Abstract: Throughout the Cold War, Japanese leaders and policymakers have generally been careful to reflect the public’s firm opposition to anti-nuclear sentiment. However, the turn of the 21st century has witnessed a remarkable shift in the political debate, with élites alluding to a nuclear option for Japan. This sudden proliferation of nuclear statements among Japanese élites in 2002 has been directly linked by Japan watchers to the breakout of the second North Korean nuclear crisis and the rapid buildup of China’s military capabilities. Is the Japanese perception of this double military threat in Northeast Asia really the main factor that triggered this shift in the nuclear debate? This paper argues that Japanese élites’ behavior rather indicates that the new threats in the regional strategic context is merely used as a pretext to solve a more deep-rooted and long-standing anxiety that stems from Japan’s own unsuccessful quest for a less reactive, and more proactive post-Cold War identity. 

About the speaker: Sayuri Romei is a Nuclear Security Predoctoral Fellow at CISAC for 2016-2017 and a doctoral candidate in international relations at Roma Tre University in Rome, Italy. Her dissertation focuses on the evolution of Japanese élites’ nuclear mentality in the postwar era, looking at its ambivalent nuclear history and exploring how the country’s nuclear latency was seen by the United States throughout the Cold War. She holds a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris III, a BA in international relations from the University of Roma La Sapienza, and an MA in international relations from Roma Tre University. Her fellowship at CISAC is sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation.

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One policy option for countries reliant on natural resources is to share part of the revenues directly with citizens, an idea known as oil to cash. Technological innovation, such as biometric identification and mobile money, now allow direct payments to people on a massive scale. Additional changes in the global marketplace, experiments in India and Kenya, and shifting political views of cash transfers have all affected the potential of cash to boost governance.

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In this talk, Karine Walther discusses her new book Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821-1921. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Americans increasingly came into contact with the Islamic world, U.S. diplomatic, cultural, political, and religious beliefs about Islam began to shape their responses to world events. In Sacred Interests, Karine V. Walther excavates the deep history of American Islamophobia, showing how negative perceptions of Islam and Muslims shaped U.S. foreign relations from the Early Republic to the end of World War I.

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The Iraqi government, the Peshmerga, the international coalition and a consortium of militia have been winning the war against ISIS in Iraq.  The concern moving forward is whether Iraq’s state institutions have what it takes to prevent ISIS from reemerging in a new, and more deadly form after the current conflict is over. What does recent history, the current military campaign, and the Donald Trump administration’s current trajectory tell us about Iraq’s prospects?

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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?

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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.

Abstract: In 1992, North Korea offered to dismantle its plutonium-production reactors in exchange for more “proliferation-resistant” light water reactors (LWRs) from the West, and this offer culminated in the 1994 Agreed Framework with the United States. After the Agreed Framework collapsed in 2002, North Korean negotiators continued to insist that LWRs were a prerequisite for relinquishing its nuclear weapons capabilities. Why has the regime placed such importance on this particular form of energy generation? I examine the history of North Korea’s pursuit of LWR technology, and the shifting role that pursuit played in its diplomacy. A technically informed look at the LWR fuel cycle reveals a network of technical dependence that can draw nations into enduring modes of collective action. At times, and with varying degrees of awareness, actors on all sides of the North Korean nuclear crisis sought to leverage these unique aspects of LWR technology, hoping to lay a path for North Korea to vacate its isolation. This overlooked history offers important lessons for nonproliferation thought and policy.

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Dr. Jillian Schwedler is Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York’s Hunter College and the Graduate Center, and Nonresident Senior Fellow of the Rafiq Hariri Center for the Middle East at the Atlantic Council.  She is member of the Board of Directors and the Editorial Committee of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), publishers of the quarterly Middle East Report.

Dr. Schwedler’s books include the award-winning Faith in Moderation: Islamist Parties in Jordan and Yemen (Cambridge 2006) and (with Laleh Khalili) Policing and Prisons in the Middle East (Columbia 2010).  Her articles have appeared in World Politics, Comparative Politics, Middle East Policy, Middle East Report, Journal of Democracy, and Social Movement Studies, among many others.  Her research has received support from the National Science Foundation, the United States Institute of Peace, the Fulbright Scholars Program, the American Institute for Yemen Studies, and the Social Science Research Council, among others. 

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From 1975 to 1990, Lebanon experienced a long war involving various national and international actors. The peace agreement that followed and officially propelled the country into a "postwar" era did not address many of the root causes of war, nor did it hold main actors accountable. Instead, a politics of "no victor, no vanquished" was promoted, in which the political elite agreed simply to consign the war to the past. However, since then, Lebanon has found itself still entangled in various forms of political violence, from car bombings and assassinations to additional outbreaks of armed combat.

In this talk, Sami Hermez discusses his newly released book War Is Coming. The book argues that the country's political leaders have enabled the continuation of violence and examines how people live between these periods of conflict. What do everyday conversations, practices, and experiences look like during these moments? How do people attempt to find a measure of certainty or stability in such times? Hermez's ethnographic study of everyday life in Lebanon between the volatile years of 2006 and 2009 tackles these questions and reveals how people engage in practices of recollecting past war while anticipating future turmoil. Hermez demonstrates just how social interactions and political relationships with the state unfold and critically engages our understanding of memory and violence, seeing in people's recollections living and spontaneous memories that refuse to forget the past. With an attention to the details of everyday life, War Is Coming shows how even a conversation over lunch, or among friends, may turn into a discussion about both past and future unrest.

Shedding light on the impact of protracted conflict on people's everyday experiences and the way people anticipate political violence, Hermez highlights an urgency for alternative paths to sustaining political and social life in Lebanon.

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Reducing long working hours has been a high priority in the agenda to improve work conditions in Japan.  Towards this aim, the government has introduced legislation and policy measures, and corporations have modified their human resource policies to help employees strike better work-life balance.  Yet, working hours in Japan have remained virtually unchanged since the 1990s.  In this talk, I argue that the true causes of long working hours lie not in the “observable” barriers such as compensation schemes, public policy and law, but rather are embedded in “unobservable” or “unmeasurable” attributes such as social norms and work conventions.  Understanding this problem better requires an approach that accounts for both economic principles (which focus on monetary rewards and incentives) and sociological perspectives which pay closer attention to the social-institutional context.  I argue that long working hours in Japan stem from the institutional complementarities of the Japanese employment system and the cultural particularities underlying it.  I discuss the role of the input-driven society, work conventions that rely on signaling, internal labor market structure, group consciousness and hierarchy, ambiguous job functions, and the traditional gender division of labor.  I close by proposing measures to reduce working hours that follow from my analysis.

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