David Skarbek is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London and an Associate Member of the Extra-Legal Governance Institute at the University of Oxford. He serves on the editorial board of Global Crime. His research examines how people define and enforce property rights and engage in trade in the absence of strong, effective governments.

In societies with continuous in-and-out migration in relatively short periods the formation of dominant culture comes into shape as "popular". Continental theories for defining people's culture mostly assume some permanent structures (cultural preferences of elites or classes) in modern societies, yet not so successful for explaining the rise of popular cultures in societies like the USA. Turkey, as a country of migratory waves from its birth, is a pristine example of such a process and unique for its elites' interventions into the cultural sphere. The talk is broadly concerns with three dynamics on the formation of Turkish popular culture - demographic transition, elitist cultural policies, and partly oppositional character of people's taste.

Orhan Tekelioğlu is Chair of Department of New Media at Bahçeşehir University (Istanbul, Turkey) and Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennyslvania’s Annenberg School of Communication.  He is a scholar of cultural sociology including such research fields as media consumption, the history of Turkish popular music, the sociological features of Turkish literature, and the cultural politics of the Republican period. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the Middle Eastern Technical University (Ankara, Turkey) and his Magisterartium degree in Sociology from the University of Oslo. He taughted in Departments of Political Science and Turkish Literature at the Bilkent University in Ankara, in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University, and acted as Acting Dean of the Faculty of Communication at the Izmir University of Economics. Dr. Tekelioğlu conducts field studies on popular television dramas and reality shows, and history of jazz and popular music in Istanbul. He has published articles in Turkish and in English and submitted papers to numerous national and international congresses. Among his publications are Pop Ekran [Pop Screen, 2013], Pop Yazılar, [Pop Essays, 2006], Foucault Sosyolojisi [Sociology of Foucault, 2003], Şerif Mardin’e Armağan, [A Festschrift for Şerif Mardin, 2005), "Modernizing reforms and Turkish music in the 1930s"  (Turkish Studies, 2001), and “Two Incompatible Positions in the Challenge Against the Individual Subject of Modernity” (Theory& Psychology, 1997).

Co-sponsored by the Mediterranean Studies Forum, Program on Urban Studies, the Europe Center, and Turkish Students Association

About the topic: When in late 2009, President Obama ordered the surge of an additional 30,000 troops into Afghanistan to reverse Taliban momentum, major tenets of the U.S. military counterinsurgency doctrine shaped the resulting campaign plan.  Adages such as "protect the population" and "clear, hold, and build" served to guide civil-military actions.  With the hindsight of four years, however, it seems clear that some of the important assumptions upon which the plan was premised were significantly flawed.  Karl Eikenberry, who served in both senior diplomatic and military posts in Afghanistan, will examine the logic of counterinsurgency doctrine as it was applied during the surge and discuss its strengths and shortcomings.

About the speaker: Karl Eikenberry served as the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan from May 2009 until July 2011, where he led the civilian surge directed by President Obama to reverse insurgent momentum and set the conditions for transition to full Afghan sovereignty. Before appointment as Chief of Mission in Kabul, Ambassador Eikenberry had a thirty-five year career in the United States Army, retiring in April 2009 with the rank of Lieutenant General.  He has served in various policy and political-military positions, including Deputy Chairman of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Military Committee in Brussels, Belgium; Director for Strategic Planning and Policy for U.S. Pacific Command at Camp Smith, Hawaii; U.S. Security Coordinator and Chief of the Office of Military Cooperation in Kabul, Afghanistan; Assistant Army and later Defense Attaché at the United States Embassy in Beijing, China; Senior Country Director for China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mongolia in the Office of the Secretary of Defense; and Deputy Director for Strategy, Plans, and Policy on the Army Staff. 

Co-sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies

The Caodai religion is unique.  Born in French Indochina in 1926, it mixes Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism with organizational elements from the Catholic Vatican and French spirit-writing practices.  It is a masculine monotheism that worships Cao Dai (the Jade Emperor) as the head of an elaborate pantheon of “spiritual advisors” who include, alongside Asian sages, Jesus, Victor Hugo, Vladimir Lenin, and Jeanne d’Arc.  The religion emerged in tandem with the Vietnamese struggle for independence as a form of “cultural nationalism” expressed as spiritual revival.  Described as both conservative and revolutionary, nostalgic and futuristic, it has been called an “outrageous form of syncretism”—an excessive, even transgressive blending of piety with blasphemy, obeisance with rebellion, the old with the new.   It counts some four million followers worldwide and has grown rapidly in the US, with dozens of temples in California.  Using the case of Caodaism, Prof. Hoskins will explore the controversial concept of “syncretism” and its application to Asian religions.

