Looming Threats to Liberal Democracy
In The American Interest podcast host Richard Aldous speaks with Larry Diamond about a potential crisis brewing for liberal democracy. Listen here.
Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
In The American Interest podcast host Richard Aldous speaks with Larry Diamond about a potential crisis brewing for liberal democracy. Listen here.
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 3
8:45-10:30 Panel 1: Populism as a Threat — Chaired by Anna Grzymala-Busse
— 10:30-10:45: Coffee break —
10:45-12:30 Panel 2: American Populism — Chaired by Didi Kuo
— 12:30-1:30: Lunch —
1:30-3:15 Panel 3: Comparative Perspectives — Chaired by Matthias Matthijs
— 3:15-3:30: Coffee break —
3:30-5:00 Panel 4: International Linkages — Chaired by Michael McFaul
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4
9:00-11:00 Panel 5: Inequality, Investment and Economic Strain — Chaired by Francis Fukuyama
— 11-1 pm Lunch and concluding discussion —
CISAC Central, 2nd Floor, Encina Hall at Stanford University, 616 Serra Street, Stanford, CA 94305
Please join Freedom House and Stanford's Global Digital Policy Incubator (GDPI) for the West Coast launch of the latest edition of Freedom on the Net, Freedom House's annual study of Internet freedom around the world.
Manipulating Social Media to Undermine Democracy
Speakers and Panelists
Michael Abramowitz
President, Freedom House
Larry Diamond
Senior fellow, FSI and the Hoover Institution
Sanja Kelly
Director, Freedom on the Net, Freedom House
Xiao Qiang
Founder and editor-in-chief, China Digital Times (CDT)
Paola Ricaurte Quijano
Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico
Dariya Orlova
Mohyla School of Journalism, Kiev, Ukraine
Justine Isola
Product Policy Manager, Facebook
Moderator
Eileen Donahoe
Executive director, Global Digital Policy Incubator
Can't join in person? This event will be Livestreamed here: https://www.facebook.com/StanfordCDDRL/
Tweet with us at #NetFreedom2017
Bechtel Conference Center (Encina Hall)
616 Serra St.
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
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"The normal functioning of our check-and-balance system has been dependent on some degree of cooperation between the parties. It has seized up in recent years as the parties have become more polarized and ideological," writes CDDRL Mosbacher Director Francis Fukuyama for The American Interest. Read the article here.
“All of us involved with the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective think the demarcation between American and comparative politics is fuzzy,” Kuo said -- hence the program's name. Even the center’s Americanist faculty members do comparative work, she added, and the “rest of us are comparativists who have long believed that the U.S. should be considered a case in comparative analysis,” says Didi Kuo for www.insidehighered.com. Read the article here.
"We have entered a new era in which two great-power adversaries are threatening our democratic way of life with great subtlety and sophistication," writes Larry Diamond for The American Interest. Read the article here.
Despite security surveillance, forced dismissals of labor activists, and referrals of labor activists and protesters to military trials, labor activism remains at the forefront of societal resistance to authoritarian policies and practices in today’s Egypt. Unionized workers in public and private industrial facilities, as well as civil servants inside the state bureaucracy, continue to demonstrate and organize strikes to articulate their economic and social demands and to defend workers’ rights to freedoms of expression and association. Protests by labor activists have even impacted key sectors, such as public transportation and healthcare. While the Ministry of Manpower and Immigration has settled some formal complaints and requests filed by workers and civil servants, most cases have been referred to labor courts. The ministry has also resorted to providing temporary financial assistance and other short-term benefits to appease some workers and civil servants and to address the upsurge in labor protests. This talk will examine the various administrative, security, legislative, and judicial tools that the regime of Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi has employed to undermine labor activism. Joel Beinin will serve as a discussant.
His research and teaching interests as well as his academic publications focus on democratization processes in Egypt, tensions between freedom and repression in the Egyptian public space, political movements and civil society in Egypt, contemporary debates in Arab political thought, and human rights and governance in the Arab world. He is currently writing a new book on contemporary Egyptian politics, titled Egypt’s New Authoritarianism.
Hamzawy is a former member of the Egyptian parliament, and was elected to office in the country’s first legislative elections following the January 25, 2011 revolution. He is also a former member of the Egyptian National Council for Human Rights. Hamzawy contributes a weekly op-ed to the Egyptian independent newspaper al-Shorouk and a weekly op-ed to the London based newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi.
Beinin’s research and writing focus on the social and cultural history and political economy of modern Egypt, Palestine, and Israel and on US policy in the Middle East. He has written or edited eleven books, most recently Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2015); Social Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa, 2nd edition (Stanford University Press, 2013) co-edited with Frédéric Vairel; and The Struggle for Worker Rights in Egypt (Solidarity Center, 2010).
