This talk overviews the state of governance in the Arab world and the conditions undermining governance improvement in the countries of the region, including corruption, rentier states, and social factionalism. The talk situates these realities in different conceptions and measurements of governance, including those informed by historical, governmental, economic, and sociocultural perspectives. Finally, it reflects on the prospects for a "governance renaissance" in the Arab world.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Raed H. Charafeddine was first vice-governor at Banque du Liban, Lebanon’s central bank, from April 2009 till March 2019 and served as alternate Governor for Lebanon at the International Monetary Fund. An expert in financial markets, his career spans thirty-five years in central and commercial banking. He is currently a partner and executive board director of Vita F&B Capital, a MEA-focused strategic advisory firm. Charafeddine served as a board member and advisor for several NGOs that focus on alleviating poverty, improving education, healthcare, social justice, and women's empowerment. He was also a volunteer consultant for the United Nations Development Program in Beirut on conflict transformation. He holds a BA and an MBA from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Despite the policy failures that enabled and even encouraged the buildup of risk in the banking system and ultimately led to the global financial crisis of 2007-2009, “reformed” rules remain poorly designed, the system remains much too fragile and dangerous, and bailouts persist. In resisting beneficial reforms, bank lobbies make false, misleading, and self-serving arguments. The weak rules and poor enforcement reflect the symbiosis of bankers with politicians, the media, lawyers, and economists. They encourage and enable a culture of recklessness, rule infringements, and even criminal behavior, with impunity. The power of bankers to distort rules and political discourse threatens our democracies. This talk will be based on the new and expanded edition of Anat Admati's The Bankers' New Clothes: What is Wrong with Banking and What to Do About It (Princeton University Press, 2024), coauthored with Martin Hellwig, and other writings.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Anat Admati is the George G.C. Parker Professor of Finance and Economics at Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and faculty director of the Corporations and Society Initiative. Her interests lie in the interaction of business, law, and policy, with a focus on governance and accountability issues. Since 2010, Admati has been engaged in policy discussions related to financial regulations. In 2014, she was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world and by Foreign Policy magazine as among 100 global thinkers. Admati has written on information dissemination in financial markets, financial contracting, corporate governance, and banking. She is the co-author, with Martin Hellwig, of The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It (Princeton University Press 2013, expanded edition 2024).

Admati holds BSc from the Hebrew University, MA, MPhil, and PhD from Yale University, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich. She is a fellow of the Econometric Society, a past board member of the American Finance Association, and a former member of the FDIC’s Systemic Resolution Advisory Committee and the CFTC’s Market Risk Advisory Committee.

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

Why could politicians of religious minority background assume the highest political offices in some countries soon after modern representative institutions were adopted, whereas, in other countries, almost all the national chief executives have been politicians from the religious majority background for decades, if not centuries?

I argue that the leading politicians of religious minority backgrounds in Europe potentially had three “secular” paths out of their marginality: liberalism, socialism, and nationalism. I examine these three paths that religious minority politicians pursued through the cases of Britain (liberalism), France (socialism), Hungary, and Italy (nationalism). I explain the variation in the rise of the first religious minority chief executives at the national level and the prominence of one of these three specific paths based on the religious configuration of the main actors in the constitutive conflict that established the nation-state. Finally, I examine a world-historical example of pattern change, the rise of Catholic-origin politicians to national leadership in previously Protestant-led Germany, which was due to a new constitutive conflict (World War II and the Holocaust) that radically altered the religious-national configuration. Religious minorities’ political (under-)representation constitutes a significant dimension of their (de-)securitization.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Şener Aktürk is Professor in the Department of International Relations at Koç University. He is a scholar of comparative politics, with a focus on comparative politics of ethnicity, religion, and nationalism. After completing his BA and MA at the University of Chicago and his PhD in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Government at Harvard University. His book, Regimes of Ethnicity and Nationhood in Germany, Russia, and Turkey (Cambridge University Press, 2012), received the 2013 Joseph Rothschild Book Prize from the Association for the Study of Nationalities.

His articles have been published in World Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Politics, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Post-Soviet Affairs, Mediterranean Politics, Social Science Quarterly, European Journal of Sociology, Nationalities Papers, Problems of Post-Communism, Turkish Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Osteuropa, Theoria, Ab Imperio, Insight Turkey, Turkish Policy Quarterly, Perceptions, and various edited books. He is the recipient of the Peter Odegard Award at UC Berkeley, the Marie Curie International Reintegration Grant, the Baki Komsuoglu Social Sciences Encouragement Award, the Kadir Has Social Sciences Prize, the TUBA Young Scientist Award, the BAGEP Science Academy Award, and the TUBİTAK Incentive Prize.

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

What are the longer-term implications of Russia’s renewed aggression in Ukraine for relations with its Eurasian neighbors it has often referred to as the “near abroad?”

A recent and growing literature suggests that domestic public opinion will play a decisive role in their future foreign policy choices. Based on an original mass survey with an embedded experiment, this talk examines the changes in Kazakhstani public opinion toward maintaining economic and security relations with Russia through international alliances such as the Collective Treaty Security Organization (CSTO). These changes should be viewed in light of both Russia’s war against Ukraine in February 2022 and the Russian-led CSTO’s intervention in the mass protests in Kazakhstan in January 2022. It argues that Kazakhstani public opinion has changed in significant ways — especially across ethnic lines — and that these changes are likely to impact Kazakhstan-Russian relations in general and the future of the CSTO in particular.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Pauline Jones is Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan (UM) and the Edie N. Goldenberg Endowed Director for the Michigan in Washington Program. She is also Founder and Director of the Digital Islamic Studies Curriculum (DISC). Previously, she served as the Director of UM’s Islamic Studies Program (2011-14) and International Institute (2014-20). Her past work has contributed broadly to the study of institutional origin, change, and impact in Central Asia. She is currently engaged in multiple research projects: exploring how state regulation of Islam in Muslim-majority states affects citizens’ political attitudes and behavior; identifying the factors that affect compliance with health mitigation policies to combat the COVID-19 pandemic; examining the influence that evoking historical memory has on public support for foreign assistance; and developing a toolkit to assess the impact of mass protest and state narratives on domestic and foreign policy change in authoritarian regimes. She has published articles in several leading academic and policy journals, including the American Political Science Review, Annual Review of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Current History, and Foreign Affairs. She is author (or co-author) of five books, most recently The Oxford Handbook on Politics in Muslim Societies (Oxford 2021).