception in policy-making.

 

Speaker's Biography:

miles headshot cisac
Simon Miles is Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. He teaches and researches US grand strategy, nuclear weapons, and Cold War international history. Simon is the author of Engaging the ‘Evil Empire’: US-Soviet Relations, 1980–1985, forthcoming from Cornell University Press; and he is beginning a new monograph, On Guard for Peace and Socialism: The Warsaw Pact, 1955–1991, an international history of the Cold War–era military alliance.

Simon Miles Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Slavic and Eurasian Studies Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy
Seminars
Research Seminar Series

Fertility Behavior and Fertility in China: Past, Present and Near Future

-

China possesses a large amount of historical demographic data showing that it has been a population giant in the world for at least two thousand years. Partly for this reason, a number of conclusions or suggestions about China’s past fertility regime have been widely accepted. Recent historical demographic investigations, however, have shown that many of these conclusions or suggestions are incorrect and need further consideration. This presentation reports these research findings and briefly examines China’s recent fertility changes. On the basis of that it makes some comments on major characteristics of China’s current fertility patterns and factors affecting fertility changes in the near future.

zhongwei
Zhongwei Zhao graduated from University of Cambridge with a PhD in 1993. Since then he has worked at the East-West Center, Hawaii, University of New South Wales, Australian National University, and University of Cambridge. Since 2008, he has been a professor at the School of Demography at the ANU. Zhao has been doing research in the following research areas: Historical demography, Computer microsimulation, Fertility, Mortality, Changes in kinship structure and household composition, Famine demography, Inequality in population health, Environmental impacts on mortality changes, and Population changes in Asia. He has co-edited three books (including recent Routledge Handbook of Asian Demography) and published many articles and book chapters by leading demography journals and academic publishers.  

Zhao, Zhongwei Professor, The School of Demography at the Australian National University
Seminars

Social Voting in Semi-Authoritarian Systems

-

Abstract:

In dominant-party states, why do individuals vote in elections with foregone conclusions when they are neither bought nor coerced? I propose that a social norm of voting motivates turnout in these least-likely contexts. Motivated by the belief that regimes reward high turnout with public goods, citizens view elections as an opportunity for community-wide benefit and use social sanctions to enforce the norm. Using lab-in-the-field voting experiments together with survey data, I document the strong influence of a social norm of voting in two semi-authoritarian states in east Africa, Tanzania and Uganda. I find that norm compliance is driven by those most dependent on their local community. This project helps to explain high turnout in elections, individual-level variation in voting behavior, and authoritarian endurance. The results suggest that rather than government accountability, elections may instead be about local accountability to one's community.

 

Speaker Bio:

leah1 small
Leah is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, France and a research affiliate at MIT GOV/LAB. She received her PhD in political science from MIT in 2018. Leah studies political behavior in sub-Saharan Africa and examines questions of citizen engagement, compliance, and government accountability. Her current book project investigates how social norms of voting help to explain high turnout in dominant-party states in East Africa. She is also working on a project on urban informality in Lagos, Nigeria. Before starting graduate school, Leah worked as the program manager at Columbia University’s Earth Institute in Nigeria.

 

Leah R. Rosenzweig

0
CDDRL Postdoctoral Scholar, 2020-21
thumbnail_leah1_small.jpg

My research centers on topics in comparative politics and the political economy of development. I focus on the micro-foundations of political behavior to gain leverage on macro-political questions. How do autocrats survive? How can citizen-state relations be improved and government accountability strengthened? Can shared identities mitigate out-group animosity? Adopting a multi-method approach, I use lab-in-the-field and online experiments, surveys, and in-depth field research to examine these questions in sub-Saharan Africa and the US. My current book project reexamines the role of elections in authoritarian endurance and explains why citizens vote in elections with foregone conclusions in Tanzania and Uganda. Moving beyond conventional paradigms, my theory describes how a social norm of voting and accompanying social sanctions from peers contribute to high turnout in semi-authoritarian elections. In other ongoing projects, I study how national and pan-African identification stimulated through national sports games influence attitudes toward refugees, the relationship between identity, emotions, and belief in fake news, and how researchers can use Facebook as a tool for social science research.

postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, France
Seminars

The Polarization of Nationalist Cleavages and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

-

Abstract:

Using survey data from a variety of sources, I examine how multiple conceptions of American nationhood shaped respondents’ voting preferences in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and how the election outcome built on long-term changes in the distribution of nationalist beliefs in the U.S. population. The results suggest that nationalist beliefs constituted important cultural cleavages that were effectively mobilized by candidates from both parties. In particular, exclusionary varieties of nationalism were associated with Trump support in the Republican primary and the general election, while disengagement from the nation was predictive of Sanders support in the Democratic primary. Furthermore, over the past twenty years, nationalism has become sorted by party: Republicans have become predominantly ethno-nationalist, while Democrats have increasingly embraced a creedal conception of nationhood. The resulting mutual reinforcement of nationalist cleavages with other sources of distinction is likely to shape future elections and threaten the stability of U.S. democracy.

 

Speaker Bio:

bonikowski head shot full size
Bart Bonikowski is Associate Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, Resident Faculty at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, a Faculty Affiliate of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (where he co-directs the Research Cluster on Global Populism / Challenges to Democracy), and a 2018-19 Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellow in Communication at Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Relying on survey methods, computational text analysis, and experimental research, his work applies insights from cultural sociology to the study of politics in the United States and Europe, with a particular focus on nationalism, populism, and the rise of the radical right. His research has appeared in the American Sociological Review, Annual Review of Sociology, Social Forces, British Journal of Sociology, European Journal of Political Research, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Brown Journal of World Affairs, and a number of other peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes.
 
Bart Bonikowski Associate Professor of Sociology at Harvard University
Seminars
Subscribe to Seminars