Jakarta time: Thursday, January 27, 2022, 8:00am to 9:30am

Southeast Asia is famously diverse.  Yet, all the ASEAN member states have committed themselves to ASEAN Community, including ASEAN Political and Security Community, with the expressed commitment to protect and promote democratic principles, human rights and good governance.

This event is open to the public online via Zoom, and limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford affiliates may be available in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines.

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(Open to all)                                            (Stanford Only)

Recent elections in the advanced western democracies have undermined the basic foundations of political systems that had previously beaten back all challenges -- from both the left and the right. The election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency, only months after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, signaled a dramatic shift in the politics of the rich democracies. In Anti-System Politics, Jonathan Hopkin traces the evolution of this shift and argues that it is a long-term result of abandoning the post-war model of egalitarian capitalism in the 1970s. That shift entailed weakening the democratic process in favor of an opaque, technocratic form of governance that allows voters little opportunity to influence policy. With the financial crisis of the late 2000s these arrangements became unsustainable, as incumbent politicians were unable to provide solutions to economic hardship. Electorates demanded change, and it had to come from outside the system.

Using a comparative approach, Hopkin explains why different kinds of anti-system politics emerge in different countries and how political and economic factors impact the degree of electoral instability that emerges. Finally, he discusses the implications of these changes, arguing that the only way for mainstream political forces to survive is for them to embrace a more activist role for government in protecting societies from economic turbulence. A historically-grounded analysis of arguably the most important global political phenomenon at present, Anti-System Politics illuminates how and why the world seems upside down.

 

Jonathan Hopkin is Professor in the European Institute and the Department of Government of the London School of Economics and Political Science. He obtained his PhD at the European University Institute in Florence. He is the author of Party Formation and Democratic Transition in Spain (1999, Macmillan) and Anti-System Politics: The Crisis of Market Liberalism in Rich Democracies (2020, Oxford University Press). Previously he taught at the Universities of Bradford, Durham and Birmingham, and held visiting positions at Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, the University of Bologna, and the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He has published widely on the party politics and political economy of Europe in peer-reviewed journals as well as for a wider audience.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson (sj1874@stanford.edu) by February 24, 2022.

The focus of religion & politics research has been predominantly on the impact of religious actors on democratic and non-democratic political systems and religion-inspired political behavior. But to better understand the political significance of religion, it is necessary to look below this institutional level and adopt a micropolitical perspective which incorporates insights from fields such as behavioral ecology, social psychology or cognitive science to study the internal politics of religious communities.

Why is religion, despite its costly requirements and uncertain rewards, such a potent factor of mobilization? How does it legitimize claims for power and status? Why do religious groups significantly outlast secular ones? To address some of these questions, I examine political systems of communitarian religious groups – including the American Shakers and Russian Skoptsy – through the lenses of costly signaling theory of religion. This evolutionarily-informed theoretical framework contributes to the explanation of seemingly irrational and costly ascetic and ecstatic religious behavior not only as signals of commitment, but also as bids for power and status. The added value of such micropolitical study of religious communities is that it may shed light on the complex relationship between religion and political power in the early stages of human social development. But it also contributes to our understanding of some modern religio-political phenomena, such as various form of political sacrifice, including suicidal terrorism.
 

Maciej Potz is a professor of Political Science at the Department of Political Systems, Faculty of International and Political Studies, University of Łódź, Poland. He earned his Ph.D. in 2006 from the Silesian University in Katowice and his post-doctoral degree from the University of Łódź in 2017, both in Political Science. His primary area of interest is religion and politics, with special focus on theocracies (as a Foundation for Polish Science scholar, he studied Shaker and Mormon theocracies in the USA in 2009 and 2012) and political strategies of religious actors in contemporary democracies, especially in Poland and the USA. His other research interests include political theory (especially theory of power and democratic theory), comparative politics and, most recently, evolutionary political science.

Maciej Potz published three monographs: (i) Granice wolności religijnej [The Limits of Religous Liberty] 2008 (2nd ed. 2015), Wrocław: FNP, on religious freedom, church-state relations and confessional politics in the USA; (ii) Amerykańskie teokracje. Źródła i mechanizmy władzy usankcjonowanej religijnie [American Theocracies. The Sources and Mechanisms of Religion-Sanctioned Power] 2016, Łódź: UŁ, theorizing theocracy as a type of a political system and emprically exploring North American theocracies; (iii) Political Science of Religion: Theorizing the Political Role of Religion, 2020, London: Palgrave MacMillan – a theoretical framework for the analysis of religion’s impact on politics. He also authored several journal articles, including in Religion, State and Society, Journal of Political Power, Politics and Religion and Studia Religiologica.

