A potential solution for weak or failing states is to enact a delegation agreement whereby a host relinquishes authority over some governance function to an external actor. Through case studies in Melanesia, I find that these arrangements can be implemented as treaties, rather than contracts, so that the external actor can in such cases remain somewhat exempt from the normal procedure or law of the host state. I also generate hypotheses about the conditions under which host states and external actors enact these self-enforcing equilibria: host states request these agreements either where a failure of law and order requires assistance to reestablish control over the use of force, or where a budgetary crisis necessitates funding to provide public goods. External actors agree to them where the host state poses a transnational security threat, and where the reputational and actual costs of the mission are low, as judged against alternative methods for resolving the threat. The next step in this project, then, is to test these hypotheses in other cases to see if similar agreements are enacted in different regions, and, if so, whether the same incentives also explain the decisions elsewhere.

Aila M. Matanock is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Stanford. Her current research is on effective governance for minimizing conflict, and on bringing violent groups into elections in conflicted states. Before coming to Stanford, she was employed by the RAND Corporation as a research assistant and summer associate on non-proliferation and counterterrorism projects. She received an undergraduate degree magna cum laude in Social Studies from Harvard University, while also working with the Belfer Center's Managing the Atom Project and with the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Seminar summary:

In her presentation, "Learning to Share: Under What Conditions do States Delegate Governance?" Aila Matanock seeks to define the concept of delegated governance and to identify the circumstances under which it arises. Drawing from field research with political elites in Australia and the Melanesian micro-states, she presents the variation in degrees of shared governance arrangements, from strict delegation to semi delegation, contracting and monitoring.

She defines delegated governance as an arrangement between a host state and an external actor that involves sharing in the decision function of the host state. She emphasizes the incentives of both host state and external actor as a framework for identifying the set of conditions under which we might expect to observe delegated governance. She argues and finds, in the Melanesian cases, that host states are more likely to seek delegation agreements if (1) they have lost their monopoly over the use of force (and there is no civil war or major ethnic cleavage); or (2) they are suffering from a severe budgetary crisis. External actors, for their part, enter into such agreements based on the costs they believe they will incur: reputational gains within the international community and domestic support for the delegation arrangement decrease an external actor's cost perception and increase its likelihood of entering into such an agreement. Matanock concludes that the Melanesian cases inform us that governance delegation is not an infrequent phenomenon. It is likely to emerge where lawlessness threatens both the host and external actor, but is constrained by the level of violence and the cleavages in society.

Matanock's presentation prompted questions about the scope and generalizability of the argument (To what extent do these findings reflect a special relationship between Australia and the Melanesian states? Would this apply in larger states such as Cambodia and Liberia, where the costs to an external actor might be greater?); the specific factors leading to the choice of delegated governance over other options (such as contracting, monitoring,...); and the power relationship between external actor and host state.

Joshua Teitelbaum, PhD (Tel Aviv University, 1996). Senior Research Fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies and Senior Lecturer in the Department of  Middle Eastern and African History, Tel Aviv University. Visiting Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, Stanford University. W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo Campbell National Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Fields of specialization: the history of the Arabian Peninsula, specifically Saudi Arabia, Palestinian history and politics.

Author of The Rise and Fall of the Hashimite Kingdom of Arabia (2001) and Holier Than Thou: Saudi Arabia's Islamic Opposition (2000). Editor of Political Liberalization in the Persian Gulf  (2008).

Reading is available in the publications shelf (located on the left hand side of CISAC's main reception area) in a limited number of hard copies.

