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
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.
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.
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:
RSVP required by Tuesday, May 7, 2019
McClatchy Hall, Building 120, Studio 40
450 Serra Mall
Stanford University
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:
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.Image
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 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. Image
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:
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.
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:
Abstract: President Trump may talk about the Middle East differently than Obama did. But the two seem to share the view that the United States is too involved in the region and should devote fewer resources and less time to it. The reduced appetite for U.S. engagement in the region reflects, not an ideological predilection or an idiosyncrasy of these two presidents, but a deeper change in both regional dynamics and broader U.S. interests. Despite this, the United States exists in a kind of Middle Eastern purgatory—too distracted by regional crises to pivot to other global priorities but not invested enough to move the region in a better direction. This worst-of-both-worlds approach exacts a heavy price. It sows uncertainty among Washington’s Middle Eastern partners, which encourages them to act in risky and aggressive ways. It deepens the American public’s frustration with the region’s endless turmoil, as well as with U.S. efforts to address it. It diverts resources that could otherwise be devoted to confronting a rising China and a revanchist Russia. And all the while, by remaining unclear about the limits of its commitments, the United States risks getting dragged into yet another Middle Eastern conflict.
Wittes is a co-host of Rational Security, a weekly podcast on foreign policy and national security issues. She writes on U.S. Middle East policy, regional conflict and conflict resolution, the challenges of global democracy, and the future of Arab governance. Her current research is for a forthcoming book, Our SOBs, on the tangled history of America’s ties to autocratic allies.
Wittes joined Brookings in December of 2003. Previously, she served as a Middle East specialist at the U.S. Institute of Peace and director of programs at the Middle East Institute in Washington. She has also taught courses in international relations and security studies at Georgetown University. Wittes was one of the first recipients of the Rabin-Peres Peace Award, established by President Bill Clinton in 1997.
Wittes is the author of "Freedom’s Unsteady March: America’s Role in Building Arab Democracy" (Brookings Institution Press, 2008) and the editor of "How Israelis and Palestinians Negotiate: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Oslo Peace Process" (USIP, 2005). She holds a bachelor's in Judaic and Near Eastern studies from Oberlin College, and a master's and doctorate in government from Georgetown University. She serves on the board of the National Democratic Institute, as well as the advisory board of the Israel Institute, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and Women in International Security.
Mara Karlin's Biography: Mara Karlin, PhD, is Director of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). She is also an Associate Professor at SAIS and a nonresident senior fellow at The Brookings Institution. Karlin has served in national security roles for five U.S. secretaries of defense, advising on policies spanning strategic planning, defense budgeting, future wars and the evolving security environment, and regional affairs involving the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. Most recently, she served as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development. Karlin has been awarded Department of Defense Medals for Meritorious and Outstanding Public Service, among others. She is the author of Building Militaries in Fragile States: Challenges for the United States (University of Pennsylvania Press; 2018).
Scott D. Sagan is the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, the Mimi and Peter Haas University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sagan was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University. From 1984 to 1985, he served as special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. Sagan has also served as a consultant to the office of the Secretary of Defense and at the Sandia National Laboratory and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In 2017, he received the International Studies Association’s Susan Strange Award which recognizes the scholar whose “singular intellect, assertiveness, and insight most challenge conventional wisdom and intellectual and organizational complacency" in the international studies community. Sagan was also the recipient of the National Academy of Sciences William and Katherine Estes Award in 2015, for his pioneering work addressing the risks of nuclear weapons accidents and the causes of nuclear proliferation.
Okimoto Conference Room
Encina Hall, 3rd Floor
616 Serra Street, Stanford