War is often a driver of macro-institutional change (Tilly 1975), and it has been suggested that the peculiar, partial, and incremental development of the institutions of the European Union have been due to the absence of major inter-state war in Europe post-1945 (Kelemen and McNamara 2022). The return of inter-state warfare to Europe allows us to examine the effect that heightened military threat and territorial revisionism has European political development. Contrary to some expectations that Europe might achieve greater unity and integration in response to a revived Russian external threat, I find that the ongoing war is driving institutional retrenchment of Europe along national lines for three reasons. First, the war has privileged newer, post-enlargement member states, whose governments and polities do not share the elite anti-nationalist principles that have underpinned the European project since the end of WWII. Second, the emerging re-armament of European states has privileged national actors and national systems of military procurement, with incentives counter to deeper European integration of armed forces and military procurement. Military assistance for Ukraine has primarily been provided through US-coordinated bilateralism rather than European multilateralism or supranationalism. Finally, the war itself has increased the salience of national identity and the normative appeal of nationalism in ways that work against European institutions and will likely put limits on deeper European integration even in an environment of greater military threat. These preliminary findings suggest that, as with other macro-institutional processes (e.g. state-building), existential threat interacts with identity variables to produce institutional outcomes.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Keith Darden (Stanford class of ’92) is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics, Governance and Economics at the School of International Service at American University. His research focuses on nationalism, state-building, and the politics of Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia. His book manuscript, Resisting Occupation in Eurasia (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), explores the development of durable national loyalties through education and details how they explain over a century of regional patterns in voting, secession, and armed resistance in Ukraine, Europe, and Eurasia. His award-winning first book, Economic Liberalism and Its Rivals (Cambridge University Press, 2009) explored the formation of international economic institutions among the post-Soviet states, and explained why countries chose to join the Eurasian Customs Union, the WTO, or to eschew participation in any trade institutions. Prof. Darden is co-editor of the Cambridge University Press Book Series Problems of International Politics.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to William J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Andrew Johnson. Richard Nixon. Donald Trump. These three presidents were often compared on the basis of their character and confrontations with the Constitutional limitations of the presidency. Yet they also shared a different, less frequently explored, feature: they each followed racially transformative presidencies. Abraham Lincoln’s presidency guided the nation through the Civil War and ended decades of political stalemate over the slavery issue. Lyndon Johnson signed civil rights legislation that, similarly, marked the end of decades of impasse and reinvigorated the promise of multi-racial democracy in the United States. Barack Obama, as the nation’s first African American president, changed the symbolism associated with the presidency and challenged the implied whiteness of the office. This talk, based on a forthcoming book with Princeton, will examine how the dynamics of each of these presidencies unsettled political norms and long-term compromises, creating political opportunities for populist successors. Each of the impeachment crises — the Tenure of Office Act, Watergate, and both Trump impeachments — can be traced to the racial politics ignited by their predecessors.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Julia Azari is Professor of Political Science at Marquette University. An active public-facing scholar, she has published commentary on presidential and party politics in FiveThirtyEight, Politico, Vox, The New York Times, The Washington Post, MSNBC, and The Guardian. Her scholarly work has appeared in journals such as The Forum, Perspectives on Politics, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Foreign Affairs, and Social Science History. She has contributed invited chapters to books published by the University Press of Kansas, University of Pennsylvania Press, Cambridge University Press, and University of Edinburgh Press. Azari is the author of Delivering the People’s Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate (Cornell, 2014), coeditor of The Presidential Leadership Dilemma (SUNY, 2013), and co-editor of The Trump Legacy (under contract, University Press of Kansas).

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to William J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person.

The Troubling State of India’s Democracy brings together leading scholars from around the world to assess the conditions of India’s democracy across three important dimensions: politics, specifically the state of political parties and the party system; the state, including the condition of federalism and the health of various institutions; and society, including NGOs, ethnic and religious tensions, and control of the media. Even though elements of India’s democracy seem to function—like its commitment to elections—the contributors document a disturbing trajectory, one that not only threatens to undermine India’s own stability, but could also affect the global order.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Larry Diamond is William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. His research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy, and U.S. and international policies to advance democracy and counter authoritarian influence. He was the founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy and he remains a consultant to the National Endowment for Democracy. Among his books is Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency.

Dinsha Mistree is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he manages the Program on Strengthening US-Indian Relations. He is also a research fellow in the Rule of Law Program at Stanford Law School and an affiliated scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. Dr. Mistree studies the relationship between governance and economic growth in developing countries. His scholarship concentrates on the political economy of legal systems, public administration, and education policy, with a regional focus on India. He holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Politics from Princeton University, with an S.M. and an S.B. from MIT. He previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at CDDRL and was a visiting scholar at IIM-Ahmedabad.

Šumit Ganguly is a Senior Fellow and directs the Huntington Program on Strengthening US-India Relations at the Hoover Institution. He is also a Distinguished Professor and Tagore Chair Emeritus at Indiana University, Bloomington. His most recent publications are the Oxford Handbook of Indian Politics (co-edited with Eswaran Sridharan) and States and Their Nationals Abroad: Support, Co-Opt and Repress (co-edited with Klaus Brummer).

