FSI researchers work to understand continuity and change in societies as they confront their problems and opportunities. This includes the implications of migration and human trafficking. What happens to a society when young girls exit the sex trade? How do groups moving between locations impact societies, economies, self-identity and citizenship? What are the ethnic challenges faced by an increasingly diverse European Union? From a policy perspective, scholars also work to investigate the consequences of security-related measures for society and its values.
The Europe Center reflects much of FSI’s agenda of investigating societies, serving as a forum for experts to research the cultures, religions and people of Europe. The Center sponsors several seminars and lectures, as well as visiting scholars.
Societal research also addresses issues of demography and aging, such as the social and economic challenges of providing health care for an aging population. How do older adults make decisions, and what societal tools need to be in place to ensure the resulting decisions are well-informed? FSI regularly brings in international scholars to look at these issues. They discuss how adults care for their older parents in rural China as well as the economic aspects of aging populations in China and India.
Time: 7:30am-8:45am California, USA 15 February 2022
3:30pm-4:45pm London, UK 15 February 2022
11:30pm-12:45am Singapore, 15-16 February 2022
How does India’s civil-military relationship affect its security? Historically, civil-military relations have been characterized by an “absent dialogue,” with the military enjoying almost complete operational autonomy in planning and fighting wars. But that arrangement has produced some mixed results for Indian national security, and is coming under increasing strain in an environment of intensifying peacetime strategic competition. New Delhi recognizes the need for reform, and has made some halting progress. This webinar will examine the evolution of civil-military relations in India, the challenges with the current configuration, and the agenda for reform that will face the next Chief of Defence Staff.
Speakers:
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Anit Mukherjee is an Associate Professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore. He is the award-winning author of The Absent Dialogue: Politicians, Bureaucrats and the Military in India, the definitive analysis of Indian civil-military relations. He is also Non-Resident Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI), University of Pennsylvania, and at Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP), New Delhi. Prior to his academic career, he was a Major in the Indian Army and is an alumnus of India’s National Defence Academy (NDA), Khadakwasla. Anit holds a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University.
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Saawani Raje-Byrne is a lecturer (assistant professor) in International History at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. She is currently working on a book, based on her PhD dissertation, that presents novel theoretical analysis and detailed historical case studies of Indian civil-military relations. She previously taught at Defence Studies Department at King’s, and the Joint Services Command and Staff College at Shrivenham, and was a researcher at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. She holds a PhD from King’s College London, and a BA from the University of Cambridge.
Moderated by : Arzan Tarapore, South Asia research scholar at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University
Join us on Tuesday, February 8 from 12 PM - 1 PM PT for “The Quantum Age” featuring Chris Hoofnagle, Faculty Director, Center for Long–Term Cybersecurity at UC Berkeley, and Zahra Takhshid, University of Denver Sturm College of Law in conversation with Kelly Born of the Hewlett Foundation. This weekly seminar series is jointly organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet and the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.
Quantum technologies have provided capabilities that seem strange, are powerful, and at times, frightening. These capabilities are so different from our conventional intuition that they seem to ride the fine border between science fiction and fantasy—yet some quantum technologies can be commercially purchased today, and more are just around the corner. This discussion will explore the different kinds of quantum technologies and their legal, political, and social implications and, more broadly, the ways we can think about regulating the fast growing ecosystem of emerging technologies.
About the Speakers:
Chris Hoofnagle
Chris Jay Hoofnagle is Professor of Law in Residence at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where he teaches cybersecurity, programming for lawyers and torts. He is an affiliated faculty member with the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, a Professor of Practice in the School of Information, and a faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. Hoofnagle’s new book with Simson Garfinkel, Law and Policy for the Quantum Age is now available (open access) from Cambridge University Press, which also published his first book, Federal Trade Commission Privacy Law and Policy (2016). An elected member of the American Law Institute, Hoofnagle is of counsel to Gunderson Dettmer LLP, and serves on boards for Constella Intelligence and Palantir Technologies.
