Abstract: Why do states acquire nuclear weapons? Existing theories of nuclear proliferation fail to account for the impact of bargaining on the process---i.e., credible agreements exist in which rival states make sufficient concessions to convince the potential rising state not to proliferate. I show the existence of that range of settlements and the robustness of the inefficiency puzzle and then provide two main explanations as to why states proliferate anyway. First, if the would-be proliferator expects to lose the ability to construct nuclear weapons in the future, the states face a commitment problem: the rival state would like to promise to continue providing concessions into the future but will renege once proliferation is no longer an option. And second, if the proliferator's rival faces some sort of uncertainty---whether regarding the potential proliferator's ability to go nuclear or regarding its previous proliferation activity---the optimal offer can entail positive probability of nuclear investment. However, the nonproliferation regime's mission to increase the cost of building often leads to Pareto improvement. Put differently, rising states sometimes benefit directly by making their nuclear options more costly.

About the Speaker: William Spaniel received a PhD in international relations, formal theory, and quantitative methodology from the University of Rochester in 2015. His research investigates the credibility of nuclear agreements in the absence of verifiable compliance. As a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at CISAC for 2015-2016, he is working on the potentially perverse effects of nuclear safeguards. His publications have appeared in International Studies Quarterly, International Interactions, and The Journal of Theoretical Politics.

Abstract: How do leaders win power struggles in Leninist regimes? The political science literature emphasizes the importance of institutions in such polities: institutionalization allegedly provides a mechanism for distributing patronage, prevents the military and secret police from playing a special role, and strictly delineates the group that selects the leadership. This project instead argues that the defining feature of one-party states is the lack of institutionalization. Power struggles are therefore determined by prestige and sociological ties, politicized militaries and secret police, and the manipulation of multiple decision-making bodies. I test the relative explanatory value of these two competing sets of hypotheses by examining the power struggles fought by Nikita Khrushchev, Deng Xiaoping, and Kim Ilsung. The historic failure to institutionalize leadership selection had a tragic legacy: its absence is crucial for understanding the origins of stagnation, the tragedy at Tiananmen Square in 1989, and the Kim family multi-generational personality cult. 

About the Speaker: Joseph Torigian is a Ph.D. student at MIT interested in Chinese, Russian, and North Korean elite politics and qualitative methods. His current research uses archival material to investigate how war affects political authority in authoritarian regimes. Before coming to MIT, Joseph worked at the Council on Foreign Relations and studied China's policies towards Central Asia as a Fulbright Scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai. He has conducted dissertation research at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and as a visiting scholar at the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at George Washington University. He received his BA in Political Science at the University of Michigan and speaks Chinese and Russian.

Abstract: The 1995 launch of a sounding rocket from Andoya in Norway allegedly misinterpreted as an attack in Russia and the so-called "Cuban Missile Crisis" in 1962 have one thing in common: they have both been referred to as "the closest we came to nuclear war." The 1962 crisis has mostly been studied from an American perspective due to the availability of documentary evidence and of the Kennedy tapes, until the 1990s when Cuba and the Soviet Union were given a voice, with the rest of the world still largely absent from the understanding of the event. The 1995 close call has been controversial and is remembered in conflicting ways: an alarmist and an untroubled one.

About the Speaker: Benoît Pelopidas is a CISAC affiliate and lecturer in International Relations at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS), University of Bristol. He was a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC for the 2011-2012 academic year.

He received his Ph. D. in political science from Sciences Po (Paris) and the University of Geneva in 2010 and was a postdoctoral fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in 2010-2011. Since 2005, he has been teaching international relations at Sciences Po (Paris), the University of Geneva and the Monterey Institute of International Studies (Graduate School of International Policy and Management).

In 2010, he won the "outstanding student essay prize" from the Doreen and Jim McElvany Nonproliferation Essay Competition and in 2011, he was awarded the "Best Graduate Paper 2010" from the International Security Studies Section of the International Studies Association. Also in 2011, he won the SNIS Award 2010 for the Best Thesis in International Studies from the Swiss Network for International Studies. A book based on his dissertation is forthcoming in French by Sciences Po University Press.

He published When Empire Meets Nationalism: Power Politics in the US and Russia (with Didier Chaudet and Florent Parmentier; Ashgate, 2009) as well as articles in The Nonproliferation Review, the European Journal of Social Sciences, the Swiss Political Science Review, and the French Yearbook of International Relations. His research focuses on epistemic communities in international security, renunciation of nuclear weapons as a historical possibility, the uses of nuclear history and memory and French nuclear policies.

Abstract: In November 1954, French Algeria erupted in violence.  Confronted with a growing nationalist revolution, French authorities turned to not only to repression, but to a radical program of social reform aimed at capturing Algerian Muslims’ hearts and minds.  Why, beginning in the 1950s, did the French Army come to see its task not only as conventional combat, but also social engineering?  Historians often focus on the violence employed by the French Army during the war, but in so doing, they have missed both the full scope and the novelty of the French state’s strategy of “Pacification.”  Drawing on archival research and oral interviews, I show that French commanders did not simply seek to preserve colonial rule, but to radically remake Algerian society along French lines.  French civil and military leaders sought to discover an alternative model of decolonization –one capable of immunizing Algeria against subversive Cold War threats and guaranteeing its future as part of France.  In the process, they transformed the norms of modern warfare, and laid the foundations of the postcolonial relationships between Europe and the Muslim world.

