Societies transitioning from conflict and/or authoritarianism have increasingly built Transitional Justice (TJ) museums to explore their legacies of violence and repression, and to contribute to a culture of democracy, pluralism, and societal reconciliation. However, until recently, the impact of such museums had been assumed and not rigorously evaluated. This talk will be presenting results of three different experimental studies conducted in TJ museums/exhibits around the world: the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile (with Valeria Palanza and Elsa Voytas), the "Troubles and Beyond" exhibit in the Ulster Museum in Belfast, Northern Ireland (with Elsa Voytas), and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC (with Francesca Parente and Ethan vanderWilden). The talk will offer comparative lessons from these three studies. In addition, it will present evidence from a recently built TJ museum database (with vanderWilden and Voytas) with the goal to examine macro-level patterns of post-conflict memorialistic initiatives around the world.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Laia Balcells is the Christopher F. Gallagher Family Professor of Government at Georgetown University, where she is also core faculty of the M.A. in Conflict Resolution, and a faculty affiliate of Gui2de, the BMW Center for German and European Studies, and the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS).

Balcells's research and teaching are at the intersection of comparative politics and international relations. She received my BA (with highest distinction) in Political Science from Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona), including a full academic year as an Erasmus student at Sciences Po (Toulouse). Balcells began her graduate studies at the Juan March Institute (Madrid), and earned her Ph.D. from Yale University.

Balcells has been an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University (2012-2017), a Niehaus Visiting Associate Research Scholar at the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University (2015-16), and Chair of Excellence at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (2017).

Her first book, Rivalry and Revenge: the Politics of Violence during Civil War, was published in 2017 by Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics). The book  was a runner-up for the Conflict Research Society Book of the Year Award (2018).

Economic reintegration is a critical part of peacebuilding, helping former combatants transition into civilian life. Yet stigma from employers may block access to formal jobs, threatening the success of reintegration programs. We implemented a résumé field experiment to test whether ex-combatants in Colombia face labor market discrimination, and whether signals of rehabilitation reduce bias. Partnering with the Colombian government’s Agency for Reincorporation and Normalization, we use real résumés from eight job-seeking ex-combatants. We randomly vary whether they disclose ex-combatant status, highlight education or reconciliation experience, signal work experience, or mention tax incentives. We tracked employer responses to identify which signals increase interest and under what conditions discrimination is most severe. This design provides unique causal evidence on employer behavior in post-conflict societies and will inform policies for how best to structure reintegration support so that those who leave violence behind are not excluded from economic opportunities.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Oliver Kaplan is a CDDRL Visiting Scholar and an Associate Professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. He is the author of the book, Resisting War: How Communities Protect Themselves (Cambridge University Press, 2017), which examines how civilian communities organize to protect themselves from wartime violence. He is a co-editor and contributor to the book, Speaking Science to Power: Responsible Researchers and Policymaking (Oxford University Press, 2024). Kaplan has also published articles on the conflict-related effects of land reforms and ex-combatant reintegration and recidivism. As part of his research, Kaplan has conducted fieldwork in Colombia and the Philippines.

Kaplan was a Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace and previously a postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University and at Stanford University. His research has been funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and other grants. His work has been published in The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, Conflict Management and Peace Science, Stability, The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, CNN, and National Interest.

At the University of Denver, Kaplan is Director of the Korbel Asylum Project (KAP). He has taught M.A.-level courses on Human Rights and Foreign Policy, Peacebuilding in Civil Wars, Civilian Protection, and Human Rights Research Methods, and PhD-level courses on Social Science Research Methods. Kaplan received his Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University and completed his B.A. at UC San Diego.

Autocratic regimes often view emigration as a safety valve to reduce dissent, yet this strategy creates costly brain drain. Can autocracies draw politically motivated emigrants back with selective incentives, or is regime change the only viable option? We develop a three-dimensional model of return decisions, integrating conditions in host, home, and potential third countries. We argue that return is unlikely unless the home country restores core conditions—especially political freedoms—whose erosion triggered emigration, making selective incentives or return-promotion policies largely ineffective. Even when political change occurs, return remains limited among those who already enjoy political liberties abroad or can re-emigrate elsewhere. We test our theory using a conjoint experiment with 7,500 war-induced Russian emigrants across 100 countries, supplemented by open-ended feedback and longitudinal data. Democratization emerges as the minimum threshold for return, giving autocracies little leverage to reverse brain drain; where return occurs, it may ultimately strengthen opposition rather than incumbents.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Emil Kamalov has focused his research at the intersection of autocratic control, political behavior, migration, and repression, utilizing advanced quantitative methods complemented by qualitative data.

