The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) economies are not catching up with the rest of the world. The region’s average per capita income has increased by just 62 percent over the last 50 years. In comparison, over the same period, the increase was fourfold in emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) and twofold in advanced ones. Only a few developing MENA economies have avoided diverging further from the richest countries’ living standards (what economists call the frontier), and those where conflicts erupted have accelerated in the wrong direction. In this presentation, Roberta Gatti will discuss the factors that shape MENA’s long-term growth potential, with special attention to the role of the state in the economy, the persistent effects of conflict, and the boost that closing the gender gap in the labor force can deliver in terms of growth.

This event is co-sponsored by the Program on Arab Reform and Development and the Program on Capitalism and Democracy, as well as the Middle Eastern Studies Forum.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Roberta Gatti is the Chief Economist for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region at the World Bank, where she oversees the analytical agenda of the region and the publication of the semi-annual MENA Economic Updates. She is the founder of the MENA Central Banks Regional Research Network. In her prior capacity as Chief Economist for the Human Development Practice Group, Roberta co-led the conceptualization and launch of the World Bank Human Capital Index and the scale up of the Service Delivery Indicators data initiative.

Roberta joined the World Bank as a Young Professional in the Macro unit of the Development Research Group, and she has since led and overseen both operational and analytical work in her roles of Manager and of Global Lead for Labor Policies.

Roberta’s research, spanning a broad set of topics such as growth, firm productivity, the economics of corruption, gender equity, and labor markets, has been published in lead field journals such as the Journal of Public Economics, the Journal of Economic Growth, and the Journal of Development Economics. She is also the lead author of a number of flagship reports, including Jobs for Shared Prosperity: Time for Action in the Middle East and North Africa; Striving for Better Jobs: The Challenge of Informality in Middle East and North Africa; The Human Capital Index 2020 Update: Human Capital in the Time of COVID-19; and Service Delivery in Education and Health across Africa.

Roberta has taught courses at the undergraduate, masters, and Ph.D. Level at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins Universities. She is a frequent lecturer on development economics, most recently at Dartmouth College, Princeton University, and Cornell University. Roberta holds a B.A. from Università Bocconi and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University.

Delegation of authority is central to the functioning of bureaucracies and, indeed, to political institutions as a whole. It is today at the center of the contemporary assault on the "administrative state," and its importance is widely misunderstood. In this seminar, Francis Fukuyama will discuss how a well-functioning government needs to provide bureaucrats with sufficient authority and that this is something that the US has failed to do.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Francis Fukuyama is Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a faculty member of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also Director of Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy Program, and a professor (by courtesy) of Political Science.

Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His most recent book,  Liberalism and Its Discontents, was published in the spring of 2022.

Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004.  

Dr. Fukuyama holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), Aarhus University (Denmark), and the Pardee Rand Graduate School. He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Trustees of Freedom House, and the Board of the Volcker Alliance. He is a fellow of the National Academy for Public Administration, a member of the American Political Science Association, and of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to the William J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person.

The recent regime change in Syria and Turkey’s role in this process underscores a complex interplay of geopolitical shifts in the Middle East, the regional ambitions of the Erdoğan government, and its domestic political calculations. This panel will analyze the political trajectory of Syria under its new leadership and its evolving relationship with Turkey while also examining Turkey’s policy toward Kurdish demands on both sides of the border and the recently revived talks with the imprisoned PKK leader.

This event is co-sponsored by The Program on Turkey at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and the Middle Eastern Studies Forum.

War is often a driver of macro-institutional change (Tilly 1975), and it has been suggested that the peculiar, partial, and incremental development of the institutions of the European Union have been due to the absence of major inter-state war in Europe post-1945 (Kelemen and McNamara 2022). The return of inter-state warfare to Europe allows us to examine the effect that heightened military threat and territorial revisionism has European political development. Contrary to some expectations that Europe might achieve greater unity and integration in response to a revived Russian external threat, I find that the ongoing war is driving institutional retrenchment of Europe along national lines for three reasons. First, the war has privileged newer, post-enlargement member states, whose governments and polities do not share the elite anti-nationalist principles that have underpinned the European project since the end of WWII. Second, the emerging re-armament of European states has privileged national actors and national systems of military procurement, with incentives counter to deeper European integration of armed forces and military procurement. Military assistance for Ukraine has primarily been provided through US-coordinated bilateralism rather than European multilateralism or supranationalism. Finally, the war itself has increased the salience of national identity and the normative appeal of nationalism in ways that work against European institutions and will likely put limits on deeper European integration even in an environment of greater military threat. These preliminary findings suggest that, as with other macro-institutional processes (e.g. state-building), existential threat interacts with identity variables to produce institutional outcomes.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Keith Darden (Stanford class of ’92) is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics, Governance and Economics at the School of International Service at American University. His research focuses on nationalism, state-building, and the politics of Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia. His book manuscript, Resisting Occupation in Eurasia (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), explores the development of durable national loyalties through education and details how they explain over a century of regional patterns in voting, secession, and armed resistance in Ukraine, Europe, and Eurasia. His award-winning first book, Economic Liberalism and Its Rivals (Cambridge University Press, 2009) explored the formation of international economic institutions among the post-Soviet states, and explained why countries chose to join the Eurasian Customs Union, the WTO, or to eschew participation in any trade institutions. Prof. Darden is co-editor of the Cambridge University Press Book Series Problems of International Politics.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to William J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Professor Federico Fabbrini will discuss his new book, which examines the EU’s responses to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. From a legal perspective, Fabbrini evaluates how the EU has addressed the conflict and identifies options for improving the EU’s constitutional set-up amidst growing geopolitical challenges and risks.

