Stanford University

Migration and Citizenship

Book Launch: "Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies"

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Image of the front cover of Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies
Please join us as we celebrate the publication of David Laitin and co-authors Claire Adida (UC San Diego) and Marie-Anne Valfort's (Paris School of Economics and the Sorbonne) recent book Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies which will be released in January 2016 by Harvard University Press.  

Amid mounting fears of violent Islamic extremism, many Europeans ask whether Muslim immigrants can integrate into historically Christian countries. In a groundbreaking ethnographic investigation of France’s Muslim migrant population, Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies explores this complex question. The authors conclude that both Muslim and non-Muslim French must share responsibility for the slow progress of Muslim integration.

Book signing to immediately follow.  Copies of the book will also be available for sale.

 

David D. Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. His specialty is comparative politics. In that field he conducts research on political culture, ethnic conflict, and civil war. His field expertise spans Somalia, Nigeria, Catalonia, Estonia and France.

David Laitin

Department of Political Science
Stanford University
Encina Hall, W423
Stanford, CA 94305-6044

(650) 725-9556 (650) 723-1808
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James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science
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David Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science and a co-director of the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford. He has conducted field research in Somalia, Nigeria, Spain, Estonia and France. His principal research interest is on how culture – specifically, language and religion – guides political behavior. He is the author of “Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-heritage Societies” and a series of articles on immigrant integration, civil war and terrorism. Laitin received his BA from Swarthmore College and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

Affiliated faculty at the Center for International Security and Cooperation
Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science Speaker Department of Political Science
Associate Professor of French and Director, Department of French and Italian Discussant Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages
Amalia Kessler Lewis Talbot and Nadine Hearn Shelton Professor of International Legal Studies Discussant Stanford Law School
Seminars

Paris attacks add to debate on Syria and immigration

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Last Friday's multiple terrorist attacks in Paris that killed 129 people and injured over 350 was the topic of KQED Radio’s “forum with Michael Krasny" (Monday, Nov. 16, 2015).   The discussion centered around the potential impact to US and European strategy for fighting ISIS, immigration policy, and to French nationalism, values and public discourse on multiculturalism and open borders.

Participating in the panel was French literature associate professor and TEC faculty affiliate Cécile Alduy.  Alduy is the author of the recent book Marine Le Pen's Words: Deciphering the New National Front's Discourse.

Joining Alduy were Bloomberg Paris bureau chief Geraldine Amiel, UC Berkeley professor of public policy Michael Nacht, and Brookings’ Center for Middle East Policy fellow William McCants.

Visit KQED Radio's Forum web article “France Closes Borders After Multiple Terror Attacks in Paris" to download a recording of this interview.

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Image of A banner with the drawing "Peace for Paris" of French artist Jean Jullien.
A banner with the drawing "Peace for Paris" of French artist Jean Jullien hangs on the facade of the city hall in Nantes, France, November 16, 2015, as people observe a minute of silence to pay tribute to the victims of the series of deadly attacks on Friday in Paris. | REUTERS/Stephane Mahe
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Conflict and Crisis: Implications of Ongoing Human Rights Violations in Syria

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**To RSVP, please email Jessie Brunner at jbrunner@stanford.edu.**

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Abstract

As the protracted and chaotic conflict in Syria continues into its fifth year, Syrians of all backgrounds are being subjected to gross human rights violations. A growing number of parties to the conflict, including the Government and the Islamic State, display disregard for international legal conventions and employ tactics such as sexual violence, murder, and torture that have resulted in mass civilian casualties, large-scale displacement, and the destruction of Syria’s cultural heritage.

Peter Bouckaert

Peter Bouckaert is Human Rights Watch’s emergencies director, coordinating the organization’s response to major wars and other human rights crises. A Belgian-born Stanford Law School graduate, Bouckaert has conducted fact-finding missions around the world, including currently documenting Syrian refugees in Europe.

Sareta Ashraph

Sareta Ashraph specializes in international criminal, humanitarian, and human rights law and has served since 2012 as the Senior Analyst on the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, investigating and reporting on violations of international law in the context of ongoing events in Syria.

To RSVP, please email Jessie Brunner at jbrunner@stanford.edu.

Peter Bouckaert Director, Emergencies, Human Rights Watch
Sareta Ashraph Senior Analyst, UN Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic
Seminars

On Cruelty: Global Reflections from the Age of Revolutions to the War on Citizenship

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This is the second meeting of the workshop series on Civility, Cruelty, Truth. A one-day event hosted by the Stanford Humanities Center, the workshop will explore the genealogies, promises, and limits of civic virtue—at the heart of which is the city, the classical polis, itself— as a universal ideal. European in its moral contours, constituted by a deep fascination with the rule of law, borders, and security, at once coercive and oblique in whom it excludes and includes, how it punishes and protects, the city held out the promise of a humane center for ethical and sovereign life, one upon which anticolonial struggles against European empires too were first conceived and mounted. This workshop will examine the ambiguous foundations and resolutions of that vision in Asia, Europe, and the fatal waters in between; a vision that has come to be marked today by extreme violence and tragic displacements, and which now presses new questions against the very limit of modern political imagination.
 