In his PhD thesis and papers, Emil develops an integrated account of extraterritorial opposition politics, examining how geopolitical tensions and host-country conditions shape emigrant activism, diaspora resilience, and migrant well-being. His findings demonstrate that under certain conditions, transnational repression by autocratic regimes can strengthen rather than weaken diaspora activism.

In collaboration with Ivetta Sergeeva, Emil co-founded and co-leads the OutRush project, the only ongoing multi-wave panel survey focusing on Russian political emigrants following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The OutRush project includes over 18,000 survey observations across four waves, covering respondents from more than 100 countries. The project has garnered substantial international media coverage and has drawn attention from policymakers and experts. Emil received his PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute.

This seminar will introduce the prototype of an innovative new AI-powered decision-making intelligence platform that forecasts country trajectories with scenario analysis, predictive analytics, hotspot detection, causal explanations through large language models, etc., for a range of outcomes central to CDDRL and FSI's missions — effective governance, human security, and sustainable development. The initial use case is for political resilience and its inverse, fragility, conflict, and violence.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr. Sanjeev Khagram is a world-renowned leader, entrepreneur, scholar, and professor across the academic, private, public, and civic sectors. His specialities include global leadership and management across sectors, entrepreneurship and innovation, the data revolution and 4th Industrial Revolution — including AI, sustainable development and human security, good governance and accountability, globalization and transnationalism, public-private partnerships and multi-stakeholder networks. Dr. Khagram holds all of his transdisciplinary bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from Stanford University. He has lived and worked for extended periods in Australia, Brazil, China, Kenya, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, the GCC, Germany, South Africa, Thailand, and the United Kingdom.

Dr. Sanjeev Khagram is currently a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and Department of Management Science and Engineering.  He is also a Distinguished Visiting Fellow with the Hoover Institution's Emerging Markets Working Group, where he leads the Global Reslience Intelligence Platform Partnership (GRIPP), and at the Center for Sustainable Development and Global Competitiveness, where he leads the AI and Sustainability Initiative at Stanford.

Khagram was most recently CEO, Director-General, and Dean of the Thunderbird School of Global Management, 2018-2024, which he took to #1 in International Trade with QS World University Rankings. He is on leave from his position as Foundation Professor of Global Leadership and Global Futures at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, Arizona State University.  Previously, he was the inaugural Young Professor of Global Political Economy at Occidental College, Wyss Scholar at the Harvard Business School, Founding Director of the Lindenberg Center for International Development, Professor at the University of Washington, and Associate Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Dr. Khagram is an award-winning scholar and teacher. Dr. Khagram has published widely including the award winning book Dams and Development with Cornell University Press; Restructuring World Politics with University of Minnesota Press; The Transnational Studies Reader with Routledge Press; Open Budgets: The Political Economy of Transparency, Participation and Accountability with Brookings Press; "Inequality and Corruption" in the American Journal of Sociology; "Future Architectures of Global Governance" in Global Governance, "Environment and Security" in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, “Towards a Platinum Standard for Evidence-Based Assessment,” in Public Administration Review, “Social Balance Sheets” in Harvard Business Review, “Evidence for Development Effectiveness” in the Journal of Development Effectiveness, and “From Human Security and the Environment to Sustainable Security and Development,” in the Journal of Human Development.

Dr. Khagram has worked extensively in global leadership roles across international organizations, government, business, and civil society from the local to the international levels around the world. Dr. Khagram has established and led a range of global multi-stakeholder initiatives over the last three decades, including the Global Carbon Removal Partnership, Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency, and the World Commission on Dams, authoring its widely acclaimed final report.  

Dr. Khagram was selected as a Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum, was a senior advisor to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, Dean of the Desmond Tutu Peace Centre, and Founder/CEO of Innovations for Scaling Impact – a global technology enterprise solutions network. He is currently Chair of the Board of United Platform Solutions (an African AI-IOT Pollution Monitoring Venture) and Vice Chair of Altos Bank (the first new bank in Silicon Valley since 2008).