Charli Carpenter joined the Department of Political Science at University of Massachusetts-Amherst in Fall 2008, after teaching for four years at University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. Her teaching and research interests include national security ethics, the laws of war, transnational advocacy networks, gender and political violence, war crimes, comparative genocide studies, humanitarian affairs and the role of information technology in human security. She has a particular interest in the gap between intentions and outcomes among advocates of human security. She is the author of Innocent Women and Children: Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians, and the editor of Born of War: Protecting Children of Sexual Violence Survivors in Conflict Zones. She has also published numerous articles in journals such as International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Security Dialogue and Human Rights Quarterly and has served as a consultant for the United Nations. Dr. Carpenter's current research focuses on global agenda-setting, investigating why certain issues but not others end up on the human security agenda. With funding from the National Science Foundation, she is directing a project on Transnational Advocacy Networks. In addition to teaching and research, Dr. Carpenter spends her time raising two future members of the American electorate, surfing, snowboarding, and rambling about international politics at Duck of Minerva and asymmetric warfare at Complex Terrain Lab. 

Alexander Montgomery, a visiting assistant professor in 2008-09, was a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC in 2005-2006 and is an assistant professor of political science at Reed College. He has published articles on dismantling proliferation networks and on the effects of social networks of international organizations on interstate conflict. His research interests include political organizations, social networks, weapons of mass disruption and destruction, social studies of technology, and interstate social relations. His current book project is on post-Cold War U.S. counterproliferation policy, evaluating the efficacy of policies towards North Korea, Iran, and proliferation networks.

He has been a joint International Security Program/Managing the Atom Project Research Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He has also worked as a research associate in high energy physics on the BaBar experiment at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and as a graduate research assistant at the Center for International Security Affairs at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He has a BA in physics from the University of Chicago, an MA in energy and resources from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in sociology and a PhD in political science from Stanford University. 

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For more than three months now the French academic world has been shaken by an unprecedented crisis with many demonstrations, action days, alternative teaching and protest initiatives of all sorts. A very specific feature of this movement is that it encompasses the whole political spectrum. In almost daily demonstrations, law professors, traditional support of right wing governments, and social sciences scholars, the leftist part of the French academic scene, were marching hands in hands. What are the reasons for such upheaval? What is under threat? What is called for? Beyond the analysis of the causes and goals of these actions, the talk will focus on the deep transformations in culture and education that are affecting French modern society.

Synopsis

To Prof. Canto-Sperber, the recent protests to university reform in France represent an unprecedented crisis in the French academic world encompassing the whole political spectrum. She sees the two most immediate causes as the reforms President Sarkozy has tried to pass. The first one would give more autonomy to the universities to regulate their professors in terms of time management and promotion. However, Prof. Canto-Sperber reveals that this comes into conflict with the fact that French academics believe that only a national body has the legitimacy to decide on the best balance between research and teaching, as well as the promotion of professors. In addition, Prof. Canto-Sperber explains it is commonly assumed in the French academic world that only a body of professors of the same academic discipline is entitled to judge the performance of a particular professor. The second reform involves a shift in the training of professors by introducing professional exams and taking away from the current system of aggregation, an achievement that mainly exhibits intellectual status. Prof. Canto-Sperber focuses on the fact that the proposition of such professional exams was seen to strike at the pride and identity of professional teaching. Moreover, to Prof. Canto-Sperber, such exams were also seen as a threat to the quality of the professors and as lowering the knowledge requirements for becoming a professor. In addition to this, Prof. Canto-Sperber also focuses on changing social realities in the French education system where some of the students do not even speak French. Professors want to maintain high intellectual status without having to come to terms with the necessity for professional training, the system of aggregation is a way to hold on to their beliefs.

In order to properly understand to significance of recent events, Prof. Canto-Sperber sets out to put them in historical context. She explains the history of the university system in France, as well as the rise and domination of the Grandes Ecoles over the universities. She argues that as French universities have all been state dependent and equal in status, they have had no incentive to attract students and have gradually become isolated from French society. They have not had to deal with the necessities of most social organizations such as efficiency, responsibility, and self-regulation. To Prof. Canto-Sperber, that is why at this stage it is difficult for universities to fathom organizing and regulating themselves. Prof. Canto-Sperber reinforces this by making the point that from the 15th century through to the 19th century, French universities repeatedly ignored the development of new knowledge such as the Cartesian revolution or the Enlightenment. This led to a habit in France of creating parallel institutions to deal with the necessity of having platforms to discuss these new intellectual approaches. Prof. Canto-Sperber puts forward the view that the reason the renewal of universities in France has been so difficult is that it means reintegration with a society that has moved on culturally and scientifically.

