Stanford University

Ukraine's Unnamed War: 2014-2022 | Jesse Driscoll

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About the Event: Naming the Russo-Ukraine War has been controversial since 2014.  Why did Russian diplomats deploy the term “civil war” as a preferred descriptor until 2022 — and why did Ukrainians insist that the phrase be taboo?  We assess four complementary logics for the use of the “civil war” descriptor by Russian diplomats before Russia’s full-scale invasion of 2022.  First, calling the war “civil” implies military non-involvement by Russia.  Second, explanations putting causal weight on Ukrainian domestic variables allow Russia to blame the violence on Western intervention (e.g., the CIA coup, color revolutions, NATO expansion, etc.) or well-rehearsed tropes about Ukraine’s unfitness as a state (e.g., a “fascist coup,” east-west cleavages in the pre-2014 Ukrainian state, stereotypes of Ukraine as a corrupt/“weak”/non-democratic polity, etc.).  Third, the narrative accesses legal precedents, especially Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and self determination as justifications authorizing Russia’s use of force. Fourth, favored internationalist mechanisms developed for settling civil wars privilege the United Nations Security Council, the OSCE, and other consensus forums, thus redirecting energy to forums where Russians enjoy a veto.  This not only functionally de-linked Crimea (“peaceful self-determination”) from the war in the Donbas (“violent and tragic, requiring costly/sustained collective action…”), but also reified Russia as a great power with UNSC veto.

About the Speaker: Jesse Driscoll is Associate Professor of Political Science and the Faculty Chair of the Global Leadership Institute at the School of Global Policy and Strategy, University of California San Diego. He is the author of Warlords and Coalition Politics in Post-Soviet States (Cambridge, 2015), Doing Global Fieldwork (Columbia, 2021), and Ukraine’s Unnamed War: Before The Russian Invasion of 2022 (Cambridge, 2023, with Dominique Arel).  He received his PhD in Political Science from Stanford University in 2009.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

William J. Perry Conference Room

Jesse Driscoll
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The 1969 Nuclear Crisis: Confusion, Contingency, and China | David Logan and Joseph Torigian

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About the Event: What are the political effects of nuclear weapons? What are the dynamics of territorial disputes and militarized crises between nuclear-armed states? As China continues with its unprecedented nuclear modernization program and U.S.-Russian nuclear arms control agreements are cast aside, these questions have taken on new urgency. We address these questions through a detailed reexamination of the 1969 border crisis between China and the Soviet Union. This crisis is a crucial case for both Cold War history and international relations theory. However, until recently, much of the evidence on this incidence remained either unused or inaccessible. Using hundreds of newly available and previously unused archival and primary sources from Albania, China, France, India, Italy, Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United States, and elsewhere, we shed light on new and important dynamics in the crisis including the role of psychological factors in interstate bargaining, elite politics in authoritarian states, and the impact of the strategic nuclear balance. The work has important implications for our understanding of the history of the Cold War, crisis escalation dynamics, state signaling and perception, and the political effects of nuclear weapons.
 
About the Speakers:

David Logan is Assistant Professor of Security Studies at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. He researches nuclear weapons, arms control, deterrence, and U.S.-China relations. He has conducted research for the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs at National Defense University, and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. He has published in International Security, Journal of Strategic Studies, Georgetown University Press, National Defense University Press, Foreign Affairs, and Los Angeles Times, among other venues. He holds a B.A. from Grinnell College and an M.P.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Princeton University.

Joseph Torigian is an assistant professor at the School of International Service at American University in Washington, a global fellow in the History and Public Policy Program at the Wilson Center, and a Center associate of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. His book Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao was published in 2022 by Yale University Press, and he has a forthcoming biography on Xi Jinping’s father with Stanford University Press. He studies Chinese and Russian politics and foreign policy.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

William J. Perry Conference Room

David Logan
Joseph Torigian
Seminars
Research Seminar Series
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Japan Fellowships Information Session

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Event Flyer for JSPS Fellowship Information Session on April 29, 2024, featuring a photograph of Japanese Cherry Blossoms



Join us for an information session and hear representatives of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) and Stanford Professor Kiyoteru Tsutsui, the director of the Japan Program at Shorenstein APARC, who will share information about their respective programs and student opportunities. This event will be hybrid and can be attended through Zoom.

