About the Seminar: Better regulation or regulatory policy and governance has been on the agenda of Western governments for about 20 years. The OECD regularly publishes overviews and adopts recommendations.

In Germany, the adoption of the Normenkontrollrat Act in 2006 and the subsequent establishment of the National Regulatory Control Council (NKR) as the national oversight body marked the beginning of the Better Regulation Policy. The presentation explains the working methods of the NKR as well as the highlights of its work, especially with regard to efforts to reduce unnecessary bureaucracy, to improve the preparation of draft legislation, and to digitalize and modernize the administration in Germany.

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About the Speaker:

Dr. Johannes Ludewig, Chairman of NKR 2006-2021; Chairman of German Railways and afterwards Community of European Railways, Brussels 1997-2010; State Secretary Federal Ministry of Economics (1995-1997); Economic and Financial Advisor to the German Federal Chancellor, also responsible for the economic reconstruction of East Germany after Reunification 1990; PhD 1975 (University of Hamburg); MS 1972 (Stanford).

 

 

The American Passport in Turkey explores the diverse meanings and values that people outside of the United States attribute to U.S. citizenship, specifically those who possess or seek to obtain U.S. citizenship while residing in Turkey. Özlem Altan-Olcay and Evren Balta interviewed more than one hundred individuals and families and, through their narratives, shed light on how U.S. citizenship is imagined, experienced, and practiced outside of the United States. Offering a corrective to citizenship studies where discussions of inequality are largely limited to domestic frames, Altan-Olcay and Balta argue that the relationship between inequality and citizenship regimes can only be fully understood if considered transnationally. Additionally, The American Passport in Turkey demonstrates that U.S. global power not only reveals itself in terms of foreign policy but also manifests in the active desires people have for U.S. citizenship, even when they do not live in the United States. These citizens, according to the authors, create a new kind of empire with borders and citizen-state relations that do not map onto recognizable political territories.

The American Passport in Turkey has recently won the American Sociological Association, Global and Transnational Sociology Section, Best Book by an International Scholar Award.
 

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Özlem Altan-Olcay is an associate professor in the Department of International Relations and the associate director of the Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey. She is also an editor of Gender, Place, and Culture as well as an assistant editor of Citizenship Studies. She has a Ph.D. degree from New York University, Department of Politics. Her primary research interests include citizenship studies and gender and development. Her research has been supported by the New York University International Center for Advanced Studies, the UN Population Council, the Middle East Research Competition, the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, the Turkish Science Academy, and the EU Marie Curie Individual Fellowship Program. Some of her recent articles have appeared in Development and Change, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Feminist Economics, Gender, Place and Culture, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Sociology, Social Politics, and Women’s Studies International Forum. She has recently co-authored (with E. Balta) The American Passport in Turkey: National Citizenship in the Age of Transnationalism, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press (2020).
 

Evren Balta is a Professor of International Relations and the chair of the International Relations Department at  Özyeğin University. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Party Politics, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Sociology, Gender Place & Culture. She is the author of The American Passport in Turkey: National Citizenship in the Age of Transnationalism (with O Altan-Olcay, University of Pennsylvania, 2020), Age of Uneasiness (İletisim, 2019), and Global Security Complex (İletisim, 2012). She is the editor of Neighbors with Suspicion: Dynamics of Turkish-Russian Relations (with G. Ozcan and B. Besgul, İletisim, 2017); Introduction to Global Politics (Iletisim, 2014) and Military, State and Politics in Turkey (with I. Akca, Bilgi University, 2010). Her research has been supported by the American Association for the University Women, Mellon Foundation, Bella Zeller Scholarship Trust Fund, the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, and the Fulbright Scholar Program. In 2018, she received the Distinguished Alumni Award of the Political Science Program at the CUNY-The Graduate Center. Balta is a senior scholar at Istanbul Policy Center, a member of Global Relations Forum, and co-editor of International Relations Journal. She is appointed as the academic coordinator of the TÜSİAD Global Politics Forum in 2021.