Faculty Organizer: Aishwary Kumar (Department of History)
Student Assistant: Ahoo Najafian (Department of Religious Studies)
 
Schedule (coming soon)
 

Co-sponsored by the Department of History, Department of Religious Studies, The Europe Center, The France- Stanford Center for interdisciplinary Studies, Program in Global Justice, McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, Stanford Global Studies, School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford Humanities Center, Center for South Asia

 

Stanford Humanities Center
424 Santa Teresa St.
 

Conferences

New study links immigrant naturalization to long-term political integration

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One of the key policy debates in Europe centers on how best to integrate immigrants. The issue is particularly salient in Switzerland where immigrants make up almost 25% of the population. New research from scholars at Stanford and the University of Zurich demonstrates that naturalization substantially improves the political integration of immigrants. 

Jens Hainmueller, faculty affiliate of The Europe Center and co-director of the Immigration and Integration Policy Lab, along with his co-authors Dominik Hangartner and Giuseppe Pietrantuono, use an innovative research strategy to show that naturalization serves as a catalyst for integration. 

Between 1970 and 2003 residents decided on naturalization applications in secret ballot referendumsin some Swiss municipalities. The researchers compare immigrants who just barely won a referendum with those that just barely lost, and the resulting natural experiment provides a treatment and control group that are almost identical. 

"In some cases, the difference between them was merely a few votes, which turned 49% into 51%. It was down to luck whether people received Swiss citizenship or not," says Professor Hainmueller. 

And because the researchers were able to survey immigrants 15 years after their naturalization decisions, the study provides one of the first unbiased estimates of the causal impact of naturalization on the long-term integration of immigrants. 

In Switzerland, where immigrants must wait twelve years to apply for citizenship, the study suggests that reducing this waiting period could improve immigrant integration and positively impact Swiss society. 

The full article is located on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences website.

A recent news article on this research can be found in the October 22, 2015 Stanford Report

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The Sunflower Movement and the Future of Taiwan's Political Culture

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Based on first-hand participant-observation, this talk will examine the culture, politics, and spatiality of the Sunflower Movement. Taiwan's most significant social movement in decades, the Sunflower Movement not only blocked the passage of a major trade deal with China, but reshaped popular discourse and redirected Taiwan's political and cultural trajectory. It re-energized student and civil society, precipitated the historic defeat of the KMT in the 2014 local elections, and prefigured the DPP's strong position coming into the 2016 presidential and legislative election season.
 
The primary spatial tactic of the Sunflowers-- occupation of a government building-- was so successful that a series of protests in the summer of 2015 by high school students was partly conceived and represented as a "second Sunflower Movement". These students, protesting "China-centric" curriculum changes, attempted to occupy the Ministry of Education building. Thwarted by police, these students settled for the front courtyard, where a Sunflower-style pattern of encampments and performances emerged. While this movement did not galvanize the wider public as dramatically as its predecessor, it did demonstrate the staying power of the Sunflower Movement and its occupation tactics for an even younger cohort of activists.
 
The Sunflower Movement showed that contingent, street-level, grassroots action can have a major impact on Taiwan's cross-Strait policies, and inspired and trained a new generation of youth activists. But with the likely 2016 presidential win of the DPP, which has attempted to draw support from student activists while presenting a less radical vision to mainstream voters, what's in store for the future of Taiwanese student and civic activism? And with strong evidence of growing Taiwanese national identification and pro-independence sentiment, particularly among youth, what's in store for the future of Taiwan's political culture? 
 

Speaker Bio

Ian Rowen in Legislative Yuan Ian Rowen in Taiwan's Legislative Yuan during the Sunflower Student Movement protest.

Ian Rowen is PhD Candidate in Geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and recent Visiting Fellow at the European Research Center on Contemporary Taiwan, Academia Sinica’s Institute of Sociology, and Fudan University. He participated in both the Sunflower and Umbrella Movements and has written about them for The Journal of Asian Studies, The Guardian, and The BBC (Chinese), among other outlets. He has also published about Asian politics and protest in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers (forthcoming) and the Annals of Tourism Research. His PhD research, funded by the US National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Program, and the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, has focused on the political geography of tourism and protest in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. 

 

Presentation Slides

Ian Rowen Doctoral Candidate University of Colorado Dept of Geography
Seminars

Sarah Cormack-Patton

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA  94305
 

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Post-doctoral Fellow at The Europe Center, 2015-2016
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Sarah Cormack-Patton received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh in August 2015. She is a political economist working at the nexus of comparative politics and international relations with a focus on European politics. Sarah is interested in how the cross-border movement of goods, capital, and people impacts the domestic policy-making process, and how domestic politics affect these cross-border flows. In her current research, Sarah examines these questions through the lens of international migration. Sarah's doctoral dissertation examined the ways in which varying bundles of migrant rights affect domestic preferences over immigration, the effect of these rights on the policy-making coalitions that form over immigration, and how these preferences aggregate in various institutional environments. In addition to her Ph.D., Sarah holds a BS in International Affairs and Modern Languages (French) and MS in International Affairs from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a MA in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh.

 
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