About the event: Research shows that women are less likely to protest and have less cellphone access than men. Since studies indicate that cellphones can boost protest participation, we ask whether the gender gap in mobile ownership influences gender disparities in protest turnout. We find that the growing gender digital divide in cellphone ownership exacerbates the participation gap. We use survey data from Africa to show that where women systematically own fewer cellphones than men, they protest less frequently than men. We use a variety of methodological techniques to address concerns of endogeneity. We also probe one mechanism underpinning this relationship; we demonstrate that women who do not own cellphones face a political information disadvantage that limits their engagement. We conclude that unequal cellphone access further entrenches women’s position on the political margins.

This paper was co-authored with Tiffany Barnes, Emily Rains and Jingwen Wu.

About the speaker: Jakana Thomas is Associate Professor in the School of Global Policy and Strategy and Department of Political Science at University of California San Diego. Her research focuses on political violence and conflict processes with an emphasis on understanding women’s participation in and experiences with contentious politics. Her work has been published at the leading Political Science and International Relations journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics and International Organization, among other outlets. She is PI on a Blue Shield Foundation funded project examining Californians’ experiences with violence across their lifespans (CalVEX).

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

After more than three years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, international support for Ukraine is coming under increasing attack, even as it is more important than ever to safeguard Ukraine’s independence and sovereignty. 

This paper builds on two waves of online public opinion surveys in eight countries bordering Ukraine and/or Russia (Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Moldova, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan) to analyze the drivers of popular attitudes towards the war among citizens of neighboring countries, and identify the factors that may counter the growing war fatigue and the barrage of misinformation and propaganda from Russia (and increasingly from Western politicians). We also present the results of a pre-registered survey experiment, in which respondents were selectively exposed to an empathy induction prompt that encouraged them to reflect on the challenges of daily life in war-time Ukraine, and tests the impact of this empathy treatment on different dimensions of support for Ukraine.

Speaker: Grigore Pop-Eleches

I am a Professor of Politics and International Affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the Politics Department at Princeton University. I joined the Princeton faculty in 2003 after receiving my PhD in Political Science from UC Berkeley. I am co-director of the Princeton Workshop on Post-Communist Politics(Link is external).

My main current research interests are in comparative political behavior with a focus on authoritarian and post-authoritarian regimes (largely in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union). I have also worked on comparative and international political economy of Eastern Europe and Latin America, and on democratization and democratic backsliding, with a focus on the role of electoral behavior and political parties.

My first book, entitled "From Economic Crisis to Reform: IMF Programs in Latin America and Eastern Europe" was published by Princeton University Press in February 2009. My second book, "Communism's Shadow: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Political Attitudes" (joint with Joshua A. Tucker), was published in 2017 by Princeton University Press. My work has also appeared in a variety of academic journals, including The American Journal of Political Science, The Journal of Politics, World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Democracy, Studies in Comparative International Development, and East European Politics and Societies.

REDS: RETHINKING EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT AND SECURITY

The REDS Seminar Series aims to deepen the research agenda on the new challenges facing Europe, especially on its eastern flank, and to build intellectual and institutional bridges across Stanford University, fostering interdisciplinary approaches to current global challenges.

REDS is organized by The Europe Center and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Learn more about REDS and view past seminars here.

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How Transnational Conservative Networks Target Sexual and Gender Minorities

In the past three decades, remarkable progress has been made in numerous countries for the rights of individuals marginalized due to their sexual orientation and gender identity. The advancements in LGBTI rights in a variety of diverse countries can largely be attributed to the tireless efforts of the transnational LGBTI-rights movement, forward-thinking governments in pioneering nations, and the evolving human rights frameworks of international organizations. However, this journey towards equality has been met with formidable opposition. An increasingly interconnected and globally networked resistance, backed by religious-nationalist elements and conservative governments, has emerged to challenge LGBTI and women's rights, even seeking to reinterpret and co-opt international human rights law.

In this lecture, Phillip Ayoub draws on his new book with Kristina Stöckl to investigate this complex landscape, drawing from over a decade of in-depth fieldwork with LGBTI activists, anti-LGBTI proponents, and various state and international organization actors. Moral conservative TANs have employed many of the same transnational tools that garnered LGBTIQ people their widespread recognition. As the double-helix metaphor suggests, rival TANs have a reciprocal relationship, having to navigate each other’s presence in an interactive space and thus using related strategies and instruments for mutually exclusive ends."

Phillip M. Ayoub is a professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science at University College London. He is the author of four books and volumes, including When States Come Out: Europe’s Sexual Minorities and the Politics of Visibility (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and his articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, Social Forces, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, the European Journal of International Relations, the European Journal of Political Research, the Review of International Studies, Mobilization, the European Political Science Review, the Journal of Human Rights, Social Politics, Political Research Quarterly, and Social Movement Studies, among others. Further information can be found under www.phillipayoub.com.

About the event: In this talk, Elena Kempf shares material from her forthcoming book on the history of weapons prohibitions in international law from the 1860s to the 1970s.

