About the Speaker: Lieutenant General (retired) Khalid Kidwai is advisor to Pakistan’s National Command Authority and pioneer Director General of Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Division, which he headed for an unprecedented 15 years. He is one of the most decorated generals in Pakistan and was awarded the highest civil award Nishan-i-Imtiaz, as well as Hilal-i-Imtiaz and Hilal-i-Imtiaz (Military). Winner of the Sword of Honor at Pakistan’s Military Academy, he later saw frontline combat action in erstwhile East Pakistan and was a prisoner of war in Pakistan’s 1971 war with India. General Kidwai conceived, articulated, and executed Pakistan’s nuclear policy and deterrence doctrines into a tangible and robust nuclear force structure. General Kidwai is also the architect of Pakistan’s civilian Nuclear Energy Program and National Space Program.

Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where she focuses on issues of rule of law, security, and governance in post-conflict countries, fragile states, and states in transition. As the founding CEO of the Truman National Security Project, she spent nearly a decade leading a movement of national security, political, and military leaders working to promote people and policies that strengthen security, stability, rights, and human dignity in America and around the world.  Kleinfeld has consulted on rule of law reform for the World Bank, the European Union, the OECD, the Open Society Institute, and other institutions, and has briefed multiple U.S. government agencies. She is the author of Advancing the Rule of Law Abroad: Next Generation Reform (Carnegie, 2012).

This event is part of the Governance and the Rule of Law series being hosting jointly by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford's School of Law.

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Speaker Bio:

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Anders Aslund has been a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute since 2006. He is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. He examines the economic policy of Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, as well as focuses on the broader implications of economic transition. He worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from 1994 to 2005, first as a senior associate and then from 2003 as director of the Russian and Eurasian Program. He also worked at the Brookings Institution and the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies. He earned his doctorate from Oxford University. Åslund served as an economic adviser to the governments of Russia in 1991–94 and Ukraine in 1994–97. He was a professor at the Stockholm School of Economics and the founding director of the Stockholm Institute of East European Economics. He has worked as a Swedish diplomat in Kuwait, Poland, Geneva, and Moscow. He is a member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and an honorary professor of the Kyrgyz National University. He is chairman of the Advisory Council of the Center for Social and Economic Research (CASE), Warsaw, and of the Scientific Council of the Bank of Finland Institute for Economies in Transition (BOFIT).

Increasingly in scholarly descriptions of state responses to power ascendancy, the classic distinction between “balancing” and “bandwagoning” has been superseded by the less dichotomous term “hedging” as a name for what is really going on. Few, however, have tried to clarify what distinguishes hedging from other strategies, what causes weaker states to hedge, and why they hedge in different ways.

Prof. Kuik will focus on Southeast Asian states’ responses to China.  Hedging occurs, he will argue, when one country pursues contradictory policies toward two or more competing powers in order to prepare a fallback position should circumstances change.  Hedging is likely when two conditions are present:  when threats are neither immediate nor straightforward, and when sources of vital support are uncertain.  At the domestic level, hedging is often the most viable approach because its contradictory attributes allow ruling elites to optimize multiple policy tradeoffs and thereby to enhance their legitimacy at home.  The hedging behaviors of ruling elites are a function of their respective strategies of legitimation.  

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Speaker Bio

Tshering Tobgay is a Bhutanese politician who has been Prime Minister of Bhutan since 2013. He is also leader of the People’s Democratic Party and was Leader of the Opposition in the National Assembly from March 2008 to April 2013. Tobgay co-founded the People’s Democratic Party and was responsible for establishing the Party as Bhutan’s first registered political party. Prior to politics, Tobgay was a civil servant, beginning his career in 1991 with the Technical and Vocational Education Section under the Department of Education. In 1998 he established and headed the National Technical Training Authority and served as a director in the Ministry of Labour and Human Resources from 2003 to 2007.

Tobgay received a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering in 1990 and later received a master’s in public administration from Harvard University in 2004. He received his secondary schooling in India, at Dr. Graham’s Homes School in the city of Kalimpong, near Darjeeling, in the eastern Himalayas.

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Abstract:

Billions of citizens around the world are frustrated with their governments. Political leaders struggle to honour their promises and officials find it near impossible to translate ideas into action. The result? High taxes, but poor outcomes. Cynicism, not just with government, but with the political process. Why is this? How could this vicious spiral be reversed? Michael Barber’s ground-breaking book draws on his experience of working for and with government leaders the world over to present a blueprint for how to run a government, delivering much better results for citizens without excessive taxes. The first book to bring a global perspective to this issue, and using contemporary cases from every continent alongside classic examples from history, anecdote and hard evidence, Barber makes a compelling case for a new approach, arguing that, without massive improvements in delivery, trust in government, already low, will fall further putting democracy at risk.

Speaker Bio:

Sir Michael Barber

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Ernst Röhm (1887-1934) was an early member of the Nazi Party and Hitler’s closest friend.  As head of the Nazi SA (Sturmabteilung), Röhm was one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich, at least until his execution during the “Night of Long Knives” in the summer of 1934.  Röhm was also openly homosexual.   This talk considers Röhm’s rise, the disclosure of his homosexuality in 1931 in two widely-publicized trials (for violation of the anti-sodomy statute), his role in the consolidation of Nazi control, and his downfall.  The talk also considers how Hans Blüher’s theory of the Männerbund (male association) might help analyze not only Röhm and the Nazis but also contribute more broadly to the historical sociology of nationalist revolution.

