Abstract:

Although peace operations are the main policy instrument for directly protecting civilians from severe violence, only a few are designed to reflect threatened civilians’ security needs. In a forthcoming book, Humanitarian Hypocrisy: Civilian Protection and the Design of Peace Operations, I examine how four major democracies – the US, UK, France, and Australia – contribute to this situation by facilitating gaps between a force’s ambitions to protect civilians and its resources for doing so. Although missions affected by these gaps gesture toward protecting civilians, they can actually worsen their suffering. I describe these gaps as a form of organized hypocrisy and argue that their attraction lies in their ability to help leaders balance competing normative and material pressures to protect civilians while also limiting associated costs. The argument has implications both for when these gaps are most likely and for how leaders can benefit from them politically. I support it with diverse evidence based on quantitative analysis of original data and four in-depth case studies.

 

 

Speaker Bio:

Andrea Everett is a Visiting Scholar at CDDRL. Her research focuses on humanitarian politics and policy. Her first book, Humanitarian Hypocrisy, is forthcoming with Cornell University Press in December 2017, and her work has also been published in Security Studies and Conflict Management and Peace Science. She received her PhD from the Department of Politics at Princeton University in 2012 and has previously worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Politics Department at UC, Santa Cruz and as an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Affairs at the University of Georgia. She also holds a B.A. from Stanford and studied in Berlin as a Fulbright Scholar.

Abstract:

Modernization theory, institutional capacity, and rational choice institutionalism are the three candidate theories that explain how rich democratic states got to be rich and democratic. External development efforts will only be successful if he objectives or external and internal elites are complementary. This is only likely to be the case for 30-40 countries in the world. For the other 130 poorer countries the best that can be hoped for is good enough governance.

 

Speaker Bio:

Stephen D. Krasner is the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations at Stanford, and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, and the Hoover Institution. From February 2005 to April 2007 he was Director of the Policy Planning Staff at the Department of State. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the United States Institute of Peace, and was a member of the Foreign Policy Advisory Board of the Department of State from 2012 to 2014. He edited International Organization from 1986 to 1992. Professor Krasner is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a Mercator Fellow at the Free University and was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in 2000-2001. He has written or edited eight books and more than eighty articles.

Abstract:

In the year 1200, many of the largest cities in Western Europe were inhabited by just tens of thousands of individuals while Middle Eastern and Central Asia cities had upwards to 100,000 residents each. By 1800, however, this pattern had reversed. This paper explores the importance of historical trade in explaining patterns of urban growth and decline in the run-up to the Industrial Revolution. To address the issue of the endogenous development of trade routes, the paper’s empirical analysis is focused on trade networks which connected historical cities located near natural harbors, maritime choke points and desert oases. These findings speak to why Middle Eastern and Central Asian cities – long beneficiaries of locational centrality between Europe and Asia – declined as Europeans found alternative routes to the East and opened new trade opportunities in the New World.

 

Speaker Bio:

Lisa Blaydes is an Associate Professor of Political Science. She is the author of Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Her articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, the Annual Review of Political Science, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Middle East Journal, and World Politics.

Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event. 

 

Abstract:

Over the past decades, there has been a revolution in terms of who controls knowledge and information. This rapid change has imperiled the way we think. Without pausing to consider the cost, the world has rushed to embrace the products and services of four titanic corporations. Franklin Foer, a correspondent at the Atlantic and former editor of the New Republic, has written a polemic against the monopolistic practices of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple. He argues they have ushered in a new, dangerous age of conformism. A threat to the very foundations of the republic. In the words of Steve Coll—the Pulitzer Prize-winner—his book is “an argument in the spirit of those brave democracy protesters who stand alone before tanks."

 

Speaker Bio:

Franklin Foer is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and fellow at the New America Foundation. For seven years, he served as editor of The New Republic. Foer has written for Slate and New York magazine. His previous book How Soccer Explains the World has been translated into 27 languages and was the winner of a National Jewish Book Award.

