Abstract:

Efforts are underway in South Africa to turn around a decade of governance reversal. But progress in addressing an underlying cause of  the reversals remains very limited – extreme, racially-tinged inequality, with missing ladders of opportunity into the middle class. In this seminar, Brian Levy will explore some interactions between shortfalls in inclusion and institutional pressures, including an in-depth focus on one key challenge – improving the learning outcomes of South Africa’s poorly performing system of basic education.   The findings from his recent co-authored book, The Politics and Governance of Basic Education: A Tale of Two South African Provinces  suggest that a narrow focus on  ‘fixing the bureaucracy’ can only go so far. Re-balancing focus away from narrowly top-down approaches towards the evocation of agency  offers a variety of  added possibilities for creative and constructive action. 

 

Speaker Bio:

Brian Levy is Professor of the Practice of International Development, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University; and Academic Director, Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, University of Cape Town. He worked at the World Bank from 1989 to 2012, including as head of the secretariat responsible for the design and implementation of the World Bank Group's governance and anti-corruption strategy. He has published widely on the interactions among institutions, political economy and development policy, including Working with the Grain: Integrating Governance and Growth in Development Strategies (Oxford U Press, 2014; info at www.workingwiththegrain.com) and, as lead editor and author, The Governance and Politics of Basic Education: A Tale of Two South African Provinces (Oxford U Press, 2018). He completed his Ph.D in economics at Harvard University in 1983.

Abstract:

 

How do memory and forgetting shape politics in autocracies? We combine the logic of collective action with a theory of informational politics, in which autocrats have three instruments: propaganda, threats of violence embedded within propaganda, and censorship. For citizens, we argue that historical memory drives the calendar of protest. In turn, the likelihood of historical forgetting drives the informational strategy of repressive governments. We test our theory in the context of China. The most powerful focal points for protest, we find, are anniversaries of the regime's crimes against citizens. Those most likely to be forgotten -- those that occurred decades ago -- are subject to censorship, while those too fresh to be forgotten are subject to propaganda as well. Explicit threats of violence are reserved for China's ethnic minorities, and coincide with anniversaries of failed separatist movements. We conclude with evidence that propaganda-based threats of violence generate a short-term reduction in protest.

 

Speaker(s) Bio:

 

Erin Baggott Carter is an Assistant Professor at the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California. She received a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University and was previously a fellow at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation. Her research focuses on Chinese foreign policy and propaganda. She recently completed a book manuscript on autocratic propaganda in global perspective and is currently working on another on how the United States and China attempt to shape each other’s domestic politics.

 

 

 

 

 

Brett Carter is Assistant Professor in the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California. He received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University, where he was a Graduate Fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. He was previously a fellow at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, as well as the Hoover Institution. He recently finished a book about propaganda in the world’s autocracies and is currently working on another book project about autocratic survival in Central Africa.

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.