Zahra Takhshid
Zahra Takhshid is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. Before joining DU, she was the Lewis Fellow for Law Teaching and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School where she taught “Common Law and Privacy Torts.” Zahra is also a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and has been selected as the 2021 Quantum Fellow at the Center for Quantum Networks of the University of Arizona in partnership with Yale Law School’s Information Society Project (ISP). She teaches and writes about torts, privacy, technology and the law. A second strand of her interest is comparative and Islamic law. Zahra’s research has been published or is forthcoming in Cardozo Law Review, Minnesota Law Review Online, UCLA Journal of Islamic and Near. Eastern Law, Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology, among others.
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Moderator: Kelly Born is the Director of the Cyber Initiative at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. She leads a ten-year, $130 million grantmaking effort that aims to build a more robust cybersecurity field and improve policymaking. Previously, Kelly was executive director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center. Prior to that, she was a Program Officer for the Madison Initiative at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, an 8-year, $150 million portfolio focused on improving U.S. democracy. Kelly oversaw Madison’s grantmaking on campaigns and elections, and digital disinformation. Before that, Kelly worked as a strategy consultant with the Monitor Institute, a nonprofit consulting firm, where she supported strategic planning efforts at a number of foundations. Earlier in her career, she consulted with nonprofits, the private sector, and governments in the United States, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe.
This event is made possible by generous support from the Korea Foundation and other friends of the Korea Program.
On the heels of South Korea's presidential election, an expert panel will examine the election results and their likely policy implications.
Speakers:
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Jae-ho Yeom is an Emeritus Professor of Policy Studies at Korea University where he also served as the 19th President. Previously, he served as President of Korean Association for Policy Studies; President of Korean Association for Contemporary Japanese Studies; and Chief Editor of Asian Research Policy. He also served in government as a leader in Inspection and Evaluation Group at the Ministry of Planning and Budget; Chair of Policy Advisory Committee at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Chair of Committee for Innovation and Development at the Board of Audit and Inspection of Korea; and as Advisor for Korean Presidential Commission of Science and Technology Policy. He wrote columns in major Korean newspapers, and moderated a debate show on SBS and a 2002 presidential debate. He is regarded as a scholar who has a discerning eye on social transformations, keen understanding of changing societies and corporate social values. He received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University.
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Eunjung Lim is an Associate Professor at the Division of International Studies at Kongju National University where she also serves as Vice President for International Affairs, Dean of Institute of International Language Education, and Dean of Institute of Korean Culture and Education. Her specializations include international cooperation in the Asia-Pacific, comparative and global governance, energy, nuclear, and climate change policies of East Asian countries. Since 2018, she has served as a board member of Korea Institute of Nuclear Nonproliferation and Control, and is currently a member of Policy Advisory Committee at the Ministry of Unification. Previously Dr. Lim was an Assistant Professor at the College of International Relations, Ritsumeikan University, in Kyoto, Japan. She also taught at Johns Hopkins University, Yonsei University, and Korea University. She has been a researcher and a visiting fellow at the Center for Contemporary Korean Studies at Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies at the University of Tokyo, the Institute of Japanese Studies at Seoul National University, the Institute of Japan Studies at Kookmin University, and Institute of Energy Economics, Japan. She received a B.A. from the University of Tokyo, an M.I.A. from Columbia University and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.
Moderator: Gi-Wook Shin, director of APARC and the Korea Program, Stanford University
Join us on Tuesday, February 1st from 12 PM - 1 PM PT for Algorithmic Newsfeeds and Elections featuring one of our postdoctoral scholars, Alessandro Vecchiato. This weekly seminar series is jointly organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet and the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.
While personalization algorithms are ubiquitous online, their impact on public opinion and voting behavior is still largely unknown. This talk looks at this question by presenting results from a globally replicable, lab-in-the-field experiment with a custom-developed news app. We evaluate the impact of personalized news feed on news consumption, public opinion, turnout, and voting behavior. The results show that personalization significantly skews the news consumption of politically extreme users while allowing most other users to maintain a moderate news diet. However, personalized news feeds are shown to reinforce pre-existing beliefs for all users, including a demobilizing effect for unlikely voters. While our effects are small due to design constraints, our findings call for more transparency and regulation on platforms.
