This talk will be based on Lankina's 2022 award-winning book, The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia. She will discuss how tsarist social divides and the institution of sosloviye (estate) shaped social structure during communism and why the social longue durée matters for understanding post-Communist political regime trajectories.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Tomila Lankina is professor of International Relations at the IR Department of the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has worked on democracy and authoritarianism, mass protests and historical drivers of human capital and political regime change in Russia and other countries; she has also analyzed the propaganda and disinformation campaigns in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and aggression in Ukraine. Her latest research is on social structure and inequality. Her book, The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia: From Imperial Bourgeoisie to Post-Communist Middle Class (Cambridge University Press 2022), won the 2023 J. David Greenstone Prize for the best book in the Politics and History section of the American Political Science Association and the 2023 Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eurasia, or Eastern Europe in anthropology, political science, sociology, or geography in the previous calendar year. The book also received “Honorable Mention” for the Sartori Book Award of the American Political Science Association Organized Section for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Encina E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

How do regimes instrumentalize ascriptive identity to maintain political power? In this paper, I document, analyze, and seek to explain patterns of elite continuity in Kuwait. To do this, I establish the pre-oil wealth and "rootedness" of Kuwaiti families and connect this status to post-oil measures of social prestige. Next, I analyze survey data from 13,000 respondents from across the region to show that local "rootedness" positively impacts the ability of Arab Gulf nationals to obtain services from their governments. Taken together, my evidence suggests that ascriptive identity associated with one's historical family lineage impacts economic, political, and social outcomes for citizens in ways that maintain historical rank hierarchies.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Lisa Blaydes is Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. She is the author of Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak's Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and State of Repression: Iraq under Saddam Hussein (Princeton University Press, 2018).

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Encina E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

What drives Russia's violence in and against Ukraine from the 19th century to 2024?

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is the single most important event in Europe since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It is also arguably the major global geopolitical development since 9/11. My main argument is that violence and repression are deeply rooted in the history of Russo-Ukrainian relations. Since the mid-19th century, dominating Ukraine and denying Ukrainians an independent identity, let alone a state, has been the cornerstone of Imperial, Soviet and eventually, post-Soviet Russian policies.

More specifically, I show that Russian and Soviet policies were driven by two factors: identity and security. The idea of the shared origin and fraternity of Russians and Ukrainians is a staple of Russian self-perception and historiography. The second key factor is security. Western powers often passed through Ukraine to attack Russia; Ukraine’s fertile soil was crucial to feeding and funding the Russian and Soviet Empires. Even more than geopolitics, it was regime stability that drove Moscow and St. Petersburg’s obsessive focus on Ukraine. Nothing scares a Russian autocrat more than a democratic Ukraine, because if Ukrainians can build a democracy, then the supposedly fraternal Russian people might too. Thus, combined, identity, security, and the interaction between the two drive Russia’s policies towards Ukraine since the 19th century.

Eugene Finkel is the Kenneth H. Keller Associate Professor of International Affairs, School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on how institutions and individuals respond to extreme situations: mass violence, state collapse, and rapid change.

Finkel's most recent book is Intent to Destroy: Russia's Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine (Basic Books, 2024). He is also the author of Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust (Princeton University Press, 2017), Reform and Rebellion in Weak States (Cambridge University Press, 2020, co-authored with Scott Gehlbach) and Bread and Autocracy: Food, Politics and Security in Putin’s Russia (Oxford University Press, 2023, co-authored with Janetta Azarieva and Yitzhak M. Brudny). His articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, East European Politics and Societies, Slavic Review, and several other journals and edited volumes. Finkel has also published articles and op-eds in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, The Spectator and other outlets.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by April 11, 2024.

How do parliamentary norms break down?

How does the presence of extremist parties in parliaments modify parliamentary norms? In this talk, I draw on two recent papers to examine the responses of mainstream politicians to the disruptive strategies of extremist legislators. A first study will examine the dynamics of parliamentary erosion during the Weimar parliament. Using a novel dataset of all calls-to-order, I document the existence of a cycle of provocation-counter provocation that led to the erosion of parliamentary norms in the last years of the Weimar Republic. 

A second paper (co-authored with Qixuan Yang) studies informal interactions in the contemporary German Bundestag during the period between 2017 and 2021. Using a novel dataset of over 25,000 parliamentary speeches, we document a significant erosion of parliamentary norms, as measured by an increase in the number of verbal and nonverbal interruptions. Both legislators from mainstream and extremist parties contribute to this erosion of parliamentary norms. We argue that legislators from mainstream parties use informal attacks on legislators from non-proximate extremist parties to appeal to voters on their extremes and signal a more extreme policy position. We show that the incentives of legislators from mainstream parties to engage in these informal attacks on extremist legislators can be explained by partisan and district-level conditions.