JSPS is the largest funding agency for academic research in Japan. It offers fellowships for Ph.D. students, post-doctorate scholars, and faculty members in all fields of research.

The Japan Program at Stanford’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center cultivates multidisciplinary research and education on contemporary Japanese affairs. Shorenstein APARC also provides opportunities for undergraduate students through post-doctorate scholars to pursue studies in the field of contemporary Asia.
 

Questions?

Contact Kana Igarashi Limpanukorn

Philippines Conference Room
Encina Hall, Third Floor, Central, C330
616 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305

Also available to attend Online via Zoom Webinar

Kiyoteru Tsutsui

Shorenstein APARC
Encina Hall
616 Jane Stanford way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 723-2408
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Professor of Sociology
Henri H. and Tomoye Takahashi Professor and Senior Fellow in Japanese Studies at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
Kiyo Tsutsui1_0.jpg PhD

Kiyoteru Tsutsui is the Henri H. and Tomoye Takahashi Professor and Senior Fellow in Japanese Studies at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), the director of APARC and of the Japan Program at APARC, co-director of the Southeast Asia Program at APARC, executive director of the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies, co-director of the Center for Human Rights and International Justice, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and professor of sociology, all at Stanford University.

Prior to his appointment at Stanford in July 2020, Tsutsui was professor of sociology, director of the Center for Japanese Studies, and director of the Donia Human Rights Center at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Tsutsui’s research interests lie in political/comparative sociology, social movements, globalization, human rights, and Japanese society. More specifically, he has conducted (1) cross-national quantitative analyses on how human rights ideas and instruments have expanded globally and impacted local politics and (2) qualitative case studies of the impact of global human rights on Japanese politics. His current projects examine (a) changing conceptions of nationhood and minority rights in national constitutions and in practice, (b) populism and the future of democracy, (c) experimental surveys on public understanding about human rights, (d) campus policies and practices around human rights, (e) global expansion of corporate social responsibility and its impact on corporate behavior, and (f) Japan’s public diplomacy and perceptions about Japan in the world.

His research on the globalization of human rights and its impact on local politics has appeared in American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Social Problems, Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and other social science journals. His book publications include Rights Make Might: Global Human Rights and Minority Social Movements in Japan (Oxford University Press 2018), and two co-edited volumes Corporate Social Responsibility in a Globalizing World (with Alwyn Lim, Cambridge University Press 2015) and The Courteous Power: Japan and Southeast Asia in the Indo-Pacific Era (with John Ciorciari, University of Michigan Press forthcoming). He has been a recipient of National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, National Science Foundation grants, the SSRC/CGP Abe Fellowship, Stanford Japan Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship, and other grants as well as awards from American Sociological Association sections on Global and Transnational Sociology (2010, 2013, 2019), Human Rights (2017, 2019), Asia and Asian America (2018, 2019), Collective Behavior and Social Movements (2018), and Political Sociology (2019). 

Tsutsui received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Kyoto University and earned an additional master’s degree and Ph.D. from Stanford’s sociology department in 2002.

