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About the Event: Following the Allied invasion of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. government and military officials revived counterinsurgency doctrine and practice—widely employed, though not invented, during the era of decolonization—in service of the nation’s ongoing War on Terror. This revival was dramatized during a widely publicized screening at the Pentagon of Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic film The Battle of Algiers (1966). What insights into (Algerian) insurgency and (French) counterinsurgency did U.S. officials hope to glean from Pontecorvo’s film? And how would these insights be mobilized, if at all, for the occupation of Iraq and other insurgent geographies? 

This talk revisits this historical moment and the questions it raises about the relationship between U.S. militarism and the uses of literature and film in the management of insurgency in Africa and Western Asia.

 

About the Speaker: Vaughn Rasberry is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Academic Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford. He is the author of Race and the Totalitarian Century: Geopolitics and the Black Literary Imagination (Harvard UP, 2016), winner of the Ralph Bunche Award from the American Political Science Association and an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. 

 

 

In October, the Justice Department sued Google for violating antitrust laws.These antitrust concerns are motivated by the potential economic harms caused by the tech giants’ monopoly positions, but there might be greater reason to worry about the political harms that the platforms pose to American democracy because of their control over the modern information ecosystem. If the antitrust laws are designed to address economic harms, how should policymakers confront the political harms from dominant digital platforms?

Join us on November 18th at 10 a.m. PST to discuss recommendations from the new White Paper of the Stanford Working Group on Platform Scale, where we will assess how today’s digital platforms pose threats to American democracy and a proposal for how creative technological interventions might mitigate the platform’s growing power. Panelists include Francis Fukuyama, Mosbacher Director of Stanford University’s Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and a leader at the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet, Ashish Goel, Professor of Management Science and Engineering and (by courtesy) Computer Science at Stanford University, Barak D. Richman, Professor of Law and Business Administration at Duke University, Luigi Zingales, Professor of Economics at the Chicago Booth School of Business and Co-host of the podcast Capitalisn't, and Dick Costolo, former CEO of Twitter, founder and CEO of multiple startups, and now a Managing Partner at 01 Advisors, in conversation with Kelly Born, Executive Director of the Cyber Policy Center as they discuss new ideas in antitrust.

This event is open to Stanford undergraduate students only. 

The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) will be accepting applications from eligible juniors on who are interested in writing their senior thesis on a subject touching upon democracy, economic development, and rule of law (DDRL) from any university department.  The application period opens on January 11, 2021 and runs through February 12, 2021.   CDDRL faculty and current honors students will be present to discuss the program and answer any questions.

For more information on the Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program, please click here.

**Please note all CDDRL events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone

ABSTRACT

This talk is based on the co-authors' recent paper "How Much Will the Pandemic Change Egyptian Governance and for How Long?" The Egyptian regime has reacted in an unexpected way to the global pandemic—with civilian, technocratic, and expert bodies leading the way and even some (admittedly officially patrolled) political debate being allowed to emerge. This talk examines these recent developments and evaluates whether they mark a real change in Egyptian governance, and if so, why, what kind, and will it last.

Co-Authors Bios

Amr Hamzawy is currently a senior research scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. He studied political science and developmental studies in Cairo, The Hague, and Berlin. He was previously an associate professor of political science at Cairo University and a professor of public policy at the American University in Cairo. Between 2016 and 2017, he served as a senior fellow in the Middle East program and the Democracy and Rule of Law program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC. His research and teaching interests as well as his academic publications focus on democratization processes in Egypt, tensions between freedom and repression in the Egyptian public space, political movements and civil society in Egypt, contemporary debates in Arab political thought, and human rights and governance in the Arab world. His new book On The Habits of Neoauthoritarianism – Politics in Egypt Between 2013 and 2019appeared in Arabic in September 2019. Hamzawy is a former member of the People’s Assembly after being elected in the first Parliamentary elections in Egypt after the January 25, 2011 revolution. He is also a former member of the Egyptian National Council for Human Rights. Hamzawy contributes a weekly op-ed to the All Arab daily al-Quds al-Arabi.

Nathan Brown is Professor of Political Science and International Relations at The George Washington University. He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow at The Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and serves on the board of trustees at the American University in Cairo. His contributions span a wide range of topics, including Islamist movements, Egyptian politics, Palestinian politics, and Arab law and constitutionalism. Dr. Brown served as the president of the Middle East Studies Association between 2013 and 2015. He was previously named a Guggenheim Fellow and a Carnegie Scholar by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and is a former fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. His previous research was funded by the United States Institute of Peace and two Fulbright fellowships. He received the Oscar and Shoshana Trachtenberg Award for Scholarship from George Washington University in 2015 and the Harry Harding teaching award from the Elliott School of International Affairs in 2014. His dissertation received the Malcolm Kerr award from the Middle East Studies Association in 1987. Dr. Brown is the author of six books, including Arguing Islam after the Revival of Arab Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), and When Victory is Not an Option: Islamist Movements in Arab Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012). He received his B.A. in political science from the University of Chicago and his M.A. and Ph.D. in politics and Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University. 

**Please note all CDDRL events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone

About this Event:  This book offers a novel theory of the nuances in relationships between business and political elites in three authoritarian regimes in developing Asia: Indonesia under Suharto’s New Order, Malaysia under the Barisan Nasional (BN), and China under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). How did business-state relations in all three regimes come to be seen as “crony,” and why do some crony arrangements generate growth and political stability and others stagnation or crisis? The book develops conceptual models of state-business relations (mutual alignment and mutual endangerment) and explains their genesis. I argue that the main factors explaining why one pattern dominates over the other are the political status of capitalists, determined during regime formation, and the political management of the financial system. The research draws on extensive archival and interview sources as well as novel datasets on corporate filings in each country.