Janet Hoskins is a professor of anthropology and religion at the University of Southern California.  Her books include Fragments from Forests and Libraries (2001); A Space Between Oneself and Oneself: Anthropology as a Search for the Subject (1999); Biographical Objects: How Things Tells the Stories of People’s Lives (1998); and Headhunting and the Social Imagination in Southeast Asia (contributing ed., 1996).  The Association for Asian Studies awarded its Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies to The Play of Time: Kodi Perspectives on History, Calendars and Exchange (1993).  She has also written and produced three ethnographic documentaries, including “The Left Eye of God: Caodaism Travels from Vietnam to California” (2008).

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The Left Eye of God: Caodaism Travels from Vietnam to California

Abstract:

The levels of violence in Mexico have dramatically increased in the last few years due to structural changes in the drug trafficking business. The increase in the number of drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) fighting over the control of territory and trafficking routes has resulted in a substantial increase in the rates of homicides and other crimes. This study evaluates the economic costs of drug-related violence. We propose electricity consumption as an indicator of the level of municipal economic activity and use two different empirical strategies to test this. To estimate the marginal effect of violence in the rate of homicides (per 100,000 inhabitants) we use an instrumental variable regression created by Mejía, Castillo and Restrepo (2012). For the average municipality, the marginal negative effect of the increase in homicides rates is substantive for earned income and the proportion of business owners, but not for energy consumption. Although negative and statistically significant, the effects are mild for labor participation. We also employ the methodology of synthetic controls to evaluate the effect that inter-narco wars have on local economies. The analysis indicates that the drug wars in those municipalities that saw dramatic increases in violence between 2006 and 2010 significantly reduced their energy consumption in the years after the change occurred, which is interpreted as a significant reduction in GDP per capita for these municipalities.

Speaker Bio:

Gabriela Calderon holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University. Her research interests include policies that affect gender differences in developing countries, policy evaluation, violence in Latin America and the effect of institutions and governance on the provision of public goods and health/education outcomes. She did her master's degree in economic theory and bachelor's degree in economics at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México. Currently, in the Program on Poverty and Governance, her research analyzes the way institutions and democracy affect the provision of public goods, and the impact they have on health outcomes like infant mortality trends. She is also studying the effects of government interventions that combat drug-trafficking organizations over violence in Mexico.

Her research has focused on the topics of development, public finance, and the evaluation of public policy programs in Mexico. For example, during the summers of 2009/2010, she conducted a field experiment in Zacatecas, Mexico with Giacomo de Giorgi, an assistant professor from Stanford University, and Jesse Cuhna, a former Stanford student. The main task was to evaluate the impact of financial literacy classes on underprivileged women entrepreneurs in the region. To successfully complete an evaluation in an untreated region, they proposed collaborating with the Mexican NGO CREA on a joint project. They contacted local interviewers, trained them, and identified all women entrepreneurs in the 17 communities, in which we conducted the experiment. Preliminary results suggest that the female entrepreneurs who were randomly assigned to treatment earned higher profits, had larger revenues, and served a greater number of clients. They also found that they were more likely to implement formal accounting techniques.

She has also studied programs that are not randomly assigned as an experiment. For example, she has analyzed the effects of a national policy in Mexico of child care services, called Estancias Infantiles para apoyar a Madres Trabajadoras (EI), using administrative, census and household data. Her empirical research strategy identifies the effects of the program on both the men and women who were eligible for the program. She used time, location and eligibility variation, and considered a major threat to identification of the actual effects: for example, a manufacturer who moves into a municipality at approximately the same time as the EI program and who happens to disproportionately demand the skills of women who were eligible to the program happened to have. To ensure that such scenarios do not affect her results, she chose not triple difference strategy, in which all ineligible people are treated as “controls” for the EI-eligible families. Instead, she employs Synthetic Control Methods, using the same methodology as Abadie and Gardeazabal (2003) and Abadie, Diamond and Hainmueller (2010) to ensure that her control group has the same mix of skills and preferences as the EI-eligible group. She adapted the Synthetic Control Method to analyze repeated cross-sectional household data, which are data that are typically available in developing countries