About the Event

This conversation with Behlul Özkan (Marmara University)and Mehmet Ali Tuğtan(Bilgi University) will examine the adverse and long-lasting impact of the US-led anti-communism on Turkish democracy. We will trace the roots of current authoritarianism in the top-down Islamization of society and institutions since the 1950s, paying special attention to the role of the military- an institution often regarded as the protector of secularism.

This event is a part of the Program on Turkey. It is co-organized by the Ottoman Turkish Studies Association and supported by OTES@Stanford.

About the Speakers

Behlül Özkan received his PhD from Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University in 2009. He is currently Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations at Marmara University, Istanbul. Özkan is the author of From the Abode of Islam to the Turkish Vatan: Making of a National Homeland in Turkey (Yale University Press, 2012). He also contributed op-eds to New York Times, Huffington Post, Open Democracy. Özkan is also a board member of European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). In recent years his academic studies has been focused on Political Islam in Turkey and Europe.

Mehmet Ali Tuğtan is assistant professor in International Relations at Istanbul Bilgi University. He has a PhDin Political Science from Boğaziçi University. His research focuses on Turkish-American Relations, Contemporary World Politics and Security Studies. Dr. Tugtan has edited a book on the Turkish involvement in the Korean War (Kore Savaşı: Uzak Savaşın Askerleri) published in 2013.

About this Event: In this book project, we walk in the footsteps of the pioneers of the nonviolent approach to provide a reinterpretation of the histories of the great movements of the twentieth century from a game theoretic perspective, bringing to bear a host of new quantitative analyses to understand the challenges they faced, when they were successful at overcoming them and why. We develop a simple conceptual framework for understanding the strategies available to both the leaders and the followers of political movements, the media and outside audiences, as well as the regimes that they seek to influence, and how these decisions interact. We use this framework to highlight the presence of three key tensions that exist in many political movements.

These tensions include: those between the allure of violence and the seeming pedestrianism of nonviolence, between the need for numbers and the need for focus, and between organizations that depend on grassroots mobilization versus hierarchies and leadership. 

In light of the framework and new quantitative evidence, we then retrace and re-examine the decisions of the participants of the Indian Independence Movement in each of their three great nonviolent drives for change---the Non-Cooperation Movement of the 1920s, the Civil Disobedience Movement of the 1930s and the Quit India Movement of the 1940s---and how they succeeded or failed in addressing these tensions. At each step, we also discuss both grand strategy and the effectiveness of local tactics. We next compare the Indian experience with the movements that came after, including the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, the Arab Spring and recent protests around the world. Finally, we draw on what we have learned to suggest ideas for better implement nonviolent protests today.

About the Speaker:

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About the Event:  Decentralization and community-driven development programs have become increasingly common policies to attempt to improve the distribution of public goods across low- and middle-income countries. We study a series of reforms in the city of Delhi that decentralized the administration of discretionary school-level budgets to elected bodies of parents. We find that parents have preferences for representatives that are substantially more educated than them and discriminate against Muslims. Parents act on these preferences when given the opportunity to elect SMC members. They elect parents that are wealthier and more educated and are also of higher status. The paper provides empirical evidence to the question of under what conditions decentralization leads to elite capture. When bureaucrats have a stronger say in the selection of representatives, budgets are captured to reflect the preferences of state representatives, rather than constituents.

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This event is co-sponsored by the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

How does autocratic lobbying affect political outcomes and media coverage in democracies? This talk focuses on a dataset drawn from the public records of the US Foreign Agents Registration Act. It includes over 10,000 lobbying activities undertaken by the Chinese government between 2005 and 2019. The evidence suggests that Chinese government lobbying makes legislators at least twice as likely to sponsor legislation that is favorable to Chinese interests. Moreover, US media outlets that participated in Chinese-government sponsored trips subsequently covered China as less threatening. Coverage pivoted away from US-China military rivalry and the CCP’s persecution of religious minorities and toward US-China economic cooperation. These results suggest that autocratic lobbying poses an important challenge to democratic integrity.

Erin Baggott Carter is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California. There, she is also a Co-PI at the Lab on Non-Democratic Politics. She received a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University, is currently a visiting scholar at the Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and was previously a Fellow at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation.

Dr. Carter's research focuses on Chinese politics and propaganda. She recently completed a book on autocratic propaganda based on an original dataset of eight million articles in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish drawn from state-run newspapers in nearly 70 countries. She is currently working on a book on how domestic politics influence US-China relations. Her other work has appeared or is forthcoming in the British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and International Interactions. Her work has been featured by the New York Times, the Brookings Institution, and the Washington Post Monkeycage Blog.

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