FSI scholars produce research aimed at creating a safer world and examing the consequences of security policies on institutions and society. They look at longstanding issues including nuclear nonproliferation and the conflicts between countries like North and South Korea. But their research also examines new and emerging areas that transcend traditional borders – the drug war in Mexico and expanding terrorism networks. FSI researchers look at the changing methods of warfare with a focus on biosecurity and nuclear risk. They tackle cybersecurity with an eye toward privacy concerns and explore the implications of new actors like hackers.
Along with the changing face of conflict, terrorism and crime, FSI researchers study food security. They tackle the global problems of hunger, poverty and environmental degradation by generating knowledge and policy-relevant solutions.
Diary of a Banished Prince
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Moulay Hicham’s newly published memoir, Journal d’un prince banni, retells his personal life within the context of devastating political critique against the Moroccan political system, its authoritarian monarchy, and the “deep state” within that resists democratic change, the Makhzen. Written during Moulay Hicham's time as a fellow at the Center for Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law at Stanford University, the volume is neither a settlement of accounts nor a gossipy narrative of frivolous stories. It instead uniquely ensconces vivid personal recollections within the context of authoritarian politics. The prince witnessed the rise of the system under King Hassan II, the long-lasting ruler who eliminated all opposition, centralized power, and linked a loyal community of courtiers, elites, and cronies to his will—the Makhzen. The memoir reveals how Moulay Hicham’s aspirations towards autonomy and independence were constantly blocked by this system, often by either the King himself or his coercive apparatus, comprising the intelligence services and military. At the same time, the nearly half-century reign of King Hassan exposes critical insight into the development of Moroccan politics and identity, from his acumen regarding the Western Sahara problem to his ability to make the kingdom a focal point of Arab politics after the demise of Nasserism.
Those personal observations on governance continue with the royal ascent of Hassan’s son, Mohamed VI, who assumed the throne in 1999 and is Moulay Hicham’s cousin. Replacing Hassan’s powerfully intent personality was this more humane yet political disengaged new king. His inability to curb the Makhzen and enact meaningful democratic reforms shows the system’s very success. Whereas the pressures of conforming to the system crushed many of those personalities who grew up in the court, Moulay Hicham managed to elude this destructive side through his self-imposed exile to the United States and his intellectual decision to criticize an authoritarian machine to which he was meant to belong. As the memoir concludes, such resistance to change implicates the monarchy’s future. Decades of political exclusion, false promises, and rising inequality have alienated much of the Moroccan public. As the Arab Spring showed, such discontentment portends to future social and political conflict that could well discredit the monarchy, resulting in its overthrow after 350 years of continuous reign.
Journal d’un prince banni has become a literary and political phenomenon in Morocco and the Moroccan diaspora worldwide. Its release ignited tumultuous debates within the press, social media, and civil society. Dubbed an “exceptional document” by Le Nouvel Observateur, the memoir has become one of the best-selling non-fiction works in France. Though print versions are currently unavailable in Morocco, electronic versions have been downloaded and disseminated on an exponential scale. Arabic, English, and other language-editions are scheduled for release in the near future.
Speaker Bio:
Hicham Ben Abdallah received his B.A. in Politics in 1985 from Princeton University, and his M.A. in Political Science from Stanford in 1997. His interest is in the politics of the transition from authoritarianism to democracy.
He has lectured in numerous universities and think tanks in North America and Europe. His work for the advancement of peace and conflict resolution has brought him to Kosovo as a special Assistant to Bernard Kouchner, and to Nigeria and Palestine as an election observer with the Carter Center. He has published in journals such Le Monde, Le Monde Diplomatique,Pouvoirs, Le Debat, The Journal of Democracy, The New York Times, El Pais, and El Quds.
In 2010 he has founded the Moulay Hicham Foundation which conducts social science research on the MENA region. He is also an entrepreneur with interests in agriculture, real estate, and renewable energies. His company, Al Tayyar Energy, has a number of clean energy projects in Asia and Europe.