She argues that weapons prohibitions during this period emerged as a central site of contestation about the limits of the legitimate application of new technologies to war. These debates involved diplomats and international lawyers, but also medical professionals, scientists, and journalists. From their efforts, two ways of justifying a prohibition on a weapon emerged. The first repurposed the old legal concept of unnecessary suffering to newly weigh wounding against the abilities of military surgeons. The second was based on the specter of injury to global systems like shipping lines or the obliteration of major cities.

To revisit the early history of weapons prohibitions under international law is to uncover an expansive vocabulary that might animate future efforts at prohibition or control. This history also reveals the limits of outlawing weapons under international law. Law and technology changed at different velocities, leading to persistent distortions between moral-legal expectations and technical realities. In addition, the project of weapons prohibitions remained fragile, contested by techno-optimist, militarist, and pacifist critics.

About the speaker: Elena Kempf is the Old Dominion Career Development Assistant Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on the legal regulation of modern weapons of war. She is currently completing a manuscript on the history of weapons prohibitions in international law from the 1860s to the 1970s. She is also drafting a paper on the history of the concept of unnecessary suffering and superfluous injury. Prior to joining MIT, she was a postdoctoral fellow with the Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law at UC Berkeley Law School, and a lecturer with the Department of History at Stanford University. Professor Kempf earned her PhD in History from UC Berkeley in 2021.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

With the collapse of the Japanese Empire in August 1945, the Korean peninsula erupted with hopes and dreams that had been bottled up for nearly forty years. Kornel Chang's new book, A Fractured Liberation: Korea under U.S. Occupation (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2025), tells the story of how Koreans—from political leaders and activists to ordinary peasants, workers, and women—experienced the shock of liberation, what they thought it might bring, the great expectations, and the opportunities and challenges they faced as a newly emancipated people. The book also looks at how the entry of American forces complicated, and ultimately, narrowed possibilities for liberation. U.S. officials fought over how to best fulfill Korean aspirations and how they should be prioritized among competing objectives in Korea. An eclectic group of American and Korean reformers—New Deal liberals, Christian socialists, and trade unionists—proposed an agenda of democratization and reform as an alternative to the rigid anti-communism of the military high command. Their stories reveal the paths not taken. In telling them, A Fractured Liberation restores contingency to a narrative that looks ahead to war and division as an inevitable endpoint.
 

Kornel Chang is Associate Professor of History and American Studies and Chair of the History Department at Rutgers University-Newark. His first book Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands is a history of Asian migration to the Pacific Northwest, revealing how their movements sparked some of the first battles over the border in North America. It won the Association for Asian American Studies History Book Prize and was a finalist for the John Hope Franklin Book Prize. His second book, A Fractured Liberation: Korea under U.S. Occupation, recently published by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, is a narrative history of southern Korea in the aftermath of World War II, when the collapse of the Japanese Empire ushered in an extraordinary moment of promise and possibility that ultimately ended in political tragedy.

Directions and Parking > 

When President John F. Kennedy established the US Agency for International Development (USAID) by executive order in 1961, it was with an eye both to national self-interest and the greater global good. Addressing Congress, Kennedy acknowledged that “economic collapse” of “less-developed nations” would be “disastrous to our national security, harmful to our comparative prosperity and offensive to our conscience.” Foreign aid was not a new undertaking for the US, but the context of both communist threat and a post-WWII proliferation of newly sovereign and/or economically striving nations, called for consolidation and expansion of those efforts. In making the world more prosperous and secure, the US aimed to protect itself and foster democracy. That effort persisted long after the cold war thawed, with the same mix of idealism and pragmatism, and altruism and self-preservation. USAID, and US support more broadly, has been vital to global efforts against famine, disease, dislocation, and more, saving countless lives, fostering stability, and seeding prosperity—in the process, containing threats ranging from epidemics, to transborder crime, to armed conflicts. 

Among Donald Trump’s first acts upon his inauguration in 2025, however, was to freeze all foreign aid for 90 days, to root out waste and fraud. Within days, efforts to shut down programs and lay off or furlough staff globally intensified, chaotically and with contested legality. The future not only of this agency—slated to be merged with the State Department, but currently in shreds—but of US foreign assistance and policy broadly remains uncertain. 

In few places is this dramatic shift more deeply felt than in Myanmar and along its borders. This webinar will explore both the context that made US support so vital—for its direct recipients and for the US itself—and the nature and implications of this abrupt change in US policy.

Panelists:

Scot Marciel – former US Ambassador to Myanmar, Indonesia, and for ASEAN Affairs; Lecturer at the Masters in International Policy Program, Stanford University

Alice Ba – Emma Smith Morris Professor, Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Delaware

Kyaw Htet Aung – Head, Conflict, Peace and Security Program, Institute for Strategy and Policy, Myanmar

Su Mon Thazin Aung – Visiting Fellow, Myanmar Studies Programme, ISEAS–Yusuf Ishak Institute; Adjunct Assistant Professor, National University of Singapore

Moderator:

Meredith Weiss – Professor, Department of Political Science, University at Albany, SUNY; Lee Kong Chian Fellow on Southeast Asia, Stanford University

This event is co-sponsored by the SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium

