Why do super-wealthy business owners in developing democracies engage in politics? Is corporate political activity fundamentally “defensive” or “offensive” in nature?

Using an original longitudinal dataset of 177 Ukrainian oligarchs, this paper investigates the reasons for (and the ramifications of) tycoons’ political activity. The analysis differentiates between political and economic vulnerabilities — as well as capabilities — of the oligarchs as antecedents for their political strategy. I also investigate how asset specificity of oligarchs’ portfolios, as well as their media ownership and foreign holdings, mitigate the results. Theoretical implications are drawn for our understanding of state-business relations in emerging democracies lacking the rule of law.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Stan Markus is an Associate Professor of International Business at the University of South Carolina and an Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard. He received his Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University and his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

Professor Markus works on state-business relations and is broadly interested in the political economy of development. His projects explore property rights protection, oligarchs, corporate social responsibility, lobbying, corruption, state capacity, and institution building.

His book — Property, Predation, and Protection: Piranha Capitalism in Russia and Ukraine (Cambridge University Press, 2015) — was awarded the Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research. His research has also been published in the leading peer-reviewed journals in management (e.g. Academy of Management Review), political science (e.g. Comparative Political Studies), development studies (e.g. Studies in Comparative International Development), economic sociology (e.g. Socio-Economic Review), and general interest (e.g. Daedalus). It has also been recognized through many awards, including the Wilson Center Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in D.C.; the Harvard Academy Fellowship from the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies; the Jean Monnet Fellowship from the European University Institute; the Academy of Management Best Paper Award; and the Best Article in Comparative Politics Award from APSA.

Markus's commentary has been featured in media outlets, including CNN, BBC, New York Times, Washington Post, Bloomberg, Forbes, Fortune, CNBC, NPR, Vox, and Voice of America, among others.

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

Nora Fisher-Onar will present an original and timely key to (Turkey’s) politics as driven not by any perineal conflict between “Islamist vs. secularist,” “Turk vs. Kurd,” or “Sunni vs. Alevi.” Rather, she argues, the driving force of political contestation is shifting coalitions of moderates across camps who seek to pluralize public life, versus coalitions of those who champion ethno- and ethno-religious nationalism. Using the key to retell Turkey’s political history from the late Ottoman empire through to the present, she concludes with insights for coalition dynamics today. The talk emanates from her book, Contesting Pluralism(s): Islam, Liberalism, and Nationalism in Turkey and Beyond (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

This talk is hosted in partnership with CDDRL's Program on Turkey.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Nora Fisher-Onar is Associate Professor and Director of the Masters of Arts in International Studies at the University of San Francisco, as well as coordinator of Middle East Studies. Her research interests include IR and social theory, comparative politics (Turkey, Middle East, Europe), foreign policy analysis, political ideologies, gender, and history/memory.

She received a doctorate in IR from Oxford and holds master's and undergraduate degrees in international affairs from Johns Hopkins (SAIS) and Georgetown universities, respectively.

Fisher-Onar is the lead editor of the volume, Istanbul: Living With Difference in a Global City (Rutgers University Press, 2018) and author of Contesting Pluralism(s): Islam, Liberalism and Nationalism in Turkey (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

She has published extensively in academic journals like the Journal of Common Market Studies (JCMS), Conflict and Cooperation, Global Studies Quarterly, Millennium, Theory and Society, Women’s Studies International Forum, and Turkish Studies.

Fisher-Onar also contributes policy commentary to platforms like the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, the Guardian, and OpenDemocracy, and fora like Brookings, Carnegie, and the German Marshall Fund (GMF). At the GMF, she has served as a Ronald Asmus Fellow, a Transatlantic Academy Fellow, and a Non-Residential Fellow.

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

In 1985, James A. Baker III's “Program for Sustained Growth” proposed a set of economic policy reforms, including inflation stabilization, trade liberalization, greater openness to foreign investment, and privatization, that he believed would lead to faster growth in countries then known as the Third World, but now categorized as emerging and developing economies (EMDEs).

A country-specific, time-series assessment of the reform process reveals three clear facts. First, in the 10-year-period after stabilizing high inflation, the average growth rate of real GDP in EMDEs is 2.6 percentage points higher than in the prior ten-year period. Second, the corresponding growth increase for trade liberalization episodes is 2.66 percentage points. Third, in the decade after opening their capital markets to foreign equity investment, the spread between EMDEs average cost of equity capital and that of the US declines by 240 basis points. The three central facts of reform provide empirical support for the Baker Hypothesis.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Peter Blair Henry is the Class of 1984 Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and dean emeritus of New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business. The youngest person ever named to the Stern Deanship, Henry has authored numerous peer-reviewed articles in the flagship journals of economics and finance, as well as a book on global economic policy, Turnaround: Third World Lessons for First World Growth (Basic Books).