Oksenberg Conference Room
Hicham Ben Abdallah
CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
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ate@stanford.edu
Consulting Professor
Hicham Ben Abdallah received his B.A. in Politics in 1985 from Princeton University, and his M.A. in Political Science from Stanford in 1997. His interest is in the politics of the transition from authoritarianism to democracy.
He has lectured in numerous universities and think tanks in North America and Europe. His work for the advancement of peace and conflict resolution has brought him to Kosovo as a special Assistant to Bernard Kouchner, and to Nigeria and Palestine as an election observer with the Carter Center. He has published in journals such Le Monde, Le Monde Diplomatique,Pouvoirs, Le Debat, The Journal of Democracy, The New York Times, El Pais, and El Quds.
In 2010 he has founded the Moulay Hicham Foundation which conducts social science research on the MENA region. He is also an entrepreneur with interests in agriculture, real estate, and renewable energies. His company, Al Tayyar Energy, has a number of clean energy projects in Asia and Europe.
Conferences
The Army’s Decision to Repress: A Turning Point in Tunisia’s Regime Change
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This article aims to explain the 2011 Tunisian transition by offering a historical institutional and a game-theoretic analysis of how the army played a crucial role in the fall of Ben Ali’s regime. What is the rationality behind the military’s decision to refuse Ben Ali’s order to open fire on the demonstrators? Why did the Tunisian army repressed protesters in the revolt of the Gafsa Mining Basin in 2008, and refused to do so in the decisive uprising of 2011? How to explain the speed at which the Tunisian regime fell? It is argued that the balance of power on the field was such that the army was better-off to back the population and used a strategic entry point to bring a decisive “coup” to the regime. The high degree of institutionalization of the Tunisian army is seen as a precondition to make such an independent decision. The army’s commitment to back the population constituted a strong signal to the protesters as well as to foreign allies, causing a rapid fall of the Tunisian dictatorship. This paper offers the first analysis applying game theory to explain the 2011 Tunisian transition and, more precisely, the interactions between Ben Ali’s regime and the army. While several analyses focus on the unprecedented popular mobilization to explain Ben Ali’s fall, only a few authors attempted to explain the role of the militaries. However, while they emphasize on the “disdain” of the army towards the regime, we, instead, claim that the rationality of one of the most professional army of the region to understand how and why the militaries refused to repress demonstrators in the 2011 national protests.
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The Logic of Violence in Drug Wars: Cartel-State Conflict in Mexico, Brazil and Colombia
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Why have militarized interventions to curtail violence by drug cartels had wildly divergent results? In the past six years, state crackdowns drove a nine-fold increase in cartel-state violence in Mexico, versus a two-thirds decrease in Brazil. Prevailing analyses of drug wars as a criminal subtype of insurgency provide little traction, because they elide differences in rebels’ and cartels’ aims. Cartels, I argue, fight states not to conquer territory or political control, but to coerce state actors and influence policy outcomes. The empirically predominant channel is violent corruption— threatening enforcers while negotiating bribes. A formal model reveals that greater state repression raises bribe prices, leading cartels to fight back whenever (a) corruption is sufficiently rampant, and (b) repression is insufficiently conditional on cartels’ use of violence. Variation in conditionality helps explain observed outcomes: switching to conditional repression pushed Brazilian cartels into nonviolent strategies, while Mexico’s war “without distinctions” inadvertently made fighting advantageous.
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A Hole at the Center of the State: Prison Gangs and the Limits to Punitive Power
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The state’s central function is to establish authority through its monopoly on violence; the very attempt, however, can be counterproductive. Punishment incapacitates and deters individuals, but can empower destructive collective forces. Prison gangs, their ranks swelled by mass incarceration, transform the core of the coercive apparatus into a headquarters for organizing and taxing streetlevel criminal activity, supplanting state authority in communities, and orchestrating mass violence and protest. Drawing on a formal model, fieldwork, and case studies from the US and Latin America, I show how gangs use control over prison life, plus the state-provided threat of incarceration, to project power. The model predicts that common state responses—crackdowns and harsher sentencing— can strengthen prison gangs’ leverage over outside actors, consistent with the observed expansion of prison gangs during mass-incarceration initiatives. These gang-strengthening effects of incarceration can have increasing returns, implying a point beyond which additional punishment erodes state authority.
