Stanford University

An Address by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky

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Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine
The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) is honored to host the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, for an address on U.S.-Ukrainian relations. President Zelensky's visit to Stanford follows his August 31 meeting with United States President Joe Biden, and is the first visit to California by a Ukrainian president.

This event is publically available via Zoom. Please register in advance.

Register: https://bit.ly/3DdkPzL

Lectures

French Culture Workshop with Minayo Nasiali

Please join us for a workshop discussion of Dr. Minayo Nasiali's draft book chapter, "A Working Alias: African Sailors and Fungible Identities across France and Great Britain’s Maritime Empires (1920-1939).

 

The French Culture Workshop is co-sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, the DLCL Research Unit, the France-Stanford Center, and the Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute.

Register for a Zoom link

Lectures

The Challenges of Reimagining Policing: A Comparative Perspective

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This event will take place on Zoom. Registration is required: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_NzD-GVYjRY-vSxHkLmSzdQ

At a time when protests in the United States and around the world are bringing attention to systemic abuses committed by the police, many are asking important questions about what works in police reform. While significant scholarly attention has focused on how increases in police spending impact crime, far less attention has been paid to the efficacy of institutional reforms that reshape who joins the police, how police are trained, and rules and procedures that govern police-citizen relations. Drawing on comparative evidence from their own micro-level studies of police reform in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, Beatriz Magaloni and Jeremy Weinstein will explore the evidence base for prominent reforms now on the policy agenda including: community policing, external oversight, and the use of new technologies (e.g. body-worn cameras). Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, will offer welcome remarks.

Lectures

Where Do We Go From Here? King's Unanswered Question

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This event will be live streamed on Zoom. RSVP required: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_MKEESYy6SZWjqlQ5YuQC9w

Martin Luther King, Jr., is best known for his "I Have a Dream" speech, but if we look at his Nobel lecture and final works, it is clear that he is much more than a civil rights leader. In the lecture, he makes clear his global vision and addresses what he termed the "giant triplets of evil": racial injustice, poverty, and war. King perceives the ultimate challenge that we continue to face today: "We have inherited a large house, a great 'world house' in which we have to live together — black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Muslim and Hindu — a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace." As I try to help build King's "World House," I find myself returning to his unanswered question: where do we go from here?

Clayborne Carson is the founder of Stanford’s Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute and the Martin Luther King Jr. Centennial Professor of History at Stanford University.

Michael McFaul is the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in Political Science, Director and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, all at Stanford University.

Lectures

Regimes of Inequality: The Political Economy of Health and Wealth

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Inequality has become an intractable feature of the rich industrialized democracies, despite consensus among mass publics and experts that more social and economic equality is desirable. This book examines the political dynamics underlying the “new normal” of high and rising inequality since 1980. To do so, it traces the largely unsuccessful attempts of west European governments during this period to reduce socioeconomic inequalities in health. In England, France, and Finland, three quite different countries that span the range of European political economies, governments stated their intention to reduce inequalities in health — yet in all three cases, they were largely unable or unwilling to do what it would take to achieve this goal. Lynch finds that when center-left politicians take up the issue of socioeconomic inequalities in health, they do so in response to perceived taboos against redistribution, public spending and market regulation in a neoliberal era. Reframing inequality as a matter of health, rather than of the maldistribution of political or economic resources, is at best a partial solution, however: It reshapes the policy-making environment surrounding social inequality in ways that make it more difficult to reduce either socioeconomic inequality or health inequalities. Technocratic, medicalized inequality discourses result in shifting the Overton window around inequality away from tried-and-true policy remedies for inequality, and toward complex policy levers that are far more likely to fail. In short, inequality persists despite growing awareness of the harms it creates because of the way political leaders choose to talk about it — and not only because of economic necessity or demands from the electorate.
 
 
Julia Lynch

Julia Lynch is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.  Her research focuses on the politics of inequality and social policy in the rich democracies, particularly the countries of western Europe. She has special interests in comparative health policy and the politics of health inequalities; the politics of aging; and the relationship between party systems and political economy in western Europe. Lynch serves as an expert advisor to the World Health Organization’s European regional office on issues of health equity, and is past chair of the Health Politics and Policy section of the American Political Science Association and past treasurer of the Council for European Studies. She is editor of Socio-Economic Review, a multi-disciplinary journal focusing on analytical, political and moral questions arising at the intersection of economy and society.  At Penn, Lynch is faculty director of the Penn In Washington Program and co-director of the Penn-Temple European Studies Colloquium. Lynch holds a BA from Harvard University, a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and has held visiting appointments at the European University Institute, Sciences Po, and Oxford.
 