Reuben Hills Conference Room
2nd Floor East Wing E207
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, California 94305
Amr Hamzawy is the director of the Carnegie Middle East Program. He studied political science and developmental studies in Cairo, The Hague, and Berlin. He was previously an associate professor of political science at Cairo University and a professor of public policy at the American University in Cairo.
His research and teaching interests as well as his academic publications focus on democratization processes in Egypt, tensions between freedom and repression in the Egyptian public space, political movements and civil society in Egypt, contemporary debates in Arab political thought, and human rights and governance in the Arab world. His new book On The Habits of Neoauthoritarianism – Politics in Egypt Between 2013 and 2019 appeared in Arabic in September 2019.
Hamzawy is a former member of the People’s Assembly after being elected in the first Parliamentary elections in Egypt after the January 25, 2011 revolution. He is also a former member of the Egyptian National Council for Human Rights. Hamzawy contributes a weekly op-ed to the Arab daily al-Quds al-Arabi.
Scholars have credited a model of state-led capitalism called the developmental state with producing the first wave of the East Asian economic miracle. Using historical evidence based on original archival research, this talk offers a geopolitical explanation for the origins of the developmental state. In contrast to previous studies that have emphasized colonial legacies or domestic political factors, I argue that the developmental state was the legacy of the rivalry between the United States and Communist China during the Cold War. Responding to the acute tensions in Northeast Asia in the early postwar years, the United States supported emergency economic controls in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan to enforce political stability. In response to the belief that the Communist threat would persist over the long term, the U.S. strengthened its clients by laying the foundations of a capitalist, export-oriented economy under bureaucratic guidance. The result of these interventions was a distinctive model of state-directed capitalism that scholars would later characterize as a developmental state.
I verify this claim by examining the rivalry between the United States and the Chinese Communists and demonstrating that American threat perceptions caused the U.S. to promote unorthodox economic policies among its clients in Northeast Asia. In particular, I examine U.S. relations with the Chinese Nationalists on Taiwan, where American efforts to create a bulwark against Communism led to the creation of an elite economic bureaucracy for administering U.S. economic aid. In contrast, the United States decided not to create a developmental state in the Philippines because the Philippine state was not threatened by the Chinese Communists. Instead, the Philippines faced a domestic insurgency that was weaker and comparatively short-lived. As a result, the U.S. pursued a limited goal of maintaining economic stability instead of promoting rapid industrialization. These findings shed new light on the legacy of statism in American foreign economic policy and highlight the importance of geopolitics in international development.
James Lee is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. He specializes in International Relations with a focus on U.S. foreign policy in East Asia and relations across the Taiwan Strait. James also serves as the Senior Editor for Taiwan Security Research, an academic website that aggregates news and commentary on the economic and political dimensions of Taiwan's security.
This event is co-sponsored by the Taiwan Democracy Project in the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the U.S.-Asia Security Initiative in the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), both part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
Oleksandra Matviichuk is a human rights defender who works on issues in Ukraine and the OSCE region. At present she heads the human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties, and also coordinates the work of the initiative group Euromaidan SOS. The activities of the Center for Civil Liberties are aimed at protecting human rights and establishing democracy in Ukraine and the OSCE region. The organization is developing legislative changes, exercises public oversight over law enforcement agencies and judiciary, conducts educational activities for young people and implements international solidarity programs.
The Euromaidan SOS initiative group was created in response to the brutal dispersal of a peaceful student rally in Kyiv on November 30, 2013. During three months of mass protests that were called the Revolution of Dignity, several thousand volunteers provided round-the-clock legal and other aid to persecuted people throughout the country. Since the end of the protests and beginning of Russian aggression in Ukraine, the initiative has been monitoring political persecution in occupied Crimea, documenting war crimes and crimes against humanity during the hybrid war in the Donbas and conducting the “LetMyPeopleGo” international campaign to release political prisoners detained by the Russian authorities.
Oleksandra Matviichuk has experience in creating horizontal structures for massive involvement of people in human rights activities against attacks on rights and freedoms, as well as a multi-year practice of documenting violations during armed conflict. She is the author of a number of alternative reports to various UN bodies, the Council of Europe, the European Union, the OSCE and the International Criminal Court. In 2016 she received the Democracy Defender Award for "Exclusive Contribution to Promoting Democracy and Human Rights" from missions to the OSCE.
"New laws in democratic countries that force social media platforms to remove disinformation will encourage autocratic countries to do the same, with devastating effects on human rights," writes Global Digital Policy Incubator Director Eileen Donahoe in her op-ed "Protecting Democracy from Online Disinformation Requires Better Algorithms, Not Censorship." Read here.