About the Speaker: Terrence Peterson is a Postdoctoral Fellow at CISAC for 2015-2016, where he is working on the development of French and international counterinsurgency theories during the period of decolonization.  He earned a PhD in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015.  Entitled “Counterinsurgent Bodies: Social Welfare and Psychological Warfare in French Algeria, 1956-1962,” his dissertation examines the French Army’s efforts to counter a nationalist revolution by combining population development projects and mass psychology techniques to ‘modernize’ Algerian Muslims and remake them in the image of Frenchmen.  Fulbright grantee to France for the year of 2012-2013, his current research focuses on the intersections between the Cold War, decolonization conflicts, and the development of counterinsurgency doctrines.  In addition to several articles under way, his article “The ‘Jewish Question’ and the ‘Italian Peril’: Vichy, Italy, and the Jews of Tunisia, 1940-1942” appeared in the Journal of Contemporary History in April 2015.

Please join us for a seminar on the assessment of student learning in higher education. We will hear from internationally renowned experts in the field of higher education assessment and present preliminary results from a pathbreaking new study comparing university learning between the U.S., Russia and China.

Lydia Liu

Director of Research, Higher Education
Educational Testing Service

Olga Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia

Professor of Business Education
Johannes Gutenberg University

Prashant Loyalka

Center Fellow (FSI)

Assistant Professor, Teaching (FSE)

Stanford University

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Abstract:

We live at a time of the greatest progress amongst the global poor in human history. Never before have so many people in so many developing countries made so much progress in reducing poverty, improving health, increasing incomes, expanding health, reducing conflict, and encouraging democracy. The Great Surge tells the story of this unprecedented progress over the last two decades, why it happened, and what it may portend for the future.

“A brilliant new book” ~ Francis Fukuyama

“A stunning, wise, and deeply hopeful book that anyone concerned about global human development must read.”~ Larry Diamond

“Powerful, lucid, and revelatory” ~ George Soros

“A terrific book” ~ Nicholas Kristof

“With his typical care and detail, Steven Radelet describes humanity’s greatest hits over the last twenty years—never have we lived in a time when so many are doing so well” ~ Bono

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Abstract:

The coup of July 3, 2013 brought a decisive end to Egypt’s brief experiment with elected civilian governance that followed the downfall of President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011. Early attempts to understand the downfall of the “Second Egyptian Republic” focused largely around the events that immediately preceded the ouster of President Mohamed Morsi. This presentation adds historical depth to these discussions by analyzing the role of institutional legacies in contributing to that outcome. Specifically, decades-old state interventions have structured Egypt’s political field in ways that encourage defections from pacted transitions in the present moment.

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*Please note room changed to CISAC central*

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Since she took over the National Front in 2011, Marine Le Pen has carried the far right party to first place, winning an unprecedented 30% of the votes in France’s latest December 2015 elections. What does she say that resonates with French voters so strongly? And how did she manage to turn the once infamous “FN” into an almost mainstream party that claims to be the last champion of French republican values?

Using text mining software and textual analyses, Cécile Alduy has ciphered more than 500 speeches and texts by Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen to pinpoint exactly how, and on what topics, the daughter’s discourse differs from that of her father.

In this talk, literary studies meet digital humanities and political science to crack the new National Front rhetorical code and uncover the deeper ideological and mythological structures beyond the stylistic polishing.

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Abstract:

Electoral competition, like athletic competition, requires its own norms of fair play. While the rules of the game, and the institutional umpire to enforce those rules, are important components for achieving the goal that the competition be fair, they do not suffice. The participants themselves must have their own standards of fair play apart from the rules and the referee. This need is particularly acute with respect to negative campaign ads, since the First Amendment bars the government from umpiring the fairness of those ads. But the same problem applies to other aspects of electoral competition, including compliance with campaign finance rules. What are these norms of fair electoral competition? Are they only intuitive, or can they be systematized? More specifically, insofar as incumbent candidates are officeholders, does due process constrain the use of their power to attain an unfair advantage in their race for reelection?

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Abstract:

Compulsory voting reinforces the distinctive and valuable role that elections play in contemporary democracy. Some scholars have suggested that mandatory voting laws can improve government responsiveness to members of poor and marginalized groups who are less likely to vote. Critics of compulsory voting object that citizens can participate in a wide variety of ways; voting is not important enough to justify forcing people to do it. These critics neglect the importance of voting’s particular role in contemporary democratic practice, though. The case for compulsory voting rests on an implicit, but widely shared, understanding of elections as special moments of mass participation that manifest the equal political authority of all citizens. The most prominent objections to mandatory voting fail to appreciate this distinctive role for voting and the way it is embedded within a broader democratic framework.

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Emilee is an assistant professor of Political Science at Stanford. Her current research project examines the distinctive value of voting in contemporary democratic practice, and its significance for electoral reform and the ethics of participation.