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Does the perceived provision of security affect the empirical legitimacy attributed to ISAF in Afghanistan, and vice versa? By asking this question, the paper generates new insight on the relationship between effective and legitimate governance for Afghanistan as an area of limited statehood. The study applies multilevel analysis to an empirical foundation of newly assembled survey data from Northeast Afghanistan for 2009–2013. It thereby contributes evidence to a debate where empirical results remain scant and sheds light on several open questions. People who attributed their security to ISAF were more likely to view ISAF as legitimate. Afghans who viewed ISAF as legitimate were also more likely to feel secure. Nevertheless, the results partly challenge established assumptions on the relationship between effective and legitimate governance. Additionally, factors such as respondents’ liberal values and foreign aid deserve attention when analyzing ISAF’s legitimacy and security perceptions in Afghanistan.

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Sunil Khilnani’s new book, Incarnations, tells India’s history through 50 biographical essays, ranging from the Buddha to a contemporary billionaire. Building on rich recent scholarship about Indian history and culture, Khilnani’s work ventures to integrate the fragmented character of disciplinary knowledge of India, and to suggest an alternative to both popular religious and secular nationalist accounts of India’s past. Recovering the stories of remarkable individuals, his talk will highlight experiments in living and radical, dissenting ideas as drivers of Indian history, and contend that many of India’s choices about its future depend on which historical lessons get drawn from its past.

Speaker Bio:

Sunil Khilnani is currently Avantha Professor and Director of the India Institute, established by him at King’s College London in 2011. From 2002 to 2011 he was Starr Foundation Professor and Director of South Asia Studies at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, in Washington D.C.; and before that, Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London. He received his BA and PhD from the University of Cambridge, and he has been a Fellow of Christ’s College Cambridge; the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin; and the American Academy in Berlin, as well as holding a Leverhulme Fellowship.

His publications include: Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (Yale, 1993), The Idea of India (Penguin/FSG, 7th edn. 2016), and several collaborative volumes, including: Civil Society: History and Possibilities (Cambridge, 2000); NonAlignment 2.0: a Foreign Policy for India in the 21st Century (Penguin, 2013); An Indian Social Democracy (Academic, 2013); and Comparative Constitutionalism in South Asia (Oxford, 2013). His most recent book is Incarnations: A History of India in Fifty Lives (Penguin/FSG 2016), accompanied by his 50-part BBC radio and podcast and radio series.

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Diana Fu is an assistant professor of Asian Politics at the University of Toronto. Her research examines the relationship between popular contention, state power, and civil society, with an emphasis on contemporary China. Her book manuscript, Mobilizing Without the Masses in China examines state control and civil society contention under authoritarian rule. Based on two years of ethnographic research that tracks the development of informal labor organizations, the book explores counterintuitive dynamics of organized contention in post-1989 China.  

Prior to joining the Univeristy of Toronto, Professor Fu was a Walter H. Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University and a Predoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Political Science. She holds a D.Phil. in Politics and an M.Phil. in Development Studies with distinction from Oxford University, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. 

Co-sponsor by Stanford in Government (SIG)

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Abstract: What role do negotiations play in the midst of interstate wars? Extant scholarship has largely treated negotiations as being irrelevant to understanding a conflict's trajectory, or as being a direct reflection of hostilities on the battlefield. Neither view is supported by historical readings or empirical patterns of intra-war diplomacy. I present an alternative view of negotiations as being instrumental. Diplomatic bargaining not only occurs in response to battlefield outcomes, but is also used deceptively by disadvantaged belligerents to stall for time, manage political pressures, and regroup militarily. Using two new daily-level datasets of battles and diplomatic activity, I show that negotiations in post-1945 wars extend conflict when the war initiator has an advantage in fighting, occur in response to lop-sided battle outcomes, dampen the intensity of combat, and are associated with subsequent improvements in the war target's success on the battlefield. This framework of instrumental negotiations shows that the effect of intra-war diplomacy is conditional on the state of hostilities, and has substantial implications on our understanding of war termination and conflict resolution.

About the Speaker: Eric Min is a CISAC Predoctoral Fellow for 2016-2017 and a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Stanford University. His research is focused on interstate diplomacy, information gathering and sharing during crises, and applications of machine learning and text analysis techniques to declassified documents related to conflict and foreign policy. 

Abstract:

China's government alternately appears in western scholarship as an idealized meritocracy or a corrupt cohort of venal officials. Yet empirical attempts to place China's government in comparative perspective are limited. We develop and exploit a new empirical source--survey testimony from political insiders--to measure three Weberian qualities of Chinese bureaucracy: meritocracy, autonomy, and morale. By translating questions from a major survey of U.S. officials, we place the responses of Chinese officials in comparative perspective. In contrast to claims that political connections dominate official promotions in China, Chinese bureaucrats are markedly more likely than U.S. bureaucrats to report that their agencies recruit people with the right skills and promote people based on performance. Responses from municipal governments in China resemble those of high-performing federal bureaucracies in the United States, such as NASA and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. However, the Chinese advantage shrinks in autonomy and nearly disappears in workplace morale.

Speaker(s) Bio:

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Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Mosbacher Director of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL).  He is also a professor by courtesy in the Department of Political Science. He was previously at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of Johns Hopkins University, where he was the Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy and director of SAIS' International Development program.

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Greg Distelhorst is the Mitsubishi Career Development Professor and an Assistant Professor of Global Economics and Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He studies contemporary Chinese politics and public policy, as well as the social impacts of multinational business. He was a CDDRL Predoctoral Fellow in 2012-2013.

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Margaret Boittin is Assistant Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Canada. She studies Chinese law and politics. She was a predoctoral and postdoctoral fellow at CDDRL (2012-2015).

Korea’s economic development trajectory is well known. From an impoverished war-torn nation, the country has progressed on all fronts. In the 1950s the country’s per capita income was estimated to be lower than India’s. Today the income difference is fifteen-fold in favor of Korea. It stands out internationally when it comes to education. Politically it has moved away from authoritarian to more spirited, people-driven democratic system. This presentation will shift the debate to the question what does a country do after it has achieved prosperity. Using the concept of capitalist maturity, do we look for answers in the OECD experience or should we treat Korea on its own terms? What are the development challenges for Korea in the post-development era? Given that there are both external and internal issues that merit appropriate responses, the presentation focuses on Korea’s regional (Asian) economy, business and institutional responses to expanding Asia, and the societal adjustment issues to increasing flows of Asian students, professionals, and unskilled workers. The presentation concludes by briefly indicating the many unfinished domestic reforms at multiple levels, which could reinforce Korea’s external engagement and potentially resolve the development conundrum arising from capitalist maturity.

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