Haystack, a circumvention tool, emerged in the wake of the repression after the Iranian election of June 2009. After achieving considerable public prominence, its use and distribution was recently halted. Important questions have been raised about Haystack's effectiveness and security, as well as the roots of its reputation. Evgeny Morozov, who emerged as a leading critic of Haystack, and Daniel Calascione, who wrote the Haystack code, will discuss the Haystack experience and the lessons it carries for circumvention technologies and, more broadly, for the evaluation and political deployment of new information technologies.

Daniel Colascione co-founded the Censorship Research Center in June 2009 in the aftermath of the Iranian election and has had a lifelong interest in internet freedom and technological measures to mitigate censorship. He created the Haystack anti-censorship system and holds a BSc in Computer Science from the SUNY University at Buffalo.

Evgeny Morozov is a visiting scholar in the Liberation Technology Program at Stanford University and a Scwhartz fellow at the New America Foundation. He is also a blogger and contributing editor to Foreign Policy Magazine. He is a former Yahoo fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University and a former fellow at the Open Society Institute, where he remains on the board of the Information Program. His book The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom will be published by PublicAffairs in early January 2011.

The logic of partitioning the land has dominated the various attempts to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Several developments in the last few years cast serious doubts regarding the feasibility of partition. This talk seeks to critically explore alternatives to partition in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. More specifically, it seeks to examine feasible, reasonable, and fairly just alternatives to partition that would secure the national and individual rights, interests and identities of Arabs and Jews alike.

Bashir Bashir is a research fellow at The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and a Civic Education and Leadership Fellow at Maxwell School of Citizenship at Syracuse University. He holds a Ph.D. and Master’s degree in Political Theory from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a Bachelor’s degree in Politics, Sociology and Anthropology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has taught Political Theory at the London School of Economics, Queen's University, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  His primary research interests are democratic theories of inclusion, multiculturalism, civic education, conflict resolution and the politics of reconciliation, historical injustices, Palestinian nationalism, and Israeli politics.  Among Bashir's publications is: Will Kymlicka and Bashir Bashir (eds.), The Politics of Reconciliation in Multicultural Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

As exemplified by the recent election results from Sweden, immigration is one of the most important and heated topics of debate in contemporary Scandinavian society. Immigrants are accused of being unwilling to integrate and adopt Scandinavian cultural values and practices, while the countries themselves are often criticized for not realizing that they have, in fact, become multicultural. By comparison, Jewish immigration to Scandinavia is generally regarded as a success and a strategy for others to emulate. In her presentation, Vibeke Kieding Banik will highlight some key features of Scandinavian Jewish history (with a particular focus on Norway) and argue that the skepticism characterizing the current debate was also present when Jews were allowed to emigrate to Scandinavia, and especially during the arrival of Eastern European Jews in the early 1900s.

Vibeke Kieding Banik, a Norwegian national, received her PhD in history in 2009 from the University of Oslo, where she is currently affiliated as a part time lecturer. She teaches a course entitled "The Holocaust" and supervises and examines undergraduate and postgraduate students. Her research interests include gender studies, modern Jewish history and immigration, integration and identity in Scandinavia. During her Anna Lindh fellowship at The Europe Center, Vibeke will begin work on her new project, “Gendered integration? The Jewish Encounter with Scandinavia, 1900-1940."

Audio Synopsis:

Dr. Kieding Banik begins by outlining the historical context of the Jewish experience in Scandinavia. She describes how early Jewish immigrants faced a homogenous, largely Lutheran Scandinavian population with strong anti-Semitic prejudices, with Norway even banning Jewish immigration entirely until 1851, for fear Jews would "overflow" the country. Immigration in all parts of Scandinavia was greatly restricted between 1880 and the beginning of World War I, before and after which time Jews from Eastern Europe arrived in greater numbers, often en route to other destinations.

While by 1918 Jews had full legal rights in Scandinavia, the amount of assimilation of Jews into local society differed between countries. For example, Jews in Denmark demonstrated higher levels of cultural assimilation, and prominence in society, academia, politics and civil society than in Sweden or Norway.

Dr. Kieding Banik goes on to describe the challenges immigrants faced as they attempted to balance assimilation with their Jewish identity; the effects of the Holocaust on Jewish populations in Scandinavia; the response of established Jewish communities to new immigrants; and the differences of experience between present-day Jewish immigrants to Scandinavia and their predecessors.

A discussion session addresses issues such as: the reasons for variety in the Jewish experience between Scandinavian countries; how post-war attitudes changed to facilitate increased Jewish integration; the relationship ofJews to other immigrant groups in Scandinavia; and the level of assistance for immigrant groups in Scandinavia today.

The Stanford China Program, in cooperation with the Center for East Asian Studies, will host a special series of seminars to examine China as a major political and economic actor on the world stage. Over the course of the autumn and winter terms, leading scholars will examine China actions and policies in the new global political economy. What is China's role in global governance? What is the state of China's relations with its Asian neighbors? Is China being more assertive both diplomatically as well as militarily? Are economic interests shaping its foreign policies? What role does China play amidst international conflicts?

Yves Tiberghien is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at UBC (currently on leave and a Visiting Associate Professor at National Chengchi University in Taiwan). He obtained his Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University and was an Academy Scholar at Harvard University in 2004-2006. He specializes in comparative political economy and international political economy with empirical focus on China, Japan, and Europe. In 2007, he published "Entrepreneurial States: Reforming Corporate Governance in France, Japan, and Korea" with Cornell University Press in the Political Economy Series. His publications include articles and book chapters on the comparative political economy of East Asia (Japan, Korea) and on climate change politics (Japan and EU). Over the last four years, he has been working on a large project and book on the global governance of genetically engineered food (GMOs). He has a strong interest in environmental and food governance (GMOs, climate change, food politics) in China. He is currently working on a new multi-year project on the role of China in global governance (with focus on global financial regulations, G20, and global environmental issues) funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), as well as a project on the political consequences of economic inequality in Japan.

This event is part of the China and the World series.