Osman Kavala, a Turkish philanthropist and civil society leader, has been in jail for four years without conviction. He was previously acquitted from two lawsuits to attempt to overthrow the government and the constitutional order; now, he is standing trial for a third. The European Convention on Human Rights ruled in December 2020 that Turkey violated European Convention on Human Rights and ordered his immediate release.

Join us in this webinar about Kavala's work for democracy and his ongoing imprisonment at the intersection of law, politics, and human rights in Turkey.

Hosted by Francis Fukuyama (Stanford University) and Silvia von Steinsdorff (Humboldt University Berlin)

Speakers

• Seyla Benhabib, Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Professor of Philosophy at Yale University
• Dani Rodrik, Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and President of the International Economic Association
• Ayşe Bingöl Demir, LL.M. Co-director of Turkey Litigation Support Project
   

About the Seminar: Structural racism threatens the principles that undergird the American creed. A national, multiracial solidarity is the best means of mitigating racism’s effects. The sociopolitical strategies of Black America – grounded in moral claims consonant with the creed but fashioned to be in alignment with contemporary national interests – provide a model for the type of solidarity the United States desperately needs.

This argument is explored in detail in When the Stars Begin to Fall: Overcoming Racism and Renewing the Promise of America. Through an examination of political science and sociological frameworks, alongside personal and historical narratives, it argues that structural racism is a crime of the state, that color-conscious policy is preferable to colorblindness, and that the American civil religion is central to national solidarity. Concluding with policy recommendations, the book offers the next step forward on the intractable issue of racism.
 

 

About the Speaker: Theodore R. Johnson is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Fellows Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law, where he undertakes research on race, politics, and American identity. Prior to joining the Brennan Center, he was a National Fellow at New America and a Commander in the United States Navy, serving for twenty years in a variety of positions, including as a White House Fellow in the first Obama administration and as speechwriter to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His work on race relations has appeared in prominent national publications across the political spectrum, including the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and National Review, among others.

 

About the Seminar: From foreign influence operations disrupting democratically-held elections to anti-vaccine conspiracies undermining global public health, disinformation has drawn attention to the many ways technology engenders new and complex challenges for civic life. This talk will explore the role of identity-based propaganda in contemporary influence operations and its consequences for democracy and civic life.

 

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About the Speaker: Samantha Bradshaw is a postdoctoral fellow at CDDRL, the Digital Civil Society Lab, and the Program on Democracy and the Internet.

About the Seminar: Domestic migration separates voters into nationally- and locally-minded electorates because migrants differ from non-migrants regarding the strength of their local identities. To demonstrate how migration alters the importance of local identities, I study sub-national variation in the nationalization of local elections: in out-migration areas, strong local identities mean that non-migrant voters are active in local politics and consider locally defined issues when voting, while weak local identities lower migrant voters' ability to do so in in-migration areas. I support my argument using household panel data and comprehensive data on cross-county migration, national and sub-national elections, and civil society organizations in contemporary Germany. My identification strategy uses a shift-share instrument for migration and exploits a large-scale welfare reform in 2005 that lastingly altered domestic migration flows. My focus on local identities calls for a reappraisal of conventional descriptions of contemporary democratic politics, which mostly examines divides in national politics. The paper identifies a new research agenda on the political consequences of domestic migration, which has important implications for our understanding of democratic polarization and local service delivery.

 

 

About the Speaker: Hans Lueders holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University and is currently a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. His research seeks to understand the causes and consequences of political inequality in different political contexts. Hans is currently working on a book project that links political inequality in contemporary democratic societies to domestic migration. Additionally, Hans researches political inequality in closed authoritarian regimes, where state institutions ensure that citizens have little political say. His work identifies little-acknowledged ways through which citizens can still influence politics despite this extreme inequality. Moreover, his research on unauthorized migration in the United States studies political inequality from the perspective of a politically marginalized group. It seeks to understand how unauthorized immigrants navigate life while being politically disenfranchised.  Hans’ work has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the Journal of Politics, the Journal of Economics, Race, and Policy, and the European Political Science Review, among others.