Dr. Khagram was born in Uganda as a fourth-generation East African Indian.  He and his family were expelled by Idi Amin and spent several years in refugee camps before being provided asylum in the United States in the 1970s.  He has lived and worked across all regions of the world and travelled to over 140 countries.

Professor Mary Elise Sarotte, award-winning historian and author of Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate, will offer reflections on the difficult task of writing history that is still unfolding. Covering the pivotal years from 1989 to 2022, her work traces how early decisions at the end of the Cold War shaped the trajectory of U.S.–Russia relations and contributed to the impasse that continues to trouble the international order today. In this conversation, Sarotte will explore the historian’s challenge of disentangling myth from evidence, of balancing archival distance with contemporary resonance, and of reckoning with a legacy that remains deeply contested and urgently relevant.

The event will begin with opening remarks from Kathryn Stoner, Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). The event will conclude with an audience Q&A.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).

This research introduces the concept of police-led armed groups (PLAGs) to better capture the institutional distinctiveness of armed formations organized by active-duty police officers. Unlike traditional non-state armed groups, PLAGs benefit from insider access to state infrastructure, impunity networks, and coercive training — blurring the boundaries between extralegal and illicit violence. The paper distinguishes PLAGs from both autonomous non-state actors and state-aligned militias, offering a conceptual framework based on group composition, organizational autonomy, and the strategic use of police authority. To demonstrate the utility of this framework, I reclassify the armed groups documented in the 2008 CPI das Milícias (Parliamentary Inquiry Commission on Milícias) in Rio de Janeiro. This reclassification reveals that a substantial number of groups previously treated as PLAGs are more accurately understood as non-state armed criminal groups. This conceptual innovation has implications for theories of state violence, criminal governance, and security sector reform in high-violence democracies.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Ana Paula Pellegrino is the Gerhard Casper Postdoctoral Fellow in Rule of Law at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and will join the School of Government at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile as an Assistant Professor in July 2026. Her research examines criminal and political violence in Latin America, with a particular focus on armed actors — including police and armed groups — their attitudes, and their behaviors. Her book project investigates why police form armed groups. Pellegrino received her Ph.D. in Government from Georgetown University in 2025, specializing in Comparative Government. Her work has been supported by Georgetown University, Fundação Estudar’s Leaders program, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation’s Emerging Scholars initiative.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Room E-008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

This seminar will present research featured in Killian Clarke's recently published book, Return of Tyranny: Why Counterrevolutions Emerge and Succeed. Why do some revolutions fail and succumb to counterrevolutions, whereas others go on to establish durable rule? This talk answers these questions, marshalling original data on counterrevolutions worldwide since 1900 and new evidence from the reversal of Egypt's 2011 revolution. It will lay out the book's movement-centric argument, which emphasizes the strategies revolutionary leaders embrace both during their opposition campaigns and after they seize power. Movements that wage violent resistance and espouse radical ideologies establish regimes that are very difficult to overthrow. By contrast, democratic revolutions like Egypt's are more vulnerable, though the talk will also lay out a path by which they too can avoid counterrevolution. In an era of resurgent authoritarianism worldwide, this talk will shed light on one particularly violent form of reactionary politics.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Killian Clarke is an Assistant Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. His research focuses on protest, revolution, authoritarianism, and democratization, with a regional focus on the Middle East. He is the author of Return of Tyranny: Why Counterrevolutions Emerge and Succeed (Cambridge University Press), as well as peer-reviewed articles in the American Political Science Review, Annual Review of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, and World Politics. He received his PhD in Politics from Princeton University.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to the William J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person.

When and how do autocrats use violence to win elections? Why don't they always use violence? This talk uses the past 25 years of elections in Zimbabwe to argue that autocrats try to avoid election violence and often use it as a last resort because it carries the risk of both backfire from citizens and holdup by organized agents of violence. Citizens’ reactions to repression are high variance and difficult for autocrats to predict because they depend in part on internal psychological characteristics that shape emotional reactions to violence. When electoral repression is used as a last resort, it has implications for how and where it can be organized. However, autocrats cannot always scale back election violence, particularly when it is perpetrated by state security forces. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Lauren Young is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at UC Davis. She is a member of Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) and the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) and a Steering Committee member of the Future of Democracy Initiative at the UC IGCC. She co-runs the UC Davis Contentious Politics Lab with Juan Tellez.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Room E-008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.