Co-sponsored with The World House Project at the Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law

About the Event: Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ralph Bunche was once so famous he handed out the Best Picture award at the 1951 Oscars. In this talk, Kal Raustiala, author of The Absolutely Indispensable Man: Ralph Bunche, the United Nations, and the Fight to End Empire explores Bunche’s extraordinary life and career, from professor of political science at Howard to the OSS, State Department, and eventually the UN, his professional home for 25 years. Bunche was a world class mediator and arguably the father of modern peacekeeping. But he was also a Black man in the very white world of diplomacy, who during the Cold War stood at the center of the one of the world’s great historical revolutions: the postwar decolonization of much of Africa and Asia.

About the Speaker: Kal Raustiala is the Promise Institute Distinguished Professor of Comparative and International Law at UCLA Law School, Professor at the UCLA International Institute, and Director of the UCLA Ronald W. Burkle Center for International Relations. From 2012-2015 he served as UCLA’s Associate Vice Provost for International Studies and Faculty Director of the International Education Office.

Professor Raustiala's research focuses on international law, international relations, and intellectual property. His recent publications include “The Fight Against China’s Bribe Machine,” Foreign Affairs, October 2021 (with Nicolas Barile); “Faster Fashion: The Piracy Paradox and its Perils,” 39 Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, (Spring 2021)(with Christopher Sprigman); “NGOs in International Treatymaking,” in Duncan Hollis, ed, The Oxford Guide to Treaties, 2nd Edition (Oxford University Press, 2020); “ Hollywood is Running Out of Villains,” Foreign Affairs, August 2020; “Innovation in the Information Age: The United States, China, and the Struggle Over Intellectual Property in the 21st Century,” 58 Columbia Journal of Transnational Law (June 2020); and “The Second Digital Disruption: Streaming and the Dawn of Data-Driven Creativity,” NYU Law Review (2019, (with Christopher Sprigman). His books include Global Governance in a World of Change (Michael Barnett, Jon Pevehouse, and Kal Raustiala, eds, Cambridge University Press, 2021); Does the Constitution Follow the Flag? The Evolution of Territoriality in American Law (Oxford, 2009); and The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation (Oxford, 2012) (with Christopher Sprigman), which has been translated into Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. His biography of the late UN diplomat, civil rights advocate, and UCLA alum Ralph Bunche, The Absolutely Indispensable Man: Ralph Bunche, the United Nations, and the Fight to End Empire, will be published in late 2022 by Oxford University Press.

In 2016 Professor Raustiala was elected Vice President of the American Society of International Law. He has been a visiting professor at Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School, Princeton University, the University of Chicago Law School, Melbourne University in Australia, and Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 2016, he was the Yong Shook Lin Visiting Professor of Intellectual Property at the National University of Singapore. A graduate of Duke University, Professor Raustiala holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, San Diego.

Prior to coming to UCLA, Professor Raustiala was a research fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, a Peccei Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems, and an assistant professor of politics at Brandeis University. A life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Professor Raustiala has served on the editorial boards of International Organization and the American Journal of International Law and is a frequent media contributor whose writing has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New Republic, the New Yorker, Wired, Slate, the International Herald Tribune and Le Monde. Along with Catherine Amirfar of Debevoise & Plimpton, he is co-host of the American Society of International Law’s International Law Behind the Headlines podcast.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Over the past decade, illiberal demagogues around the world have launched ferocious assaults on democracy. Embracing high-dominance political styles and a forceful argot of national greatness, they hammer at their supposed superiority as commanders, protectors, and patriots. Bewildered left-liberals have often played to the type their tormentors assign them. Fretting over their own purported neglect of the folks’ kitchen-table concerns, they leave the guts and glory to opponents who grasp that elections are emotions-driven dominance competitions.

Consequently, in America, democracy’s survival now hangs on the illiberal party making colossal blunders on the eve of elections. But in the wake of Putin’s attack on Ukraine, a new cohort of liberals is emerging in Central and Eastern Europe. From Greens to right-center conservatives, they grasp the centrality of messaging, nationalism, chutzpah, and strength. They’re showing how to dominate rather than accommodate evil. What can American liberals learn from their tactics and ways?

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

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Steve Fish is a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Democracy from Scratch, Democracy Derailed in Russia, and Are Muslims Distinctive? and coauthor of The Handbook of National Legislatures. He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Comeback: Crushing Trump, Burying Putin, and Restoring Democracy’s Ascendance around the World.

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.

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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.

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

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Across Europe, social democratic (or more broadly center-left) parties are a shadow of their former selves.

Most treatments of the center-left's decline stress economic factors like globalization or the decline of manufacturing or social factors, like the decline of the traditional working class. While such factors are important, they alone cannot explain the center-left’s decline if only because such factors do not correlate well with the fortunes of center-left parties across either time or space. This talk will accordingly focus on the political causes of the center-left's decline, in particular its shift to the center on economic issues and the dilution of its class-based political appeals during the late 20th century. This transformation had a variety of unintended and detrimental consequences for center-left parties, played a significant role in the rise of the populist right, and contributed to reshaping the dynamics of western democracies more generally.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

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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.