What Prof. Canto-Sperber therefore expresses is that there is no longer a choice but to put universities back into society and give them autonomy. Professors must be allowed to maintain their ‘republican’ ideals but in a more modest way. Prof. Canto-Sperber argues that the program of rational emancipation has led to segregation and must be abandoned. Finally and most importantly, universities must be given financial autonomy to define and regulate themselves. However, Prof. Canto-Sperber concludes by arguing that due to intellectual and philosophical barriers, the “awkward” situation will most probably continue.

In a spirited and lengthy discussion session, one of the points raised was that of bringing together research and teaching. Discussion of this also led to the point of the problem of donations in French universities and these universities' dependence on the state.

About the Speaker

Monique Canto-Sperber is the director of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris, rue d'Ulm), she is a university professor and a fellow of National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS, Center Raymond Aron), she was the former vice president of the French National Ethics Committee.

Alumnus of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, with an aggregation and a doctorate in philosophy, she was professor at several universities (University of Rouen and Amiens). She chaired a research center (at University of Caen) and in 1993 was appointed director of research at the CNRS. She was the scientific director of many international scientific conferences. She taught at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and at many other universities abroad. She was a visiting professor at Stanford University.

Monique Canto-Sperber sat on numerous boards and committees. She was a member of the board of trustees of the French National Library, and she chaired the Philosophy Committee of the National Center of Letters. She is the editor of two series edited at the Presses Universitaires de France. She takes part in a television program on essays and debates in the Senate channel, Public Sénat, and runs a radio weekly program on France Culture.

Monique Canto-Sperber was trained as a classicist and first worked in the field of ancient philosophy. She published four translations and commentaries of Plato's dialogues and several books on Greek philosophy: Les Paradoxes de la connaissance (1991), Philosophie grecque (1997) et Ethiques Grecques (2002).

For more than fifteen years, most of her books have been devoted to contemporary moral and political philosophy and to practical ethical questions. She published numerous books on these issues, translated into several languages, among them La Philosophie morale britannique (1994), le Dictionnaire d'Ethique et de philosophie morale (1996, 4ème édition : 2004), L'Inquiétude morale et la vie humaine (2001, Englis trans, 2008)), Les Règles de la liberté (2003), Le Bien, la guerre et la terreur (2005), Faut-il sauver le libéralisme? (2006), Naissance et liberté (2008). She was the editor of several books as Le Style de la pensée (2002), and Ethiques d'aujourd'hui (2004).

Monique Canto-Sperber is Chevalier des arts et des lettres, Chevalier de la légion d'honneur and Officier de l'ordre national du mérite.

There are some peculiarities in conducting interviews about the Soviet past in post-Soviet space. What details of everyday life do interviewees reveal? And how do life stories shaped during Soviet times, but recalled and reconsidered in the post-communist era influence the interview?

Prof. Dalia Marcinkeviciene is chair of the Women’s Studies Center, and a lecturer in History Department at Vilnius University. Her research interests include Lithuanian family history during the period 1795-1990; theories in Sovietology. Marcinkeviciene was awarded Fulbright (2002-2003) and AAUW (2005-2006) research fellowships. She is an author and editor of three books (published in Lithuanian): Famous Lithuanian Women, the 19th – the Beginning of the 20th Century. Vilnius University Press, 1997; The Society of Married People: Marriage and Divorce in Lithuania, the 19th – the Beginning of the 20th Century. Lithuanian Institute of History, 1999; Life Stories of Lithuanian Women. Vilnius University Press, 2007