SCCEI Seminar Series (Spring 2025)

Friday, April 18, 2025 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

Intergenerational Mobility, Marital Sorting, and Social Closure: Patterns and Trends in China

Intergenerational social mobility and marital sorting by socioeconomic status have long been regarded as key indicators of societal openness. Since China’s economic reform, a sharp rise in economic inequality has coincided with declining social mobility, as individuals’ socioeconomic status increasingly mirrors that of their parents. At the same time, marital sorting by education has intensified, exacerbating inequality among Chinese families. While both trends suggest a growing degree of social closure, how they reinforce each other remains poorly understood. In this talk, I first review recent research on trends in social mobility and marital sorting in China. I then introduce a new measure of social closure, defined as the intergenerational association in educational attainment at the family level. Using a simple decomposition, I demonstrate how intergenerational educational mobility at the individual level and marital sorting have jointly shaped the evolution of social closure in China, and how the relative importance of these forces has differed between men and women.

Please register for the event to receive email updates and add it to your calendar. Lunch will be provided.

About the Speaker 
 

Xiang Zhou is Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. He is also a faculty affiliate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, and Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. His research broadly concerns inequality, education, causal inference, and statistical and computational methods. His work has appeared in American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Journal of Political Economy, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, PNAS, among other peer-reviewed journals. Before coming to Harvard, Zhou worked as a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University. He received a PhD in Sociology and Statistics from the University of Michigan in 2015.

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu
 

About the event: Studying the social construction of norms has been a fashionable way to approach understanding European Union politics. Indeed, following the outbreak of the Ukrainian war (2022- present day), scholars of the EU have published a large number of articles exploring norm-driven politics. Many scholars of the EU have seen its engagement with Ukraine as driven by common norms and/or a shared identity. However, this talk will argue that self-interest in the form of the balance of threat assessments of individual countries remains the most crucial factor in understanding patterns of support for Ukraine, as well as explaining the percentage of GDP spent on the military by EU member states. Moreover, defense priorities are driven by a broader set of threats than just that posed by Russia. This talk will further explore how free riding and defense spending are determined by states’ interests in survival rather than shared norms or solidarity. This talk will suggest that scholars should pay greater attention to smaller ad hoc alliances between states that share specific threats, a neglected dimension of the current security environment in Europe.

About the speaker: Stig Jarle Hansen was a Professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) before joining Stanford in 2024. At NMBU, he led Norway’s only master's program in International Relations. In 2016-2017, he was a Renee Belfer fellow at Harvard University. He is also a senior nonresident associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London. His work is at the intersection of crime, security, and great power politics.

Professor Hansen’s books have received good reviews in Foreign Policy (the best book of the year) and The Economist, and Newsweek published a chapter of one of them. He has contributed to Jane’s Intelligence Review, the MES Insights of the United States Marine Corps, and West Point’s CTC Sentinel. He has commented for CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, Reuters, CCTV 4, and many other international media outlets.

Professor Hansen has also given presentations to various defense and governance institutions, including the NATO Intelligence Fusion Center, NATO Defense College in Rome, United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), has testified in hearings in the British House of Commons, and has been invited to give presentations to the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. He is a board member of the RAAD institute in Mogadishu, the Abaad center in Aden, and a member of the editorial board of Small Wars and insurgencies.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

About the event: Weaponized conspiracy theories and social media disinformation have increased exponentially since Facebook’s Frances Haugen testified before the Senate in 2021. Since January 6, 2021, QAnon has been portrayed by government agencies (DHS 2021, FBI 2019), think tanks (Moonshot CVE 2020, Soufan Group 2021) and the mainstream media as dangerous with the “potential for terrorist violence.” This talk will explore the origins of the conspiracy theory, discuss how foreign adversaries of the US weaponize and leverage QAnon to exacerbate polarization and how the conspiracy theory targets LGBTQ+ community and revives racist stereotypes from the period of reconstruction and antisemitic tropes.

Latest article: LGBTQ+ Victimization by Extremist Organizations: Charting a New Path for Research

About the speaker: Mia Bloom is an International Security Fellow at the New America and Professor at Georgia State University. Bloom conducts research in Europe, the Middle East and South Asia and speaks eight languages. Bloom is the author of six books and over 80 articles on violent extremism including Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (Columbia 2005), Living Together After Ethnic Killing (Routledge 2007) Bombshell: Women and Terror (UPenn 2011) and Small Arms: Children and Terror (Cornell 2019) and Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon with Sophia Moskalenko (Stanford 2021). Her next book, Veiled Threats: Women and Jihad was published by Cornell University Press in January 2025. Bloom is a former term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has held appointments at Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, and McGill Universities. She serves on the Counter-Radicalization boards of the Anti-Defamation League, the UN Counter Terrorism Executive Directorate (UNCTED), Women Without Borders and several working groups for the Global Internet Forum for Counter Terrorism (GIFCT). Bloom has a PhD in political science from Columbia University, Masters in Arab Studies from Georgetown University and Bachelors in Russian, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies from McGill, and her Pre-Doctorate from Harvard’s Center for International Studies and a Post-Doctorate from Princeton.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.