 

About the Speaker:  Meg Rithmire is F. Warren MacFarlan associate professor in the Business, Government, and International Economy Unit. Professor Rithmire holds a PhD in Government from Harvard University, and her primary expertise is in the comparative political economy of development with a focus on China and Asia. Her first book, Land Bargains and Chinese Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 2015), examines the role of land politics, urban governments, and local property rights regimes in the Chinese economic reforms. A new project, for which Meg conducted fieldwork in Asia 2016-2017, investigates the relationship between capital and the state and globalization in Asia. The project focuses on a comparison of China, Malaysia, and Indonesia from the early 1980s to the present. The research has two components; first, examining how governments attempt to discipline business and when those efforts succeed and, second, how business adapts to different methods of state control. 

 

 

 

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About the Event:   As we enter the stretch run of the 2020 US election campaign, join us for an inside look at how public policy is formulated on political campaigns, and the key policy debates animating the election.

 

About the Speaker:  Lanhee J. Chen, Ph.D. is the David and Diane Steffy Fellow in American Public Policy Studies at the Hoover Institution; Director of Domestic Policy Studies and Lecturer in the Public Policy Program at Stanford University; and an affiliated faculty member of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute. 

A veteran of several high-profile political campaigns, Chen has worked in government, the private sector, and academia. 

Chen has advised numerous major campaigns, including four presidential efforts.  In 2012, he was policy director of the Romney-Ryan campaign, serving as Governor Mitt Romney’s chief policy adviser and a senior strategist on the campaign.  Chen also advised Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s 2016 bid; Romney’s 2008 effort; and the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign in 2004.  In the 2014 and 2018 campaign cycles, he was the Senior Adviser on Policy to the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC). 

He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science, A.M. in Political Science, J.D. cum laude, and A.B. magna cum laude in Government, all from Harvard University.   

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About the Event: How does the widespread frustration that often accompanies democratic transitions shape the political cleavages underlying the party systems that emerge from them? Nine years after the 2010–11 uprising, Tunisia’s 2019 elections took place against a backdrop of widespread frustration with the party system that emerged during the ensuing transition. The elections presented opportunities to a diverse set of outsiders, many of whom brandished antiparty system messages, including unapologetic boosters of the former ruling party, a would-be plutocrat jailed on charges of corruption, and a broad set of antiparty independents. Drawing upon campaign materials and a nationally representative postelection survey, this presentation will describe the differences in the antiparty system messages and the ways that nostalgia underlies them. Through this analysis, I will consider a set of theoretical propositions arising from the literature on the dynamics of political cleavages in party systems in new democracies. 

About the Speaker: 

Nate Grubman is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. In the fall, he will receive his PhD in political science from Yale University. His dissertation uses the case of postuprising Tunisia to explore the question of why party systems in many new democracies furnish few economic policy choices, as well as the consequences of this absence of choice. More broadly, his research focuses on political nostalgia, ideology, corruption, and authoritarian legacies in new democracies. 

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About the Event:

Can intergroup contact build social cohesion after war? I randomly assigned Iraqi Christians displaced by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to an all-Christian soccer team or to a team mixed with Muslims. The intervention improved behaviors toward Muslim peers: Christians with Muslim teammates were more likely to vote for a Muslim (not on their team) to receive a sportsmanship award, register for a mixed team next season, and train with Muslims 6 months after the intervention. The intervention did not substantially affect behaviors in other social contexts, such as patronizing a restaurant in Muslim-dominated Mosul or attending a mixed social event, nor did it yield consistent effects on intergroup attitudes. Although contact can build tolerant behaviors toward peers within an intervention, building broader social cohesion outside of it is more challenging.

 

About the Speaker:

Salma Mousa is an Egyptian scholar of migration, conflict, and social cohesion.  Prior to joining CDDRL, Salma held fellowships at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Stanford's Immigration Policy Lab, the Freeman Spogli Institute, the Stanford Center for International Conflict and Negotiation, the McCoy Center for Ethics in Society, and the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.  Her research is forthcoming as a cover article in Science, and has been covered by The Economist, the BBC, and Der Spiegel, and featured on the front page of the Times of London and PBS NOVA.  Salma received a PhD in Political Science from Stanford in 2020.

**Please note all CDDRL events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone

About the Event:

What are the costs of the Chinese regime's fixation on quelling dissent in the name of political order, or “stability”? Using novel datasets and a variety of methodologies, Welfare for Autocrats shows how China has reshaped its major social assistance program, Dibao, around this preoccupation, turning an effort to alleviate poverty into a tool of surveillance and repression. This distortion of Dibao damages perceptions of government competence and legitimacy and can trigger unrest among those denied benefits. Welfare for Autocrats traces how China's approach to enforcing order transformed at the turn of the 21st century and identifies the phenomenon of seepage whereby one policy—in this case, quelling dissent—alters the allocation of resources and goals of unrelated areas of government. These findings challenge the view that concessions and repression are distinct strategies in authoritarian regimes and departs from the assumption that all tools of repression were originally designed as such.

 

About the Speaker:

Jennifer Pan is an Assistant Professor of Communication, and an Assistant Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford University. Her research resides at the intersection political communication and authoritarian politics, showing how authoritarian governments try to control society, how the public responds, and when and why each is successful. Her work has appeared in peer-reviewed publications such as the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Politics, and Science.