Maciej Potz has taught political science-related courses in the University of Lodz and, as guest lecturer, at other European universities, including University of the West of Scotland in Glasgow, Buskerund College and NTNU (Norway), University of Joensuu (Finland), University of La Laguna (Spain). He participated in a number of international conferences, including “XXI World IAHR Congress in Erfurt (2015), IPSA World Congresses of Political Science in Santiago (2019), Madrid (2012) and Poznań (2016), APSA Annual Meeting (forthcoming in 2021).  

The research project he will be pursuing at Stanford, entitled Costly signaling Under His Eye: explaining the commune longevity puzzle, uses costly signaling theory of religion to explore the determinants of cohesion and longevity of (communitarian) religious groups. It also proposes a novel political interpretation of signaling behavior. Over the next three years, he will head a research team undertaking an empirical study (funded by National Science Centre of Poland) of power and status in Catholic religious orders.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact: Shannon Johnson (sj1874@stanford.edu) by February 3, 2022.

For winter quarter 2022, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. 

(Stanford faculty, visiting scholars, staff, fellows, and students only)

                                                                                           

 

About the Event: In Nigeria today, frequent conflicts, disappearances and mass violence, especially in the Northern region of the country, have amounted to large-scale destruction of human life and the displacement of large populations as unarmed civilians are caught in the crossfire. The effects of climate change on the Lake Chad basin are key triggers of conflict as herders migrate to other parts of the region to find fodder and water for their cattle. Existing responses to conflict and mass violence in Nigeria have been beset by challenges. The migration patterns of nomadic communities have begun to signal security concerns beyond the immediately impacted regions. In late 2017, state governments within the western and southern parts of the country began to set up community policing strategies to address growing security challenges around their states, including those relating to the (perceived) threats associated with the movement of cattle herders. Complicating this situation, the presence of large groups of cattle has incentivized “conflict entrepreneurship” as armed groups of young men across north-central, north-west and southern parts of the country engage in cattle rustling. Government efforts at various levels, ranging from the creation of legal and policy frameworks to programs on-the-ground, have been inadequate to protect civilians and have led to the development new mechanisms for human protection.  For example, interventions by the Nigerian Federal Government have, at times, accelerated conflict, as with the passage of an anti-grazing law that has fueled controversy over implementation at state and local levels of government. Local civil society initiatives have continued to emerge to address the gap and attempt to mitigate ever growing security concerns in the region. One such strategy has involved the development of Early Warning and Early Response Systems (EWER) using geospatial technologies and other forms of crowd sourcing imagery to enhance local resilience in the face of security threats and strengthen the ability of communities to protect themselves in a sustainable way. However, the potential of such technologies depends on the ability to “see” particular phenomena and render other phenomena illegible. This paper will argue that such geospatial technology’s interpretive power is concerned with assigning to future violence an interpretive code based on its baseline values.  As an act of decoding that is anticipatory, the power of EWER processes lies in its decoding potential. These interpretive code processes provide participants with the potential to engage in analyses that involve mapping patterns and potential risk that have the ability to produce indicators that have material effects. It is these material effects, drawn from visual codes, that are used to justify action that is life preserving as well as render other relations illegible and therefore invisible to intervention.  This paper explores the emergence of EWER strategies used to address widespread violence and the challenge of illegibility that is central to it.

 

About the Speaker: M. Kamari Clarke is the Distinguished Professor of Transnational Justice and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto where she teaches in the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies. Over her career she has worked at The University of California Los Angeles (2018-2021), Carleton University (2015-2018), The University of Pennsylvania (2013-2015) Yale University (1999-2013), and at Yale she was the former chair of the Council on African Studies from 2007- 2010 and the co-founder of the Yale Center for Transnational Cultural Analysis.  For more than twenty years, Professor Clarke has conducted research on issues related to legal institutions, human rights and international law, religious nationalism and the politics of globalization. For more than 20 years, Professor Clarke has conducted research on issues related to legal institutions, international legal domains, religious nationalism, and the politics of globalization and race. She  is the author of nine books and over fifty peer reviewed articles and book chapters, including her 2009 publication of Fictions of Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Challenge of Legal Pluralism in Sub-Saharan Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Affective Justice (with Duke University Press, 2019), which won the finalist prize for the American Anthropological Association’s 2020 Elliot P. Skinner Book Award for the Association for Africanist Anthropology.  Clarke has also been the recipient of other research and teaching awards, including Carleton University’s 2018 Research Excellence Award.  During her academic career she has held numerous prestigious fellowships, grants and awards, including multiple grant awards from the National Science Foundation and from The Social Sciences and the Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC), the Rockefeller Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and, very recently, the 2021 Guggenhiem Award for Career Excellence.

For winter quarter 2021, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.