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Willliam J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person.

The conquest of the Americas produced a radical transformation of pre-colonial Empires and City States. Europeans established a new institution, the Encomienda, which “entrusted” indigenous communities to individual conquistadores, which resulted in the dismemberment and fragmentation of prior political authority. Using a simple model of temporal horizons and rent extraction, I explore demographic change and epidemic disease after the conquest of Mexico. Data is drawn from the legal and census records of Tepetlaoztoc, a polity within the Acolhua Kingdom, one of the three parts of the Aztec Empire. This rich dataset allows for the reconstruction of demographic change and the calculation of individual and household level epidemiological models. The analysis suggests that the dramatic demographic decline of the 16th century in Mexico, rather than an inevitable result of exposure to unknown pathogens or epidemic diseases beyond human control, was a consequence of colonial rent extraction and the loss of political autonomy and sovereignty.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Alberto Díaz-Cayeros joined the FSI faculty in 2013 after serving for five years as the director of the Center for US-Mexico Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He earned his Ph.D at Duke University in 1997. He was an assistant professor of political science at Stanford from 2001-2008, before which he served as an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Diaz-Cayeros has also served as a researcher at Centro de Investigacion Para el Desarrollo, A.C., in Mexico from 1997-1999. His work has focused on federalism, poverty, and violence in Latin America and Mexico in particular. He has published widely in Spanish and English. His book Federalism, Fiscal Authority and Centralization in Latin America was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007 (reprinted in 2016). His latest book (with Federico Estevez and Beatriz Magaloni) is The Political Logic of Poverty Relief Electoral Strategies and Social Policy in Mexico. His work has primarily focused on federalism, poverty and economic reform in Latin America, and Mexico in particular, with more recent work addressing crime and violence, youth-at-risk, and police professionalization.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Willliam J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Join the Cyber Policy Center on December 3rd from 1PM–2PM Pacific for Defending the Freedoms of the Internet (Because Someone Has To), a seminar with Jeff Jarvis, moderated by Nate Persily. Stanford affiliates are invited to join us at 12:40 PM for lunch, prior to the seminar.

About the Seminar

In his book, The Web We Weave: Why We Must Reclaim the Internet from Moguls, Misanthropes, and Moral Panics, journalist Jeff Jarvis asserts that the internet should be viewed as a human more than a technological enterprise — and as such, its failures are often ours to address. He examines various sins attributed to the internet, calling on research to question commonly held assumptions and accusations about hate, disinformation, addiction, and so-called surveillance capitalism. The book is a critique of media’s coverage of the internet and artificial intelligence. Jarvis, a journalist, places media’s current moral panic into context of moral panics past, over novels and nickelodeons, TV and videogames. He accuses his colleagues in news of not addressing their own conflicts of interest in covering what they see as the competitor threatening their existence. And he tries to remind readers of the privilege and fortune of living in this connected age, offering a thank-you note to the net. He examines various regulatory regimes for the internet and in the end, urges every affected constituency — technologist, corporation, government, media, and each of us — to enter into covenants of mutual obligation so we all may be held accountable for the internet and the future we build on it. 
 

About the Speaker

Jeff Jarvis, a journalist and journalism educator, is the author of six books, including The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and its Lessons for the Age of the Internet and Magazine, each published currently by Bloomsbury Academic. He is now writing a cultural history of the Linotype as a technology that opened the door to the long century of mass media. 

Jarvis is now a visiting professor at Stony Brook University’s School of Communication and Journalism and a distinguished fellow at the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University. At both, he is helping to develop new programs focused on technology and society. He is the emeritus Leonard Tow professor of journalism innovation at the City University of New York’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. There, he developed three new degree programs in engagement journalism, entrepreneurial journalism, and news innovation and leadership.

In his career in media, Jarvis was president and creative director of Advance.net, the online arm of Condé Nast and Advance Local; creator and founding editor of Entertainment Weekly at Time Inc.; Sunday editor and associate publisher of the New York Daily News; TV critic of TV Guide and People magazines; and a columnist and editor on the San Francisco Examiner and Chicago Tribune. He was also a media columnist on the Guardian.

Jarvis is cohost of the podcasts The Week in Google and AI Inside. 

Join the Cyber Policy Center November 19th, from 1 PM-2 PM, for AI and Elections, a discussion with panelists from Google, Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic. The discussion will be moderated by Nate Persily. Stanford affiliates are invited to join us at 12:40 PM for lunch, prior to the seminar. This session is in-person only and will not be recorded or live streamed.

About the Seminar

Many had predicted that the 2024 election would be the "AI Election."  Those predictions, both for the United States and for elections around the world, did not prove to be true.  In this seminar, Nate Persily will lead a discussion among representatives from the major AI companies regarding AI and elections.  Should we expect AI to play a greater role in elections going forward? How are companies thinking about the appropriate policies regarding the use of their tools in the context of elections?