Julia Lynch Speaker University of Pennsylvania
Lectures

Innovation Needed to Meet Global Food Security Challenges

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Join us for a talk with agricultural and development economist Christopher B. Barrett, this quarter’s visiting scholar with the Center on Food Security and the Environment. Barrett is the Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Professor of Applied Economics and Management and an International Professor of Agriculture with Cornell’s Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management.

Professor Barrett will discuss food systems advances over the past 50 years that have promoted unprecedented reduction globally in poverty and hunger, averted considerable deforestation, and broadly improved lives, livelihoods and environments in much of the world. He’ll share perspectives on the reasons why, despite those advances, those systems increasingly fail large communities in environmental, health, and increasingly in economic terms and appear ill-suited to cope with inevitable further changes in climate, incomes, and population over the coming 50 years. Barrett will explore the new generation of innovations underway that must overcome a host of scientific and socioeconomic obstacles.
 
Also a Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics, Barrett is co-editor in chief of the journal Food Policy, is a faculty fellow with David R. Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future and serves as the director of the Stimulating Agriculture and Rural Transformation (StART) Initiative housed at the Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development.
 

Lectures

Michel Serres: Thinking in Figures

After a long period of under-appreciation, Michel Serres's prescient and unique writing is now beginning to receive the attention it has long deserved. This talk explores the distinctiveness and contemporaneity of Serres’s thought, paying particular attention to the  "figures" that distinguish not only the themes he addresses, but also the way he approaches and passes between them. What emerges is a picture of a body of work radically distinct from that of his contemporaries Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault, and a set of concerns the timeliness of which is only now becoming evident.

 

Dr. Christopher Watkin is a Senior Lecturer at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, where he teaches across French and Literary Studies. He is the author of a number of books in modern and contemporary thought, including Phenomenology or Deconstruction? (2009), Difficult Atheism (2011), and French Philosophy Today: New Figures of the Human (2016). His latest monograph, Michel Serres: Figures of Thought, is due to be published with Edinburgh University Press in early 2020. Chris is currently working on a project interrogating the concepts of freedom and liberation in contemporary thought and society in the light of what has been called the Western “emancipation narrative”. He blogs about philosophy and academic research at christopherwatkin.com, and you can find him on Twitter @DrChrisWatkin.  

 

The French Culture Workshop is co-sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, the DLCL Research Unit, the France-Stanford Center, and the Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute.

Building 260, Room 252

Pigott Hall

Christopher Watkin Speaker Monash University – Melbourne, Australia
Lectures

CANCELED - Muscles in Brussels: EU Economic Authority in Comparative Perspective

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TEC will be canceling all public events and seminars until at least April 15th due to ongoing developments associated with COVID-19.

 

How do we explain that the European Union gained so much authority, especially in economic areas? Most explanations of the EU usually start off by misdescribing how much authority it exerts over its member-states. Classic IR theorists in realist or liberal traditions describe the EU as a strong international regime, allowing them to explain it simply as a response to especially-strong regional versions of the exogenously-given conditions that ostensibly favor international cooperation elsewhere. Even more endogenously-inclined theorists who explain the EU as an ideational or institutionally path-dependent project tend to describe it as a quasi-federation that still falls well short of a “United States of Europe.” But if the EU certainly lacks some important powers of federal states, in some core areas it has surpassed them. Employing a comparison of the EU to three Anglo-Saxon federations (United States, Canada, Australia), we show that today’s EU actively exercises authority over states’ market openness and fiscal discipline that these federations have never claimed. This re-description of the EU outcome displays just how far Europe has departed from the expectations of classic IR theories, and highlights the kind of strongly endogenous ideational and institutional explanation it requires. Co-author: Craig Parsons, University of Oregon.