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From Paris to Sacaca: A Human Rights Genealogy
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The trajectory of human rights in the contemporary world is one in which ideas and cultural practices constitute each other in ways that can bedevil theorists and empirical researchers alike. The conventional wisdom is that this dynamic interaction, or “vernacularization,” must be understood as the inevitable, if (to some) lamentable, result of the rapid expansion of international and transnational human rights after the end of the Cold War. This talk challenges the conventional wisdom by tracing the genealogy of one such idea—that of universality—from the work of a mysterious, though highly consequential, UNESCO committee in 1947 and 1948 to the practical human rights advocacy of a peasant intellectual living in a remote region of the Bolivian Andes. Doing so allows us to reframe a key moment in the history of the birth of the modern human rights movement after the Second World War; appreciate the extent to which the narrative of universal human dignity does important cultural work as a matter of practical ethics; and realize that a critical approach to both the promises and dilemmas of human rights does not stand apart from mainstream human rights advocacy, but is rather woven into the very fiber of its history.
Mark Goodale is currently Professor of Conflict Analysis and Anthropology at George Mason University and Series Editor of Stanford Studies in Human Rights. He is the author or editor of nine books, including Human Rights at the Crossroads (Oxford UP, 2013), Mirrors of Justice: Law and Power in the Post-Cold War Era (with Kamari Maxine Clarke, Cambridge UP, 2010), Human Rights: An Anthropological Reader (Blackwell, 2009), Surrendering to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights (Stanford UP, 2009), Dilemmas of Modernity: Bolivian Encounters with Law and Liberalism (Stanford UP, 2008), and The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law Between the Global and the Local (with Sally Engle Merry, Cambridge UP, 2007). Forthcoming volumes include Human Rights Encounters Legal Pluralism (with Eva Brems and Giselle Corradi, Hart/Oñati International Series in Law and Society, 2014). His writings have appeared in Current Anthropology, American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, Social & Legal Studies, Current Legal Theory, and the Journal of Legal Pluralism, among others. He is at work on several new research projects, including an NSF-funded empirical study of the relationship between human rights and radical political and social change in Bolivia and a set of essays that examine the culture, contested politics, and phenomenology of human rights after the post-Cold War.
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
Mark Goodale
Professor of Conflict Analysis and Anthropology
Speaker
George Mason University
Seminars
Violence and Policing in Latin American and US Cities
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The global cities of Latin America - Rio de Janeiro, Ciudad Juarez, Tijuana, Mexico City and Medellin - have become engines of economic growth. These cities attract remarkable talent across all levels and build extensive networks that allow for innovation and the circulation of ideas. But crime, violence and the dissolution of the social fabric threaten the main attraction of these cities and significantly undermine development prospects. The challenge of providing policing that protects citizens, especially those living in the poorest neighborhoods where gangs and other criminal organizations tend to concentrate, is daunting. The conference on violence and policing in Latin America and US cities brought together academics, policy makers, NGOs, and citizens to reflect on how cities in Latin America are meeting the challenges of rising criminal violence. Particular focus was given to the “policing” processes in cities that have experienced and successfully reduced civil war-like levels of violence. The goal was to reflect on the dynamics and varieties of security strategies, police reform and efforts to rebuild the social fabric of major cities.
The conference was hosted by the Program on Poverty and Governance (PovGov) at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). Other centers and institutions at Stanford University that co-sponsored the conference include the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS), the Bill Lane Center for the American West, the ‘Mexico Initiative’ at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).
Conference Resources:
April 28 (Day 1)
Bechtel Conference Room
Encina Hall
616 Serra St.
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
April 29 (Day 2)
Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center
326 Galvez Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6105
Conferences