Communal violence remains an enduring experience across many multi-ethnic societies. In these diverse communities, small-scale clashes can quickly escalate into severe cycles of violence. While tensions within these communities are nearly ubiquitous, the outbreak of violence is not. What accounts for these pockets of peace within conflict zones? I argue that violent outbreaks depend on the efficacy of local leaders—and citizen responses—in dispute resolution, which are shaped by the strength of ties leaders possess both within (bonding capital) and across (bridging capital) communities.

To examine my core theoretical predictions, I conducted a randomized controlled trial and surveys with local leaders and citizens across 88 communities in Nigeria. I find that leaders with cross-group ties perceive outgroup leaders with more credibility, report more successful dispute resolution and, ultimately, fewer violent events. In addition, I find that the residents who live under more bridged leaders are more likely to comply with decisions and report improved security.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

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Catlan Reardon is the Einstein-Moos Postdoctoral Fellow at CDDRL at Stanford University. She received her PhD in Political Science in August 2022. Her research lies at the intersection of elite political behavior, violence, and the political economy of development, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Her book project explores how local leaders impact violence through examining their key roles as arbiters of local disputes, drawing primarily from field research in North-Central Nigeria. She is particularly interested in understanding the incentives behind local leader behavior within local conflict resolution and how this influences the extent to which small-scale clashes escalate into larger spirals of violence. She also has several projects examining the effect of top-down and bottom-up peacebuilding interventions on violence and social cohesion. She has conducted field work in India, Uganda, Kenya, and Nigeria.


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Protest has been a key method of political claim-making in Jordan from the late Ottoman period to the present day. More than moments of rupture within normal-time politics, protests have been central to challenging state power, as well as reproducing it—and the spatial dynamics of protests play a central role in the construction of both state and society.

In her new book, Jillian Schwedler considers how space and geography influence protests and repression and, in challenging conventional narratives of Hashemite state-making, offers the first in-depth study of rebellion in Jordan. Based on twenty-five years of field research, Schwedler examines protests as they are situated in the built environment, bringing together considerations of networks, spatial imaginaries, space and place-making, and political geographies at local, national, regional, and global scales. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

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Dr. Jillian Schwedler is Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York’s Hunter College and the Graduate Center and Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Crown Center for the Middle East at Brandeis University. Her books include the award-winning Faith in Moderation: Islamist Parties in Jordan and Yemen (2006) and (with Laleh Khalili) Policing and Prisons in the Middle East (2010). Her articles have appeared in numerous journals, including World Politics, Comparative Politics, Contention, and Social Movement Studies. Her newest book, Protesting Jordan: Geographies of Power and Dissent, was published by Stanford University Press in April 2022.

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

In many Muslim societies, autocrats expand their distributive policies in the religious season of Ramadan. Why do autocrats distribute in Ramadan? And, who do they target?

Focusing on Egypt (2014-2020), this paper argues that the regime distributes in Ramadan to contain political threats to its survival by co-opting areas where such threats are more credible. This strategy addresses rising political pressures during the season while signaling the regime's competency and goodness by capitalizing on the month's religious norms. I test this argument using an original municipality-level dataset of government-reported provision of economic benefits.

The findings show that the government reports more economic distribution in places where political threats are higher: more socioeconomically developed, more contentious, and more affected by unpopular austerity measures. Using survey data, I also find that distribution in Ramadan translates into reputational gains for the regime, particularly among its critics. The conclusions suggest that autocrats might adopt multiple targeting strategies to respond to different threats to their survival, sometimes rewarding threatening groups to buy their acquiescence. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

 

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Ahmed Ezzeldin Mohamed is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law (CDDRL). He holds a Ph.D. (with distinction) in Political Science from Columbia University. He was a research fellow at the Middle East Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School in the academic year (2021-2022). He is a junior fellow of the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS).

Mohamed’s research focuses on the role of religion in political and economic development, with a special focus on the Middle East and the Muslim World. He utilizes a diverse set of tools for data collection and rigorous analysis. His work received several awards, including APSA 2022 Weber Best Conference Paper Award and MPSA 2019 Kellogg/Notre Dame Award for Best Paper in Comparative Politics. 

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What effect do gender quotas have on political responsiveness? We examine the effect of randomly imposed electoral quotas for women in Mumbai’s city council, using a wide variety of objective and subjective measures of constituency-level public service quality.

The perceived quality of local public goods is higher in constituencies with quota members, and citizen complaints are processed faster in areas with more quota members. One mechanism for this effect is differences in the focus of legislator effort. In their legislative participation, quota members focus on public goods distribution, while nonquota members focus on individual goods, member perks, and identity issues. We suggest that men’s more extensive engagement with extralegal and rhetorical forms of political action has led to men and women cultivating different styles of political representation.
 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
 

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Varun Karekurve-Ramachandra is a political scientist broadly interested in empirical political economy. His research focuses on the judiciary, women in politics, political institutions, and bureaucracies. His work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in the American Journal of Political Science and The Quarterly Journal of Political Science.

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