In his book, Fabbrini analyses the EU’s response to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, particularly focusing on how the EU (a peacetime organization) has adapted to the challenges posed by war. From a legal perspective, it examines EU action across five policy areas: 

• Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP)

• Fiscal and Economic Policy Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ)

• Energy and Industrial Policy

• EU Enlargement and Reform 

The author argues that the EU’s constitutional framework proved flexible enough to enable unprecedented institutional responses to the conflict. However, the book also addresses how structural shortcomings in the EU’s constitution have, in some cases, hampered the EU’s response, while in others, they have occasionally failed to sufficiently constrain EU action. 

The book concludes by exploring potential reforms to the EU’s constitutional set-up, emphasizing the need for improvement in a time of ever-greater geopolitical risks.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, the Stanford Program in International and Comparative Law, and the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation.

In recent years, creeping demographic changes and deep political divisions have made many Israelis worry about the fragmentation of their society into several contending “tribes.” In a 2015 talk that became known as “The Four Tribes Speech,” Israel’s President, Reuven Rivlin, observed that Israel was rapidly transforming from a country defined by a unified national ethos into one where secular, nationalist-religious, ultraorthodox Jews, and Israeli Arabs increasingly possess separate identities. But some are fighting back, seeking to renegotiate the Israeli social contract and rejuvenate a cohesive center.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr. Yoav Heller is co-founder and chairman of “The Fourth Quarter”, an Israeli NGO and mass movement dedicated to rebuilding Israeli modern democratic centrism. A historian by training, Yoav has had a rich career in media – including Ynet, Israel's largest online media site, which he helped establish and in which he served as senior editor – education and community leadership. Yoav Heller holds a BA in Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies and an MA in Management and Education from Tel Aviv University. He completed his Ph.D. in History at the University of London, Royal Holloway College Holocaust Research Institute.

Virtual Event Only.

Ari Shavit – one of Israel’s most experienced, critical, and erudite political analysts – was one of the first people in the world to put pen to paper in the aftermath of the October 7th, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack. In his latest book (published in Hebrew, with an English edition forthcoming), Shavit argues that Israel now finds itself in an existential war with Iran. It is a crisis from which, Ari Shavit argues, Israel will either emerge victorious and transformed or cease to exist.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Ari Shavit is a leading Israeli columnist, author, and political analyst. Born in Rehovot, Israel, Shavit studied philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, before embarking on a distinguished career in journalism. In the early 1990s he was chairman of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, and in 1995 he joined Haaretz, where he served on the editorial board until 2016. His recent books include the New York Time bestseller My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (2013) and Existential War: From Catastrophe, to Victory, to Revival (2024) [Hebrew].

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“Zionism” – once an innocuous term favored by socialists and liberals alike to denote support for the right of the Jewish People to equal national self-determination in the Land of Zion – has become a deeply contested word. Postcolonial and critical theories, in particular, have radically reinterpreted the term, with some weaponizing Zionism to accuse Israel and its allies of everything from racism and genocide to police brutality in Portland, Oregon, and even climate change. So, what is “Zionism”? Where did the word and concept come from? And why has it become so heatedly contested?

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr. Einat Wilf is a leading thinker on Israel, Zionism, foreign policy, and education. She was a Member of Knesset from 2010 to 2013, where she served as Chair of the Education Committee and Member of the influential Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. Born and raised in Israel, Einat served as Foreign Policy Advisor to then Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres and as a strategic consultant with McKinsey & Company. Her recent books include The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace (2020, co-authored with Adi Schwartz) and We Should All Be Zionists (2022) – a collection of her essays on Israel, Zionism and the path to peace.

Virtual Event Only.