Please join us for a conversation with Dr. Salam Fayyad, former Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority. The discussion will cover the quest for Palestinian statehood and governance reform, the ongoing war in Gaza and its ramifications, and the prospects for peace and stability in the Middle East.

Dr. Fayyad will be in conversation with Larry Diamond, Mosbacher Senior Fellow on Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Hesham Sallam, Senior Research Scholar and Associate Director for Research at CDDRL. Together, they lead CDDRL's Program on Arab Reform and Democracy. Kathryn Stoner, Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, will provide introductory remarks.

This is an in-person event. Only those with an active Stanford ID and access to the Bechtel Conference Center in Encina Hall may attend in person. All attendees will need to show their Stanford ID at check-in.

Ukraine's EU accession depends greatly on success in tackling corruption. Since 2014, Ukraine has built an extensive anticorruption institutional architecture, which has produced significant policy outcomes, but perception indices still show Ukraine as trailing most other European countries. This article summarizes Ukraine’s post-Euromaidan anticorruption reforms in the context of similar reforms pursued by other post-Communist EU candidate states pre-accession. The article then examines Ukraine’s corruption perceptions’ indices trajectory in comparative terms and wades into the debate over whether different types of perception indices proxy well for corruption incidence. The comparative look suggests that Ukraine is better prepared for EU accession in terms of control of corruption than is widely assumed.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Maria Popova is an Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University and Scientific Director of the Jean Monnet Centre Montreal. She also serves as Editor of the Cambridge Elements Series on Politics and Society from Central Europe to Central Asia. Her work explores the rule of law and democracy in Eastern Europe. Her first book, Politicized Justice in Emerging Democracies, which won the American Association for Ukrainian Studies book prize in 2013, examines the weaponization of law to manipulate elections and control the media in Russia and Ukraine. Her recent articles have focused on judicial and anticorruption reform in post-Maidan Ukraine, the politics of anticorruption campaigns in Eastern Europe, conspiracies, and illiberalism. Her new book with Oxana Shevel on the roots of the Russo-Ukrainian war entitled Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States is now available from Polity Press.

How does climate volatility alter citizen demands, change voting behavior, and affect the long-term reputation of elected (and unelected) officials? Does this effect come primarily through the economic damages caused by climate volatility or through alternative channels? Are they persistent or transitory?

As climate volatility becomes more extreme, so too will its destabilizing impact on politics. Yet we know relatively little about its effects on voting behavior, particularly in the developing world, and even less about downstream effects on the reputation of candidates and political institutions. Exploring the mechanisms behind these effects is also difficult due to a lack of data with the spatial and temporal resolution necessary for credible subnational analysis.

Here, we provide some of the first large-scale evidence on climate volatility’s effect on several measures of political accountability by combining several sources of survey data with high-resolution meteorological and climatic data. We also utilize a novel source of subnational economic data generated by combining remote sensing data with a convolutional neural network to generate annual, high-resolution estimates of growth at the 1x1km level for all of Africa. This ML-generated measure is a considerable improvement over nightlights-based alternatives and permits credible mediation analysis linking negative political outcomes to climate volatility through reductions in economic growth. We supplement our focus on Africa with companion estimates from Latin America, exploiting variation in national-level institutions to examine whether they can explain the substantial effect heterogeneity we observe in our reduced-form results.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Amanda Kennard is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. She studies the politics of decarbonization and the impacts of climate change on political systems. She holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University, an M.S. from Georgetown University, and a B.A. from New York University.

Brandon de la Cuesta is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE), working primarily with Marshall Burke and other members of the Environmental Change and Human Outcomes (ECHO) lab to estimate the impact of climate change on various measures of political accountability. Brandon specializes in comparative political economy and causal inference with a strong regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Many of his current projects involve the use of remote sensing data and machine learning algorithms, particularly convolutional neural nets, to create global, high-resolution data that can be used for downstream inference tasks. A development economics application of this data was recently featured as the cover article in Nature.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Encina E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

As the climate crisis grows more urgent, so does the question of how we can encourage citizens to mitigate it. We partner with a municipal government and NGO in Lebanon to evaluate a program that tracks and inspects citizens’ waste and then sends personalized feedback on how they can improve sorting quality. Two months after the intervention, the program improved sorting quality by an average of 0.3 out of 5 stars (14%) overall and 1.1 stars (42%) among those who complied with the program. Treated households were also over three times as likely to sign up for a raffle for ‘green’ prizes four months later (5.4% vs. 1.6%) — demonstrating an impact on other environmentally-conscious behaviors. However, positive effects disappear after the program ends. We find null results on sorting quality at the 12-month mark for all but a select few households who continue complying with the program even after inspections stop. We also observe negative treatment effects on the likelihood of volunteering for other environmental initiatives, indicating fatigue. The results suggest that information combined with monitoring can boost civic behaviors — but that continuous monitoring is likely needed to unlock durable results.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Salma Mousa is a scholar of social cohesion — typically using field experiments and partnerships with local governments and NGOs to explore the question of how to build it in the Middle East and beyond. Currently an Assistant Professor at UCLA's political science department, her research has been published in Science and covered by The Economist, BBC, Der Spiegel, the Times of London, and PBS NOVA. Salma received her PhD from Stanford University's political science department in 2020 and was previously an Assistant Professor of political science at Yale University.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Encina E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