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Every year, millions of low-income households around the world receive over $100 billion in anti-poverty aid. This research shows how psychologically savvy and culturally attuned narratives of anti-poverty policies can both improve recipients’ economic outcomes and build public support. This research suggests that status quo narratives of aid that are focused on recipients’ neediness and helplessness may paradoxically maintain cycles of stigma, prejudice and poverty. However, a series of experiments in East and West Africa demonstrate that these cycles can be interrupted when narratives represent aid as an opportunity for recipients to realize their agency and aspirations in culturally resonant ways. Lab and field experiments with low-income recipients of aid in East and West Africa demonstrate how such narrative-based interventions can enhance the cost-effectiveness of large-scale anti-poverty programs. Online experiments in the US show how such narratives can mitigate welfare-related prejudice and build support for policies like universal basic income.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

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

Increasingly, disinformation, a type of fake news with malicious or manipulative intentions, has become common in elections worldwide. However, a few survey-based studies have been conducted to understand how disinformation influences voter attitudes. We address this question in the case of the 2022 Philippine presidential election, where disinformation was rampant during the campaign. Allegedly, various types of disinformation contributed to the victory of Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. (hereafter BBM). In this project, we focused on the disinformation about BBM’s father, the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr. and conducted two survey-based studies. Study 1 examined the association between BBM support and belief in disinformation about Marcos Sr., and we found they were highly correlated. Study 2 tested the direction of causality by an experimental survey. Contrary to our expectations, those exposed to disinformation reduced support for BBM. At the same time, Study 2 showed that fact checks help correct respondents’ evaluation of disinformation. We conclude that although disinformation played a role in the 2022 presidential election, more research is needed to understand how exactly voter behavior and disinformation are related.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

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

Infrastructure development requires democracies to balance multiple, competing governance priorities. The representativeness of the decision-making process must be balanced against the benefits of impartial technical assessments by the civil service, and both must be balanced against the efficiency of infrastructure development and government actions. Using the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) as a case study, we will argue that California has become a “vetocracy” in which decisions in favor of collective action have become extremely difficult to arrive at. This presentation is based in part on CDDRL’s recent research on California governance, in collaboration with the California 100 Initiative. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

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Dr. Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation, and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004.

Dr. Fukuyama holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), Aarhus University (Denmark), and the Pardee Rand Graduate School. He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and at the Center for Global Development. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Governors of the Pardee Rand Graduate School, and the Volcker Alliance. He is a member of the American Political Science Association and the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.
 

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

While initial supply shortages delayed access to the COVID-19 vaccine for many low and middle income countries, most now have an abundance of doses. Yet only a quarter of African citizens have completed their COVID-19 vaccination primary series. Exploring effective modes of vaccine delivery is necessary to increase uptake. In collaboration with the Kenyan government, we conducted a field experiment to examine whether ease of access and requests from authority figures influence COVID-19 vaccination rates. By comparing rates between facility and community based vaccination activities, we are able to calculate the cost effectiveness of these policies, offering insights that are useful now and for future pandemics.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

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

The medieval church was a fundamental force in European state formation.

Existing accounts focus on early modern warfare or contracts between the rulers and the ruled. Yet the Catholic church both competed with medieval monarchs and provided critical templates for governing institutions, the rule of law, and parliaments. The Catholic Church was the most powerful, wealthiest, and best-organized political actor in the Middle Ages. Starting in the 11th century, the papacy fought for the autonomy of the church, challenging European rulers and then claiming authority over people, territory, and monarchs alike. Conflicts with the papacy fragmented territorial authority in Europe for centuries to come, propagating urban autonomy and ideas of sovereignty. Thanks to its organizational advantages and human capital, the church also developed the institutional precedents adopted by rulers across Europe—from chanceries and taxation to courts and councils. Church innovations made possible both the rule of law and parliamentary representation.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

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Anna Grzymala-Busse is a professor in the Department of Political Science, the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the director of The Europe Center. Her research interests include political parties, state development and transformation, informal political institutions, religion and politics, and post-communist politics.

This seminar is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

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

Our empirical and theoretical focus is on what constitutes political equality as "equal consideration" in advanced capitalist democracies. We claim that political inequality is a distinctive type of inequality. First, although affected by the factors that routinely go into thinking about social, economic and power inequality, it cannot be reduced to those factors. Second, its currency is performative, not only distributive. To make our case, we focus on three broad dimensions of political equality: participation, representation, and responsiveness. Although there is some research on each of these dimensions, influential commentators on political equality have tended to focus almost exclusively on political participation. We develop concepts and measurement for all three and then weigh the trade-offs among these dimensions.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

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She earned her BA from Bryn Mawr College in 1968 and her PhD from Harvard University in 1974, the year she joined the faculty of the University of Washington. Levi is the author or coauthor of numerous articles and seven books, including Of Rule and Revenue; Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism; Analytic Narratives; Cooperation Without Trust?; In the Interest of Others; and A Moral Political Economy.

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