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

It’s almost impossible to sue a foreign government in U.S. courts. The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, the court-created “act of state” doctrine, and other common-law immunities shield foreign officials and governments from most lawsuits. For instance, courts have dismissed claims against China, Cuba, Venezuela, and Russia over allegations of torture, detentions, and election interference. Yet foreign governments have unfettered access to U.S. courts as plaintiffs. And foreign dictatorships—including Russia, China, Turkey, and Venezuela—have leveraged this access to harass political dissidents, critics, and even newspapers in the United States. These doctrines create an asymmetry at the heart of this Article: foreign dictators and their proxies can access our courts as plaintiffs to harass their opponents, but their regimes are, in turn, immune from lawsuits here.

This seminar will expose that asymmetry and argue that U.S. courts and Congress should make it harder for foreign dictators to abuse our legal system. This seminar offers three novel contributions. First, this seminar provides the first systematic assessment of foreign dictatorships in U.S. courts. While much of the literature is siloed by area of substantive law—focusing on contexts like human rights or property expropriations—this seminar treats dictators as a transsubstantive category of litigants, worthy of special analysis. Second, this seminar exposes how foreign dictators are increasingly taking advantage of U.S. courts and comity doctrines, especially as plaintiffs. In a misguided effort to promote harmonious foreign relations, courts have provided foreign dictators an array of protections and privileges, which dicta- tors are eagerly exploiting. Finally, this seminar demonstrates that there is no historical, constitutional, or statutory obligation on U.S. courts to give foreign dictators these legal protections and unfettered access to our courts. Because of that, I offer four concrete proposals to both stymie dictators’ access to U.S. courts as plaintiffs—through a proposed foreign sovereign anti-SLAPP statute—and weaken the protections that dictators enjoy as defendants. Simply stated, U.S. courts should not be instruments of foreign authoritarian oppression.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Diego A. Zambrano’s primary research and teaching interests lie in the areas of civil procedure, transnational litigation, and judicial federalism. His work explores the civil litigation landscape: the institutions, norms, and incentives that influence litigant and judicial behavior. Professor Zambrano also has an interest in comparative constitutional law and legal developments related to Venezuela. He currently leads an innovative Stanford Policy Lab tracking “Global Judicial Reforms” and has served as an advisor to pro-democracy political parties in Venezuela. In 2021, Professor Zambrano received the Barbara Allen Babcock Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Professor Zambrano’s scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming at the Columbia Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Stanford Law Review, and Virginia Law Review, among other journals, and has been honored by the American Association of Law Schools (AALS) and the National Civil Justice Institute. Professor Zambrano will be a co-author of the leading casebook Civil Procedure: A Modern Approach (8th ed. 2024) (with Marcus, Pfander, and Redish). In addition, Professor Zambrano serves as the current chair of the Federal Courts Section of the AALS. He also writes about legal issues for broader public audiences, with his contributions appearing in the Wall Street Journal, BBC News, and Lawfare.

After graduating with honors from Harvard Law School in 2013, Professor Zambrano spent three years as an associate at Cleary Gottlieb in New York, focusing on transnational litigation and arbitration. Before joining Stanford Law School in 2018, Professor Zambrano was a Bigelow Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School.

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

Research on remedies for affective polarization has primarily focused on psychological interventions, and limited studies consider how state institutions might depolarize voters. I argue that compulsory military service—a central state institution—can depolarize voters because it prevents early partisan sorting and increases the likelihood of contact between partisans during their impressionable years.

Leveraging the staggered abolition of mandatory conscription laws in fifteen European countries and employing a regression discontinuity design, I show that men exempt from mandatory conscription report higher levels of affective polarization than men who were subject to mass conscription. This effect is mainly driven by partisan parochialism among men exempt from service and is unrelated to ideological change. My findings emphasize the potential depolarizing effects of state institutions and illustrate how the abolition of mandatory service contributed to intensified patterns of affective polarization in Europe, contributing to the literature on the institutional origins of affective polarization.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Chagai M. Weiss is a postdoctoral fellow at the Conflict and Polarization Initiative at the King Center on Global Development at Stanford University. After spending two years as a research fellow at Harvard University's Middle East Initiative, Chagai received a Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Chagai's primary interest is in understanding the potential role of institutions in reducing prejudice and conflict in divided societies. Chagai's work has been published or is forthcoming in multiple venues, including Cambridge University Press (Elements in Experimental Political Science), the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Journal of Political Science, the American Political Science Review, and Comparative Political Studies.

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

REDS: RETHINKING EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT AND SECURITY

The REDS Seminar Series aims to deepen the research agenda on the new challenges facing Europe, especially on its eastern flank, and to build intellectual and institutional bridges across Stanford University, fostering interdisciplinary approaches to current global challenges.

REDS is organized by The Europe Center and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

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