Speaker Bio:

Greg Distelhorst is a Ph.D. candidate in the MIT Department of Political Science and a predoctoral fellow at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. His dissertation addresses public accountability under authoritarian rule, focusing on official responsiveness and citizen activism in contemporary China. This work shows how citizens can marshal negative media coverage to discipline unelected officials, or "publicity-driven accountability." These findings result from two years of fieldwork in mainland China, including a survey experiment on tax and regulatory officials. A forthcoming second study measures the effects of citizen ethnic identity on government responsiveness in a national field experiment. His dissertation research has been funded by the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Boren Fellowship, and the National Science Foundation. A second area of research is labor governance under globalization, where he has examined private initiatives to improve working conditions in the global garment, toy, and electronics supply chains.

For more on Greg's research, please visit:

http://web.mit.edu/polisci/people/gradstudents/greg-distelhorst.html

Abstract:
This discussion will focus on the potential utility of innovative technology to address the governance obstacles to the provision of critical public services.  Using the challenge of maternal and child mortality reduction as an illustrative example, this discussion will outline the role political forces and governance failures play in shaping the public infrastructure of service provision and opportunities for reform.  Of special focus will be the potential role of technology to create and address these opportunities.  While there are numerous efforts underway to use new technologies to enhance the breadth and efficiency of health services in low-income settings, this discussion will focus on how these technologies could be “liberating” by being designed and used to address the political determinants of inadequate public service commitments and capacity. 

Dr. Paul Wise is the Richard E. Behrman Professor of Child Health and Society, Professor of Pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine, and Senior Fellow in the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.  He is Director of the Center for Policy, Outcomes and Prevention and a core faculty of the Centers for Health Policy and Primary Care Outcomes Research, at Stanford University.  Dr. Wise has served as Chair of the Steering Committee of the NIH Global Network for Women’s and Children’s Health, a member of the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Service’s Advisory Committee on Genetics, Health and Society and currently serves on the National Advisory Council of the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, NIH.  Dr. Wise’s research focuses on U.S and international child health policy, particularly the provision of technical innovation in resource-poor areas of
the world. 

About the Topic: The history of Pakistan's nuclear program is the history of Pakistan.  With unique insider perspective, Brig. Feroz Khan unveils the fascinating interplay that took place and reveals how international opposition to the program only made it an even more significant national issue.   Written by a 30-year professional in the Pakistani Army who played a senior role formulating and advocating Pakistan's security policy on nuclear and conventional arms control, 'Eating Grass' is a seminal study that tells the fascinating story of how and why Pakistan's government, scientists, and military, persevered to develop nuclear weapons capability in the face of international resistance, domestic political upheavals and regional military crises.   

About the Speaker: Brig (Ret.) Feroz Hassan Khan is a lecturer in the Department of National Security Affairs, Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He last served as director of arms control and disarmament affairs, in the Strategic Plans Division of the Joint Services Headquarters in Pakistan. In that position, he was a key contributor in formulating Pakistan’s security policies on nuclear and conventional arms control and strategic stability in South Asia. He produced recommendations for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and represented Pakistan in several multilateral and bilateral arms control negotiations. He is the author of recently published book Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb.

Abstract:

Political parties that represent old regime interests in moments of democratization are normally thought exclusively to play a "negative" role, blocking democracy and only conceding it when sufficiently challenged. Summarizing research for a book on the historical rise of democracy in Europe, this presentation will focus on British and German democratization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to make the case that under certain conditions, old regime conservative parties play a decisive and counter-intuitive role that makes democratization more settled over the long run.

Speaker Bio:

Daniel Ziblatt is Professor of Government at Harvard University. He has been named a Sage Publications Fellow for a project on "Conservative Political Parties and Democratization in Europe" and in 2012-2013 is on leave at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

His research and teaching interests include democratization, state-building, development, comparative politics and comparative historical analysis, with a particular interest in Europe. He is the author of Structuring the State: The Formation of Italy and Germany and the Puzzle of Federalism (Princeton University Press, 2006), the winner of three prizes from the American Political Science Association, including the 2007 Prize for the Best Book published on European Politics. He is co-editor of a 2010 special double issue of Comparative Political Studies entitled "The Historical Turn in Democratization Studies." Recent papers have appeared in American Poiltical Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, and World Politics.  His most recent papers have received APSA's 2011 Mary Parker Follett Prize from the Politics and History Section of APSA, APSA's  2009 Luebbert Prize for the best paper published  in comparative politics, the 2008 Sage prize for best paper presented in comparative politics at the APSA meeting, and two  prizes in 2010 from the Comparative Democratization Section of APSA.  Ziblatt has been a DAAD Fellow in Berlin, an Alexander von Humboldt visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute in Cologne and the University of Konstanz, Germany, and visiting professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris in 2010. He is currently completing a new book entitled Conservative Political Parties and the Birth of Modern Democracy in Europe, 1848-1950 (Cambridge University Press) that offers a new interpretation of the historical democratization of Europe.

Forecasting is a difficult profession. International economist David Hale and writer Lyric Hughes Hale do not claim they can foretell the future. But as veteran observers of the Asian economies, they can envision scenarios that are contrary to current conventional wisdom, and trends that deserve more attention than they are given in the media. What if China and Japan actually engage in armed conflict? Could East Asia experience its own version of the Arab Spring? What would be the consequences of another major earthquake in Japan? When the United States was the dominant power in the Pacific, security interests and economic interests were aligned in the region. Now that China has become the largest trading partner for many ASEAN countries, a new Great Divergence is emerging, with  potentially destabilizing consequences. While our national attention has been dominated by the Middle East for a decade now, in the coming era of energy self-sufficiency in the United States, we must shift our focus to the Far East.

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