Join Hillel at Stanford and Stanford in Government as Mohamed Abubakr shares his perspective on the global refugee crisis. He will discuss the high rate of sexual assault of women and girls in the immigration process, why gender-based violence is being used as a tool of war against refugees, and how and why the international legal system is failing refugees as well as give insight into what Stanford students can do to help these issues.

Wednesday, May 3, 2017 
4:30 - 6:00pm 
Freienrich Room 
Koret Pavillion, Stanford Hillel

Professor Larry Diamond is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy. At Stanford University, he is professor by courtesy of political science and sociology, and he coordinates the democracy program of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), within the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI).

Mohamed Abubakr is a Sudanese human rights activist and President of the the African Middle Eastern Leadership Project (AMEL), an NGO that mobilizes, empowers, and unites millennial leaders and activists from the Middle East and Africa to build resilient, inclusive societies that are free from discrimination, persecution, and violent coercion, and to advocate for policies in support of these goals.

Co-sponsor is Stanford In Government (SIG)

Abstract:

By the standards of prosperity and peace, the post-Cold War international order has been  an unparalleled success. Over the last thirty years there has been more creation of wealth, and reduction of poverty, disease, and food insecurity than in all of previous history. During the same period, the numbers and lethality of wars have decreased. Yet these facts have not deterred an alternative assessment that asserts that civil violence, terrorism, and failed states are at unprecedented high levels, and the numbers of refugees are at an all time high.

There is no global crisis of failed states and endemic civil war, no global crisis of refugees and migration, and no global crisis of disorder. Instead what we have seen is a particular historical crisis unfold in the greater Middle East, which has collapsed order within that region, and has fed the biggest threat to international order: populism in the United States and Europe.

Speaker Bio:

Stephen John Stedman is Deputy Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law (CDDRL), Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) at Stanford University. At CDDRL Professor Stedman directs the project on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective, which examines the sources and extent of polarization and paralysis in Western democracies. From 2010 to 2012 he served as the Director for the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy, and Security, a body of eminent persons tasked with developing recommendations on promoting and protecting the integrity of elections. Professor Stedman drafted the Commission’s report, Deepening Democracy: A Strategy for Improving the Integrity of Elections Worldwide.  In 2003-2004 Professor Stedman was Research Director of the United Nations High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change and was a principal drafter of the Panel’s report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility. In 2005 he served as Assistant Secretary General and Special Advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations, with responsibility for working with governments to adopt the Panel’s recommendations for strengthening collective security and for implementing changes within the United Nations Secretariat, including the creation of a Peacebuilding Support Office, a Counter Terrorism Task Force, and a Policy Committee to act as a cabinet to the Secretary General.

Professor Stedman has written widely on transnational threats to international security. He is currently researching the historical development of the concept of security and how its meanings have changed over time. Professor Stedman received his BA, MA and PhD degrees from Stanford University.  He and his wife, Corinne Thomas, are the Resident Fellows in Crothers -- Stanford’s academic theme house on global citizenship.

Abstract:

Colombia’s government set out to reduce crime and violence and increase state legitimacy by raising state presence on the streets of Bogotá, either doubling police patrol time or delivering cleanup and lighting services. We evaluate the effects of those interventions over an 8-month window. Interventions at this scale, in a dense network of streets, require us to account for spillovers into control segments. The policy implications also hinge on these spillovers. We show how to design place-based experiments to test for spatial spillovers over varying distances, and estimate direct and spillover effects using randomization inference. Using administrative data alongside a citywide survey, we find that increasing state presence reduces insecurity on targeted streets, and that there may be increasing returns to state presence and to targeting the least secure places. But data suggests that targeted state presence simply pushes insecurity around the corner.

Speaker Bio:

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