Director, Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC)
Director, Japan Program at Shorenstein APARC
Co-Director, Southeast Asia Program at Shorenstein APARC
Executive Director, Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies
Co-Director, Center for Human Rights and International Justice
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State-Evading Solutions to Violence: Indigenous Political Autonomy and Organized Crime in Mexico

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Beatriz Magaloni seminar 2024

The monopoly of violence in the hands of the state is conceived as the principal vehicle to generate order. A problem with this vision is that parts of the state and its law enforcement apparatus might become extensions of criminality rather than solutions. We focus on indigenous rural Mexico, where the degree of infiltration of cartels puts them on par with very successful insurgencies. Our paper demonstrates that territorial political autonomy, which enables some indigenous communities to select their leaders through customary practices rather than the Western system of multi-party elections and to have a justice system and police independent from the state, is a strong institutional solution to protect civilians from cartels. Using various quasi-experimental methods, including difference-in-differences, propensity score matching, and geographic discontinuity, our results suggest that the effects of indigenous political autonomy on significantly reducing cartel take-over and violence are plausibly causal. Our results are robust when we contrast politically autonomous indigenous municipalities with non-autonomous indigenous municipalities that are equally endowed with ancestral governance practices and high levels of social capital.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Beatriz Magaloni is the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations, a Professor in the Department of Political Science, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and affiliated faculty at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, the Center for Global Ethnography, and the Stanford Center on Global Poverty and Development. 

Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006), won the Best Book Award from the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association and the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations. Her second book, Strategies of Vote Buying: Democracy, Clientelism, and Poverty Relief in Mexico (co-authored with Alberto Diaz Cayeros and Federico Estévez), studies the politics of poverty relief. Why clientelism is such a prevalent form of electoral exchange, how it distorts policies aimed at aiding the poor, and when it can be superseded by more democratic and accountable forms of electoral exchange are some of the central questions that the book addresses.

In 2010, she founded the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (POVGOV). There, she pursues a research agenda focused on violence, human rights, and poverty reduction. The mission of  POVGOV is to develop action-oriented research through the elaboration of scientific knowledge that is anchored on state-of-the-art methodologies, multidisciplinary work, and innovative on-the-ground research and training. The Lab regularly incorporates undergraduate, master's, Ph.D., and post-doctoral students to pilot and evaluate interventions to reduce violence, combat human rights abuses, and improve the accountability of law enforcement and justice systems.

Her work has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Latin American Research Review, Journal of Theoretical Politics, and other journals.

Prior to joining Stanford in 2001, Professor Magaloni was a visiting professor at UCLA and a professor of Political Science at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM). She earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from Duke University. She also holds a law degree from ITAM.

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

Hesham Sallam
Hesham Sallam

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

Beatriz Magaloni

Dept. of Political Science
Encina Hall, Room 436
Stanford University,
Stanford, CA

(650) 724-5949
0
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations
Professor of Political Science
beatriz_magaloni_2024.jpg MA, PhD

Beatriz Magaloni Magaloni is the Graham Stuart Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science. Magaloni is also a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, where she holds affiliations with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She is also a Stanford’s King Center for Global Development faculty affiliate. Magaloni has taught at Stanford University for over two decades.

She leads the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (Povgov). Founded by Magaloni in 2010, Povgov is one of Stanford University’s leading impact-driven knowledge production laboratories in the social sciences. Under her leadership, Povgov has innovated and advanced a host of cutting-edge research agendas to reduce violence and poverty and promote peace, security, and human rights.

Magaloni’s work has contributed to the study of authoritarian politics, poverty alleviation, indigenous governance, and, more recently, violence, crime, security institutions, and human rights. Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006) is widely recognized as a seminal study in the field of comparative politics. It received the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations, as well as the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section. Her second book The Politics of Poverty Relief: Strategies of Vote Buying and Social Policies in Mexico (with Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estevez) (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores how politics shapes poverty alleviation.

Magaloni’s work was published in leading journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Criminology & Public Policy, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, Latin American Research Review, and others.

Magaloni received wide international acclaim for identifying innovative solutions for salient societal problems through impact-driven research. In 2023, she was named winner of the world-renowned Stockholm Prize in Criminology, considered an equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of criminology. The award recognized her extensive research on crime, policing, and human rights in Mexico and Brazil. Magaloni’s research production in this area was also recognized by the American Political Science Association, which named her recipient of the 2021 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review, the leading journal in the discipline.

