SURF Research and Publications
SURF provides students with a unique opportunity to engage in research training in international relations and simultaneously conduct their own research.
Students will participate in several workshops to learn how to formulate a research question, collect data, and identify the appropriate method to analyze that data. The workshops are designed so students can immediately apply this knowledge to their own research projects. While we expect that students already have some research experience, our program is tailored specifically to addressing the questions of international collaboration. Each SURF participant is an expert in their area of interest, and the SURF program is a way to leverage that expertise and apply it in a new context.
Memos
Exporting the Tools of Dictatorship: The Politics of China’s Technology Transfers to Africa
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The Chinese government is revolutionizing digital surveillance at home. Are digital technology transfers from Huawei, China’s leading information technology company, enabling recipient governments to expand their digital surveillance operations and engage in more targeted repression against dissidents?
Escaping femininity, claiming respectability: Culture, class and young women in Turkey
Chapter in The I.B.Tauris Handbook of Sociology and the Middle East, edited by Fatma Müge Göçek and Gamze Evcimen
This report was prepared for the City of Oakland’s Department of Violence Prevention (DVP) as a landscape analysis of the Latino community in Oakland.
Transforming Ukraine's research and development to become a driving force of reconstruction
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A chapter in Rebuilding Ukraine: Principles and policies, edited by Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Ilona Sologoub, and Beatrice Weder di Mauro.
Associational Party-Building: A Path to Rebuilding Democracy
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Regimes, Oppositions, and External Actors after the Spring
Chapter in Struggles for Political Change in the Arab World, edited by Lisa Blaydes, Amr Hamzawy, and Hesham Sallam.
Labor conflict within foreign, domestic, and Chinese-owned manufacturing firms in Ethiopia
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A large firm survey shows that labor conflicts in Ethiopia are more frequent in foreign-owned firms, especially those that are Chinese-owned. Foreign firms hire similarly educated and experienced workers, while offering similar salaries and benefits. We draw on case studies to explore reasons why foreign, and especially Chinese-owned firms, face exceptional levels of labor conflict. Misaligned perceptions about the role of local labor laws may be an important driver of conflict.
Risk Pooling and Precautionary Saving in Village Economies
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A new method to test for efficient risk pooling allows for intertemporal smoothing, non-homothetic consumption, and heterogeneous risk and time preferences.
Frameworks for a Developmental Welfare State: Lessons From Pakistan's Ehsaas Programme
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A California 100 Report on Policies and Future Scenarios
The Long-Run Consequences of The Opium Concessions for Out-Group Animosity on Java
This article examines the consequences of the opium concession system in the Dutch East Indies—a nineteenth-century institution through which the Dutch would auction the monopolistic right to sell opium in a given locality.
Keep it Simple: A Field Experiment on Information Sharing Among Strangers
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The obsolescing bargain crosses the Belt and Road Initiative: renegotiations on BRI projects
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A study examining the BRI through the lens of the obsolescing bargain to evaluate the practices of China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and policy banks in mitigating political risk.
Driving while unauthorized: Auto insurance remains unchanged when providing driver licenses to unauthorized immigrants in California
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What is the effect of offering driver's licenses to undocumented people? Hans Lueders and Micah Mumper offer answers.
A short book about the challenges to liberalism from the right and the left by the bestselling author of The Origins of Political Order.
Pascaline Dupas and co-authors Agness, Baseler, Chassang, and Snowberg leverage individual choice data they generate on farmers in western Kenya to solve a general problem: do behavioral phenomena drive individual choices when trading off cash for time, or cash and time for goods?
Pandemic Spikes and Broken Spears: Indigenous Resilience after the Conquest of Mexico
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In a new paper for the Journal of Historical Political Economy, Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Saumitra Jha examine the conditions under which indigenous communities in Mexico were able to overcome the onslaught of disease and violence that they faced.
Displacing fishmeal with protein derived from stranded methane
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Stanford researchers reveal how to turn a global warming liability into a profitable food security solution
Democracy's Arc: From Resurgent to Imperiled
In his final essay as co-editor of the Journal of Democracy, Larry Diamond calls this moment the darkest for freedom in a half-century. Whether democracy regains its footing will depend on how democratic leaders and citizens respond to emboldened authoritarians and divisions within their own societies.
Nate Grubman shows how the repeated failures of Tunisia’s once-promising democratic transition created a crisis ripe for exploitation by a populist outsider
How Voters Respond to Presidential Assaults on Checks and Balances: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Turkey
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Why do voters support executive aggrandizement?