Abstract:

Democracies are in danger. Around the world, a rising wave of populist leaders threatens to erode the core structures of democratic self rule. In the United States, the election of Donald Trump marked a decisive turning point for many. What kind of president calls the news media the “enemy of the American people,” or sees a moral equivalence between violent neo-Nazi protesters in paramilitary formation and residents of a college town defending the racial and ethnic diversity of their homes? Yet, whatever our concerns about the current president, we can be assured that the Constitution offers safeguards to protect against lasting damage—or can we?  How to Save a Constitutional Democracy mounts an urgent argument that we can no longer afford to be complacent. Constitutional rules can either hinder or hasten the decline of democratic institutions. The checks and balances of the federal government, a robust civil society and media, and individual rights—such as those enshrined in the First Amendment—do not necessarily succeed as bulwarks against democratic decline. Rather, the sobering reality for the United States is that, to a much greater extent than is commonly realized, the Constitution’s design makes democratic erosion more, not less, likely. But we—and the rest of the world—can do better. The authors conclude by laying out practical steps for how laws and constitutional design can play a more positive role in managing the risk of democratic decline.

Speaker Bio:

Tom Ginsburg is Leo Spitz Professor of Law, University of Chicago, and a professor of political science.  He is also director of the Comparative Constitutions Project   He focuses on comparative and international law from an interdisciplinary perspective. He holds BA, JD, and PhD degrees from the University of California at Berkeley. His books include Judicial Review in New Democracies (2003), which won the C. Herman Pritchett Award from the American Political Science Association; The Endurance of National Constitutions (2009), which also won a best book prize from APSA; Constitutions in Authoritarian Regimes (2014); and Law and Development in Middle-Income Countries (2014)..

 

 

Aziz Huq is is the Frank and Bernice J. Greenberg Professor of Law at the University of Chicago. His scholarship focuses on how institutional design influences individual rights and liberties. He clerked for Judge Robert D. Sack of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and then for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court of the United States. Before teaching, he led the Brennan Center’s project on Liberty and National Security and was a senior consultant analyst for the International Crisis Group.

Abstract:

The recent surge in nationalism and tribalism brings renewed salience to questions of identity within and across borders. Notably, it exposes the tension between bounded social identities, on the one hand, and universalist yearnings and commitments, on the other. Liberal democracy—and the ostensible universalism on which it is based—is struggling to resolve this tension. I turn instead to the cosmopolitan tradition. I argue that cosmopolitanism—and a genuinely cosmopolitan (i.e., unbounded) social identity, in particular—represents not just an extension of scope from the national to the global, but a qualitative shift that permeates all identities, and serves to fundamentally protect and liberate particularist attachments from their otherwise inherent instabilities and contradictions. On this view, the promise of cosmopolitanism does not rest exclusively in what it can deliver beyond our borders, but also in its potential to fundamentally recast social identities within boundaries, resolving crises of identity at all levels of society.

 

Speaker Bio:

Shahrzad Sabet's research spans politics, economics, psychology, and philosophy. She is a Fellow at the University of Maryland’s Bahá’í Chair for World Peace Program. Previously, she was a Senior Research Fellow at Princeton University’s Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard, where she recently received her PhD in Government. Her work has been featured in outlets such as The Washington Post and The New York Times.

Abstract:

Venezuela finds itself mired in an unprecedented economic and political crisis. The economy has contracted nearly 50% since President Maduro took office in 2013, oil production has declined to levels below those last seen in 1950, and inflation has reached an estimated annual rate of over 1.3 million percent. Millions have fled abroad in search of a better life, making Venezuela’s migration crisis the second worst in the world after Syria’s. In 2019, the ruling Maduro regime faces new challenges at home from an opposition that has declared it illegitimate, and from abroad due to diplomatic non-recognition by over 50 governments and the imposition of U.S. sanctions on the Venezuelan oil industry. This talk will examine the apparently intractable political and economic crisis facing Venezuela, the role of the military in keeping the present government in power, and the impact of the latest domestic and international pressures on the Maduro regime

 

Speaker Bio:

Harold Trinkunas is the Deputy Director of and a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Prior to arriving at Stanford, Dr. Trinkunas served as the Charles W. Robinson Chair and senior fellow and director of the Latin America Initiative in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. His research focuses on issues related to foreign policy, governance, and security, particularly in Latin America. Trinkunas has written on emerging powers and the international order, ungoverned spaces, terrorism financing, borders, democratic civil-military relations, drug policy and Internet governance. He received his doctorate in political science from Stanford University in 1999. He was born in Maracaibo, Venezuela.

Abstract:

This talk develops a framework to analyze how strategic politicians make tradeoffs and prioritize among six objectives (winning and staying in office, “good policy”, institutional power, career advancement, personal gain, and historical legacy) in particular situations. It focuses on the nature of the political vehicles (notably parties) within which politicians operate and broader political opportunity structures as determinants of how objectives are prioritized and strategic choices are made. While drawing evidence from a variety of political systems, the empirical focus will be on social policy choices in advanced industrial countries.

 

Speaker Bio:

R. Kent Weaver is Professor of Public Policy and Government at Georgetown University and a Visiting Professor at Stanford University in winter and spring 2019. His research focuses on the strategic behavior of politicians, political institutions, and comparative social policy.

The most violent places in the world today are not at war. Brazil has had more violent death than Syria for the last three years. More people have died in Mexico in the last decade than in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. The world's worst violence is rooted in highly unequal, highly polarized democracies that are buckling under a maelstrom of gangs, organized crime, political conflict, and state brutality. Such devastating violence can feel hopeless, yet some places--from Colombia to the Republic of Georgia--have been able to recover. 

A Savage Order uncovers what makes these locales so bloody - including the U.S., which includes four of the world's fifty most violent cities. It then charts how they can get better. Based on years of research and field work around the world, A Savage Order overturns much conventional wisdom about the causes of bloodshed, and how the most violent places in the world can recover.

 

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld advises governments, philanthropists, and activists on how democracies make major social change. As a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, she particularly focuses on countries facing violence, corruption, and other problems of poor governance.

In 2010, Time magazine named her one of the top 40 political leaders under 40 in America for her decade of work as the founding CEO of the Truman National Security Project, which assisted scores of national, state, and local political campaigns, advocated for legislation, and fostered a new generation of military veterans and national security leaders to advance policies that would enhance global security, democracy, and human dignity. In 2011, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton appointed Kleinfeld to the Foreign Affairs Policy Board, which advises the secretary of state quarterly, a role she served through 2014. In 2015, she was named a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum.

Kleinfeld is the author of three books, including A Savage Order: How the World’s Deadliest Countries Can Forge a Path to Security (Knopf, 2018). Her previous book, Advancing the Rule of Law Abroad: Next Generation Reform (Carnegie, 2012), was chosen by Foreign Affairs magazine as one of the best foreign policy books of 2012. She appears frequently in the media, from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, to the BBC, Fox & Friends, and radio and television in the U.S. and overseas.

Kleinfeld received her B.A. from Yale University and her M.Phil. and D.Phil. from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes scholar. She lives with her husband and two daughters in New Mexico and works in Washington, D,C., but hearkens often to the log house on a dirt road where she was raised in her beloved Fairbanks, Alaska