She received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University and holds a law degree from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.

Director, Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab
Co-director, Democracy Action Lab
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Maria Popova | REDS Seminar: Is Ukraine too corrupt to join the EU? Anticorruption reform, corruption perceptions, and measurement debates

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Maria Popova REDS seminar

Ukraine's EU accession depends greatly on success in tackling corruption. Since 2014, Ukraine has built an extensive anticorruption institutional architecture, which has produced significant policy outcomes, but perception indices still show Ukraine as trailing most other European countries. This article summarizes Ukraine’s post-Euromaidan anticorruption reforms in the context of similar reforms pursued by other post-Communist EU candidate states pre-accession. The article then examines Ukraine’s corruption perceptions’ indices trajectory in comparative terms and wades into the debate over whether different types of perception indices proxy well for corruption incidence. The comparative look suggests that Ukraine is better prepared for EU accession in terms of control of corruption than is widely assumed.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Maria Popova is an Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University and Scientific Director of the Jean Monnet Centre Montreal. She also serves as Editor of the Cambridge Elements Series on Politics and Society from Central Europe to Central Asia. Her work explores the rule of law and democracy in Eastern Europe. Her first book, Politicized Justice in Emerging Democracies, which won the American Association for Ukrainian Studies book prize in 2013, examines the weaponization of law to manipulate elections and control the media in Russia and Ukraine. Her recent articles have focused on judicial and anticorruption reform in post-Maidan Ukraine, the politics of anticorruption campaigns in Eastern Europe, conspiracies, and illiberalism. Her new book with Oxana Shevel on the roots of the Russo-Ukrainian war entitled Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States is now available from Polity Press.


REDS: RETHINKING EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT AND SECURITY


The REDS Seminar Series aims to deepen the research agenda on the new challenges facing Europe, especially on its eastern flank, and to build intellectual and institutional bridges across Stanford University, fostering interdisciplinary approaches to current global challenges.

REDS is organized by The Europe Center and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Learn more about REDS and view past seminars here.

 

CDDRL, TEC, Hoover, and CREEES logos
Kathryn Stoner
Kathryn Stoner

In-person: Reuben Hills Conference Room (Encina Hall, 2nd floor, 616 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford)

Virtual: Zoom (no registration required)

Maria Popova McGill University
Seminars

Climate Change and Political Behavior in the Global South

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Amanda Kennard and Brandon de la Cuesta seminar

How does climate volatility alter citizen demands, change voting behavior, and affect the long-term reputation of elected (and unelected) officials? Does this effect come primarily through the economic damages caused by climate volatility or through alternative channels? Are they persistent or transitory?

As climate volatility becomes more extreme, so too will its destabilizing impact on politics. Yet we know relatively little about its effects on voting behavior, particularly in the developing world, and even less about downstream effects on the reputation of candidates and political institutions. Exploring the mechanisms behind these effects is also difficult due to a lack of data with the spatial and temporal resolution necessary for credible subnational analysis.

Here, we provide some of the first large-scale evidence on climate volatility’s effect on several measures of political accountability by combining several sources of survey data with high-resolution meteorological and climatic data. We also utilize a novel source of subnational economic data generated by combining remote sensing data with a convolutional neural network to generate annual, high-resolution estimates of growth at the 1x1km level for all of Africa. This ML-generated measure is a considerable improvement over nightlights-based alternatives and permits credible mediation analysis linking negative political outcomes to climate volatility through reductions in economic growth. We supplement our focus on Africa with companion estimates from Latin America, exploiting variation in national-level institutions to examine whether they can explain the substantial effect heterogeneity we observe in our reduced-form results.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Amanda Kennard is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. She studies the politics of decarbonization and the impacts of climate change on political systems. She holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University, an M.S. from Georgetown University, and a B.A. from New York University.