 

Matthias Matthijs

Matthias Matthijs is associate professor of international political economy. His research focuses on the politics of economic crises, the role of economic ideas in economic policymaking, the politics of inequality, and the democratic limits of regional integration. He was one of the inaugural recipients in 2015 of a Johns Hopkins Catalyst Award, in recognition of his work as a promising early-career investigator. He teaches courses in international relations, comparative politics, and international economics, and was twice awarded the Max M. Fisher Prize for Excellence in Teaching, in 2011 and 2015.

Since the summer of 2019, he is also a Senior Fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He also currently serves as the Chair of the Executive Committee of the European Union Studies Association (EUSA).

Matthijs is the editor (with Mark Blyth) of the book The Future of the Euro published by Oxford University Press in 2015, and author of Ideas and Economic Crises in Britain from Attlee to Blair (1945-2005), published by Routledge in 2011. The latter is based on his doctoral dissertation, which received the Samuel H. Beer Prize for Best Dissertation in British Politics by a North American scholar, awarded by the British Politics Group of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in 2010.

In 2018, he won the Best Paper Award from APSA’s European Politics and Society section for “When Is It Rational to Learn the Wrong Lessons?” (co-authored with Mark Blyth). Among various other research and writing projects, he is currently working on a book-length manuscript that delves into the collapse of national elite consensus around European integration.

Dr. Matthijs received his BSc in applied economics with magna cum laude from the University of Antwerp in Belgium, and his MA and PhD in international relations from Johns Hopkins University.

Matthias Matthijs Speaker School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University
Lectures

Digital Disinformation Beyond Social Media

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Abstract: The problem of online disinformation is only getting worse. Social media may well play a role in the US 2020 presidential election and other major political events. But that doesn’t even begin to describe what future propaganda will look like. As Samuel Woolley shows, we will soon be navigating new technologies such as human-like automated voice systems, machine learning, ‘deep-fake’ AI-edited videos and images, interactive memes, virtual reality and augmented reality. In stories both deeply researched and compellingly written, Woolley describes this future, and explains how the technology can be manipulated, who might control it and its impact on political strategy. Finally, Woolley proposes strategic responses to this threat with the ultimate goal of empowering activists and pushing technology builders to design for democracy.

Samuel Woolley
Samuel Woolley is a researcher with a focus on emerging media technologies, propaganda and politics. His work looks at how automation, algorithms and AI are leveraged for both democracy and control. His forthcoming book, The Reality Game: How the Next Wave of Technology Will Break the Truth, will be released in January of 2020 by PublicAffairs/Hachette. It explores the future of digital disinformation and provides a pragmatic roadmap for how society can respond.

Woolley is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism at the Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas-Austin. He is the Program Director of disinformation research at the Center for Media Engagement (CME) at UT. He holds a PhD from the University of Washington-Seattle. His academic work has appeared in the Journal of Information Technology and Politics, the International Journal of Communication, the Routledge Handbook of Media, Conflict and Security, A Networked Self: Platforms, Stories, Connections and The Political Economy of Robots.  He is one of the founders of the Computational Propaganda Research Project, now based at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. Woolley is also the founder of the Digital Intelligence Lab at the Institute for the Future (IFTF)–a 50-year-old think-tank based in Palo Alto, CA.

Lectures

Lunch Seminar Series | Digital Advertising, Campaign Finance, and 2016 & 2020 Elections: A Conversation with Robert Bauer

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Robert Bauer
Abstract: Please join the Cyber Policy Center for a conversation on online political advertising, election law, and the 2020 election, with Robert Bauer, Professor of Practice and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at NYU Law, and Co-Director of NYU’s Legislative and Regulatory Process Clinic, with Professor Nathaniel Persily, Co-Director of the Cyber Policy Center. Bauer served as White House Counsel to President Obama, and returned to private practice in June 2011. In 2013, the President named Bauer to be Co-Chair of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. Bauer was General Counsel to Obama for America, the President’s campaign organization, in 2008 and 2012. Bauer has also served as co-counsel to the New Hampshire State Senate in the trial of Chief Justice David A. Brock (2000) and counsel to the Democratic Leader in the trial of President William Jefferson Clinton (1999). He is the authors on books on campaign finance law and articles on various topics for law review and periodicals.

Robert Bauer bio >

Robert Bauer
Lectures
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