Isabela Mares is the Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science at Yale University. She specializes in the comparative politics of Europe. Professor Mares has written extensively on labor market and social policy reforms, the political economy of taxation, electoral clientelism, reforms limiting electoral corruption. Her current research examines the political responses to antiparliamentarism in both contemporary and historical settings.

Professor Mares is the author of five books. These include The Politics of Social Risk: Business and Welfare State Development (New York: Cambridge University Press 2003), Taxation, Wage Bargaining and Unemployment (New York: Cambridge University Press 2006), From Open Secrets to Secret Voting (New York: Cambridge University Press 2015), Conditionality and Coercion: Electoral clientelism in Eastern Europe (co-authored with Lauren Young, Oxford University Press 2018) and Protecting the Ballot: How First Wave Democracies Ended Electoral Corruption (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2022)."

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by May 16, 2024.

Why are far-right movements on the rise virtually everywhere in Europe? Which implications could this have for US interests overseas?

Capitalizing on various forms of societal distress, far-right groups have been on the rise in virtually every European country. But why is Europe witnessing such a resurgence? How are these Neo-Fascist, Neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups organized? What are their main narratives and how may these impact US interests in the region? Which courses of action should Washington and its continental allies undertake to counter the phenomenon in question?

Michele Groppi is lecturer in Defense Studies at the Defense Academy of the UK, where he coordinates the Policy and Strategy Module. Member of the Institute of Directors, Michele is the founder and president of ITSS Verona, an international association dedicated to the study of security. A former varsity athlete, Michele has a BA in IR from Stanford (Honors), an MA in Counter-terrorism and Homeland Security from the IDC, and a PhD in Defence Studies from King's College London. Specializing in terrorism, extremism, and radicalization, Michele has authored various peer-reviewed pieces and regularly appears on international media outlets.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by April 18, 2024.

Chewing gum is neither food nor medicine, but it was administered to American troops as a drug substitute during the two world wars of the 20th century. Journalists and marketing strategists at the time referred to chewing gum as "fuel for fighters,” and the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps classified it as "ammunition" on the supply list. Moreover, Army officials found that providing drinking water, especially on the front lines, was costly and time-consuming, and so chewing gum became a cheap and an effective thirst quencher -- and an indispensable item in the American soldier’s kit.

Without the Caste War (1847-1915) in southeastern Mexico, chewing gum would not have become a wartime supply or a mass-market product: The Maya of the Yucatan rainforest (or Cruzobs, as they were called) resisted the feudal laws of indentured servitude and retreated into the Yucatan rainforest to defy Hispanic landowners. There they extracted chicel from wild trees and smuggled this raw material for chewing gum across the border into Belize in exchange for ammunition. This allowed them to defend themselves for nearly 50 years.

Chicle was eventually mass-produced in the United States via Central America. Then, as American troops fanned out from Europe to Asia after World War I and World War II, they distributed chewing gum to civilian populations as a gesture of friendship, paving the way for Wrigley, today's global leader in chewing gum.

This research offers an innovative window into the complex global connections between chewing gum and war, linking fragmented local and national histories to a global picture.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) and partially funded by Stanford Global Studies’ Oceanic Imaginaries

Martina Kaller is a professor of global history with a background in Latin American studies and is currently a Visiting Scholar at FSI. She has researched in Mexico, Guatemala, the United States, and several European countries. As a guest professor, Kaller has taught at Stanford University (Austrian chair), Sorbonne, and Science Po, Paris. She served for two decades on the board of and later as head of an EU-funded international Master’s program in Global Studies and five years as the president of the permanent committee of the International Congress of Americanists (ICA). Her primary research focuses are on global food history and the History of Latin America 19/20th century. She has worked extensively on the history of international development with particular attention to Mexico and Central America (two books and 27 journal and book contributions). 

Kaller (Dr. Habil) is an Associate Professor of Modern History at the Department of of History at the University of Vienna. She has various ongoing research projects on global food history and the long-term impact of political and economic autonomy of indigenous people, comparing cases in Latin America, Europe, and Canada. Her books and book chapters have been published or are forthcoming at Palgrave McMillan, Routledge, Global South Press, Bloomsbury, et al.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by February 15, 2024.