This talk will be based on Lankina's 2022 award-winning book, The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia. She will discuss how tsarist social divides and the institution of sosloviye (estate) shaped social structure during communism and why the social longue durée matters for understanding post-Communist political regime trajectories.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Tomila Lankina is professor of International Relations at the IR Department of the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has worked on democracy and authoritarianism, mass protests and historical drivers of human capital and political regime change in Russia and other countries; she has also analyzed the propaganda and disinformation campaigns in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and aggression in Ukraine. Her latest research is on social structure and inequality. Her book, The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia: From Imperial Bourgeoisie to Post-Communist Middle Class (Cambridge University Press 2022), won the 2023 J. David Greenstone Prize for the best book in the Politics and History section of the American Political Science Association and the 2023 Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eurasia, or Eastern Europe in anthropology, political science, sociology, or geography in the previous calendar year. The book also received “Honorable Mention” for the Sartori Book Award of the American Political Science Association Organized Section for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Encina E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

How do regimes instrumentalize ascriptive identity to maintain political power? In this paper, I document, analyze, and seek to explain patterns of elite continuity in Kuwait. To do this, I establish the pre-oil wealth and "rootedness" of Kuwaiti families and connect this status to post-oil measures of social prestige. Next, I analyze survey data from 13,000 respondents from across the region to show that local "rootedness" positively impacts the ability of Arab Gulf nationals to obtain services from their governments. Taken together, my evidence suggests that ascriptive identity associated with one's historical family lineage impacts economic, political, and social outcomes for citizens in ways that maintain historical rank hierarchies.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Lisa Blaydes is Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. She is the author of Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak's Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and State of Repression: Iraq under Saddam Hussein (Princeton University Press, 2018).

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Encina E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

As we navigate the complexities of global security in the 21st century, it is essential to confront the broader implications of Russia's actions in Ukraine for the world at large. The conflict serves as a stark reminder of the challenges posed by authoritarian aggression and the erosion of international norms and institutions. In this panel, Ms. Oleksandra Matviichuk will explore the interconnectedness of global security dynamics, examining how Russia's human rights violations in Ukraine reverberate across borders. Join us for a timely and thought-provoking conversation that transcends borders as we collectively strive to confront the challenges of the 21st century and build a more secure and resilient world for all.

The S.T. Lee Lectureship is named for Seng Tee Lee, a business executive and noted philanthropist. Dr. Lee is the director of the Lee group of companies in Singapore and of the Lee Foundation.

Dr. Lee endowed the annual lectureship at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies in order to raise public understanding of the complex policy issues facing the global community today and to increase support for informed international cooperation. The S.T. Lee Distinguished Lecturer is chosen for his or her international reputation as a leader in international political, economic, social, and health issues and strategic policy-making concerns.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Oleksandra Matviichuk, the head of the Center for Civil Liberties, is a human rights lawyer focused on issues within Ukraine and the OSCE region. She leads initiatives aimed at fostering democracy and safeguarding human rights. The organization supports legislative reforms, monitors law enforcement and judiciary, conducts wide education programs, and leads international solidarity efforts. In response to the full-scale war, Matviichuk co-founded the "Tribunal for Putin" initiative, documenting war crimes across affected Ukrainian regions. Recognized for her unwavering commitment, she received the Democracy Defender Award and participated in the Ukrainian Emerging Leaders Program at Stanford University.

In 2022, she earned the prestigious Right Livelihood Award and was named one of the Financial Times' 25 Most Influential Women, while the Center for Civil Liberties received the Nobel Peace Prize under her leadership.

This talk overviews the state of governance in the Arab world and the conditions undermining governance improvement in the countries of the region, including corruption, rentier states, and social factionalism. The talk situates these realities in different conceptions and measurements of governance, including those informed by historical, governmental, economic, and sociocultural perspectives. Finally, it reflects on the prospects for a "governance renaissance" in the Arab world.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Raed H. Charafeddine was first vice-governor at Banque du Liban, Lebanon’s central bank, from April 2009 till March 2019 and served as alternate Governor for Lebanon at the International Monetary Fund. An expert in financial markets, his career spans thirty-five years in central and commercial banking. He is currently a partner and executive board director of Vita F&B Capital, a MEA-focused strategic advisory firm. Charafeddine served as a board member and advisor for several NGOs that focus on alleviating poverty, improving education, healthcare, social justice, and women's empowerment. He was also a volunteer consultant for the United Nations Development Program in Beirut on conflict transformation. He holds a BA and an MBA from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.