Brandon de la Cuesta is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE), working primarily with Marshall Burke and other members of the Environmental Change and Human Outcomes (ECHO) lab to estimate the impact of climate change on various measures of political accountability. Brandon specializes in comparative political economy and causal inference with a strong regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Many of his current projects involve the use of remote sensing data and machine learning algorithms, particularly convolutional neural nets, to create global, high-resolution data that can be used for downstream inference tasks. A development economics application of this data was recently featured as the cover article in Nature.

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

Hesham Sallam
Hesham Sallam

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

Amanda Kennard
Brandon de la Cuesta
Seminars
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MARCH 19 | Psychological Defence: Sweden’s Defence Capability

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Mikael Tofvesson

Join the Cyber Policy Center on March 19th from Noon–1PM Pacific for a unique opportunity to meet with Mr. Mikael Tofvesson, Deputy Head of the Swedish Psychological Defence Agency (MPF), and Head of Operations, tasked to identify, analyze and counter malign information influence directed towards Sweden from foreign adversaries. The MPF began operations January 1 2022. From the agency’s inception, Sweden faced intensive disinformation campaigns, the invasion of Ukraine and its own national election later that same year. Given the current security situation in Europe and beyond, the many elections taking place globally, the rapid changes in the digital information environments as well as the war in Ukraine and Gaza, much is at stake. Mr. Tofvesson will explain the Swedish concept for psychological defence, present the threat situation to Sweden regarding foreign malign influence and share some lessons identified from the ongoing information war in Ukraine.

This event will take place in Encina Hall, Philippines Room (C330), 3rd Floor Central Wing. This is a change from our usual room.

About the Speaker

Mr. Mikael Tofvesson is Deputy Head of the Swedish Psychological Defence Agency (MPF), and Head of Operations. He was previously head of the Counter Information Influence Section at the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB) Mr. Tofvesson has been responsible for MSB activities to counter foreign interference since 2009, including as head of Global Monitoring and Analysis Section, where he also was responsible for the crisis management center with duty officers, operational analysis function and the international operations’ field security unit. He also headed three task forces to protect the national general elections in 2018, 2022 and the European Parliament election in 2019, against foreign malign information influence. Between 1989 and 2009, Mr. Tofvesson held various positions within the Swedish Military Intelligence and Security Directorate.

Nathaniel Persily

Philippines Room (C330), Encina Hall, 3rd Floor Central Wing.

Mikael Tofvesson
Seminars

Book Talk with Sebnem Gumuscu — Democracy or Authoritarianism: Islamist Governments in Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia

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Sebnem Gumuscu book talk

Why do some parties in power commit to democracy while others do not? Sebnem Gumuscu will explain why by relying on her extensive field research in Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia. Islamist parties rose to power in free and fair elections in all three countries, yet only in Tunisia remained committed to pluralism and liberal democratic norms. In Turkey and Egypt, in contrast, the AKP and the Muslim Brotherhood subverted democracy by committing to righteous majoritarianism. Gumuscu will explore the different trajectories of these Islamist parties and unpack the role of party factions in charting their democratic course.

This event is co-sponsored by CDDRL's Program on Turkey, the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy, and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Sebnem Gumuscu is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College. Her research interests include political Islam, dominant parties, democratization and democratic backsliding, and Middle Eastern and North African politics. Her articles appeared in journals such as Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Democracy, Government and Opposition, Third World Quarterly, South European Society and Politics, and Middle Eastern Studies.

Her first book, Democracy, Identity, and Foreign Policy in Turkey: Hegemony through Transformation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), co-authored with E. Fuat Keyman, examines Turkey's transformation under the Justice and Development Party since 2002 within the broader context of Turkish modernization.

Her new book, Democracy or Authoritarianism: Islamist Governments in Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia (Cambridge University Press) focuses on Islamist parties and their democratic commitments in power. Relying on extensive fieldwork in Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia, she unpacks intra-party dynamics to explain divergent trajectories of Islamist governments.

Encina Hall E008 (Garden Level, East)     
616 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305

Online via Zoom

Sebnem Gumuscu
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