Co-sponsored by the Department of History, The Europe Center and the Department of German Studies.

Abstract

A peculiar construction boom is in progress worldwide: border walls are being installed at an unprecedented rate in order to control unwanted immigration by poor people into wealthy countries. This paper asks why, almost a quarter of a century after the Iron Curtain came down, the walls are now going up again. It provides a provocative answer: I suggest that these separation barriers are a logical response of states to the way in which human rights law has been enforced in cases bearing on immigration. In other words, and counter-intuitively, the recent boom in border wall construction signals the success of the human rights tradition, rather than its failure to establish an alternative to territorial sovereignty.

Next, I use the case study of walls to make a larger point on the intractability of the human rights regime that bears on immigration. Building on a systematic analysis of jurisprudence, the paper argues that human rights courts and quasi-judicial bodies utilize an arbitrary category – territory – to balance the policy interests of the individual non-national and the state. The result is essentially random from the perspective of both these stake holders. Walls make concrete a perverse side effect of this compromise: because the regime conflates access with territory, it disproportionately rewards strong young men who already have sufficient capacity (in age, gender, or resources) to scale the barrier, even if their predicament may not actually call for protection. But it privileges them only after they have risked themselves, and if they survive that risk. And so, at least when it comes to immigration, the human rights regime operates in effect as a natural selection mechanism. This is fundamentally unstable and unjust.

Speaker Bio

Moria Paz focuses her scholarship on the intersection of minorities, immigrants, international law, and human rights. Paz is a visiting scholar at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a Fellow at Stanford Law School. Before joining FSI, she was a Law and International Security Fellow at CISAC, a Lecturer in Law and Teaching Fellow of the Stanford Program for International Legal Studies (SPILS) at Stanford Law School. Paz received her S.J.D. doctoral degree from Harvard Law School. While at Harvard, she was awarded a number of fellowships, including at the Hauser Center for Non-Profit Organizations, The European Law Research Center, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Before Harvard, she attended The University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and Beijing Normal University.

She is currently working on two books, Network or State? International Law and The History of Jewish Self-Determination (under contract, Oxford University Press) and The Law of Strangers – Critical Perspectives on Jewish Lawyering and International Legal Thought (co-edited with James Loeffler). In 2007 she was awarded the Laylin Prize for most outstanding paper in international law awarded by Harvard Law School. In 2013 she was selected by the American Society of International Law (ASIL) for the New Voices Panel at the Society’s Annual Meeting. In 2014 was a winner of the Law & Humanities Junior Scholar Interdisciplinary Writing Competition. Her papers appear in multiple journals, including the Harvard International Law Journal and the European Journal of International Law.

 

Abstract: Chevaline was the codename given to a highly-secret program begun in 1970 to improve the performance of the UK's force of Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missiles in order to give them the capability to overcome Soviet ABM defenses deployed around Moscow. After much technical difficulty, delays in project timescale and cost escalation the new system was finally introduced in 1982, but it had already attracted major criticism for the expenditure involved, claims of project mismanagement, the rationale that underpinned its development, and its concealment from proper parliamentary scrutiny. This lecture will explore the background to the program, why it ran into so many problems, and how it became one of the most controversial episodes in post-war British defense policy. An understanding of the problems confronted by the attempt to improve Polaris illuminates a number of key themes and issues that are of relevance to policymakers concerned with strategic weapons programs and project management.

About the Speaker: Matthew Jones’ current research focuses on British nuclear history during the Cold War. He has also written on many different aspects of US and British foreign and defense policy in the 20th century, and has a long-standing interest in empire and decolonization in South East Asia. Jones’ first book, Britain, the United States and the Mediterranean War, 1942-44 (Macmillan, 1996), examined strains in the Anglo-American relationship by strategic issues and command problems in the Mediterranean theater. His book, Conflict and Confrontation in South East Asia, 1961-1965: Britain, the United States, Indonesia, and the Creation of Malaysia (Cambridge University Press, 2002), looks at the federation of Malaysia during British decolonization in the early 1960s. After Hiroshima: The United States, Race, and Nuclear Weapons in Asia, 1945-1965 (Cambridge University Press, 2010) addresses US nuclear policies in Asia in the period of the Korean War, confrontation with China, and early engagement in Vietnam. His current project on UK nuclear policy encompasses the development of nuclear strategy within NATO, the Anglo-American nuclear relationship, and European responses to strategic arms control. In 2008, Jones was appointed by the Prime Minister to become the Cabinet Office official historian of the UK strategic nuclear deterrent and the Chevaline program, a commission that will lead to the publication of a two-volume official history exploring British nuclear policy between 1945 and 1982. Jones’s journal articles have appeared in Diplomatic History, Historical Journal, Journal of Cold War Studies, and English Historical Review. He gained his DPhil in Modern History at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, in 1992.