Abstract:

Few Ideas are as sacred in American politics as sovereignty. From the founding of the republic through the rejection of the League of Nations to the present day, Americans have grappled with how to reconcile their desire for independence with the need for effective international cooperation. Unfortunately, contemporary debates over how to defend and exercise that sovereignty are confused and overheated. Such polemics distract us from what is really at stake in the sovereignty debate: namely, the ability to shape America’s destiny in a global age. Contrary to common assertions, the United States is in little danger of subordinating its Constitution and system of government to international law and organizations. What globalization does require is for Americans to think more clearly about sovereignty’s different dimensions—and to consider “sovereignty bargains”, whereby the nation voluntarily trades off a measure of its freedom of action to cooperate with other countries in exploiting the shared opportunities and mitigating the common risks of interdependence.

 

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Stewart Patrick is the James H. Binger senior fellow in global governance and the director of the program on international institutions and global governance at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). His areas of expertise include multilateral cooperation, international institutions, and the challenges posed by fragile, failing, and post-conflict states.

From September 2002 to January 2005, Dr. Patrick served on the secretary of state’s policy planning staff, with lead staff responsibility for U.S. policy toward Afghanistan and a range of transnational issues. Following government service, he was Research Fellow at the Center for Global Development. Dr. Patrick is the author of The Sovereignty Wars: Reconciling America with the World (Brookings Institution Press, October 2018), as well as of Weak Links: Fragile States, Global Threats, and International Security, and The Best Laid Plans: The Origins of American Multilateralism and the Dawn of the Cold War. He also writes the CFR blog “The Internationalist.”

Dr. Patrick graduated from Stanford University (with a B.A. in human biology and honors in humanities) and received his doctorate in international relations and two masters degrees (in international relations and modern European history) from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He has three children.

Abstract:

This paper provides evidence that innovative multinational firms attempt to use health and safety regulations to eliminate cheaper, generic products from the market, even when they themselves produce those products. Stricter regulations on generic products allow innovative firms to shift the market to patented alternatives while forcing out generic producers. Firms are able to win these preferential regulatory outcomes at both national and international levels of governance, despite the fact that these outcomes create trade barriers and tilt the playing field in favor of companies in developed nations. I utilize original data from the agrochemical sector to provide evidence that agrochemical producers request stricter standards on their own products when it could help them sell patented alternatives. Using longitudinal data on actual regulatory change at both national and international levels I find that regulatory institutions seemingly set up to protect consumers also appear to have helped innovative firms win preferential outcomes.

 

Speaker Bio:

Rebecca is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Stanford University and a Pre-doctoral Fellow at CDDRL. She studies international political economy with a focus on regulation, trade, and the role of international institutions. She received a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Her undergraduate degree is from Princeton University, where she majored in politics and graduated summa cum laude and phi beta kappa.

Abstract:

Duncan Green, Oxfam Strategic Adviser and LSE Professor of Practice in International Development, introduces the arguments of his new book, How Change Happens (OUP, October 2016). How Change Happens explores how political and social change takes place, and the role of individuals and organizations in influencing that change. He discusses the challenges that 'systems thinking' creates for traditional aid practices, and how a 'power and systems approach' requires activists, whether in campaigns, companies or governments, to fundamentally rethink the way they understand the world and try to influence it.

Praise for How Change Happens:

• A splendid treatise on how to change the actual world - in reality, not just in our dreams’ Amartya Sen

• ‘An indispensable guide for activists and change-makers everywhere’ Francis Fukuyama

 

Speaker Bio:

Dr.Duncan Green is Senior Strategic Adviser at Oxfam GB, Professor in Practice in International Development at the London School of Economics, Honorary Professor of International Development at Cardiff University and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Development Studies. He is the author of How Change Happens (OUP, October 2016) and From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States can Change the World (Oxfam International, 2008, second edition 2012). His daily development blog can be found on http://www.oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/. He was previously Oxfam’s Head of Research, a Visiting Fellow at Notre Dame University, a Senior Policy Adviser on Trade and Development at the Department for International Development (DFID), a Policy Analyst on trade and globalization at CAFOD, the Catholic aid agency for England and Wales and Head of Research and Engagement at the Just Pensions project on socially responsible investment. He is the author of several books on Latin America including Silent Revolution: The Rise and Crisis of Market Economics in Latin America (2003, 2nd edition), Faces of Latin America (2012, 4th edition) and Hidden Lives: Voices of Children in Latin America and the Caribbean (1998).