The session is open to the public, but registration is required.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:
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Alessandro Vecchiato is a postdoctoral fellow at the Program on Democracy and the Internet at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. in Politics from New York University in May 2019. His work looks at internet technologies' role in shaping political beliefs and electoral outcomes. In his dissertation, he uses primarily experimental methods to study how algorithmic personalization in social media news feeds affects the beliefs and preferences of voters. In other work, he investigated how internet-mediated communication through social media has affected politicians' relationships with voters.
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Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and FSI. Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration. He is codirector of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, which supported local election officials in taking the necessary steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide safe voting options for the 2020 election. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age.
This is a virtual event. Please click here to register and generate a link to the talk.
The link will be unique to you; please save it and do not share with others.
Once considered incapable of innovation, China’s contribution to technological advancement has become impossible to ignore as it continues its historic rise. Now home to such tech giants as Alibaba, Tencent, and Huawei, China is competing in the global market. But what does this technological success mean in the context of China's internal and international politics, particularly its tense relationship with the United States? Will efforts to decouple help or hinder progress in tech? Can China’s educational system produce the next generation of innovators and propel them to the forefront of technology? What effects, if any, is the recent tightening on tech giants having on the sector at large? In this program, experts Denis Simon, Senior Adviser to the President for China Affairs at Duke, and Dan Wang, technology analyst for Gavekal Dragonomics, will be discussing the status and consequences of decoupling for the US and China and their technological sectors.
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Denis Fred Simon is Senior Adviser to the President for China Affairs at Duke and Professor of China Business and Technology at Duke's Fuqua School of Business. He also serves as Executive Director of the Center for Innovation Policy at Duke. Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, Simon has more than four decades of experience studying business, competition, innovation and technology strategy in China. In 2006, he was awarded the China National Friendship Award by Premier Wen Jiabao in Beijing. Prior to returning to Duke, Dr. Simon served as Executive Vice Chancellor at Duke Kunshan University in China (2015-2020). Simon’s career included spells as senior adviser on China and global affairs in the Office of the President at Arizona State University; vice-provost for international affairs at the University of Oregon; and professor of international affairs at Penn State University’s School of International Affairs. He also has had extensive leadership experience in management consulting having served as General Manager of Andersen Consulting in Beijing (now Accenture) and the Founding President of Monitor Group China.
Simon is the author of several books including Corporate Strategies Towards the Pacific Rim; Techno-Security in an Age of Globalization; and China’s Emerging Technological Edge: Assessing the Role of High-End Talent.
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Dan Wang is the Shanghai-based technology analyst for Gavekal Dragonomics, the China economics research firm. He tracks the prospects for China's industrial policy, US regulatory measures and the activities of multinationals in China. He has given keynotes for a variety of organizations and his work is widely cited in the press. Dan previously worked in Silicon Valley and studied philosophy at the University of Rochester. Dan's essays have been published in Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, and he is a contributor to Bloomberg Opinion
Denis F. Simon
Senior Adviser to the President for China Affairs, Duke University; Professor of China Business and Technology, Duke Fuqua School of Business
In addition to her role as Director of Strategic Partnerships for the Human Trafficking Data Lab, Jessie Brunner serves as Deputy Director of Strategy and Program Development at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Stanford University. In this capacity she manages the Center's main interdisciplinary collaborations and research activities, in addition to advising on overall Center strategy. Jessie currently researches issues relevant to data collection and ethical data use in the human trafficking field, with a focus on Brazil and Southeast Asia. Furthermore, in her role as co-Principal Investigator of the Re:Structure Lab, Jessie is investigating how supply chains and business models can be re-imagined to promote equitable labor standards, worker rights, and abolish forced labor. Brunner earned a MA in International Policy from Stanford University and a BA in Mass Communications and a Spanish minor from the University of California, Berkeley.
Director of Strategic Partnerships, Human Trafficking Data Lab
Deputy Director of Strategy and Program Development, Center for Human Rights and International Justice
The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) is pleased to share that Professor Jean C. Oi has been elected to serve as vice president of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), an international, 5,000-member organization dedicated to the advancement of scholarly study of Asia. She will begin her term after the AAS Annual Conference in March 2022, serving on a four-year AAS leadership ladder of vice president, president, and past president.
“I am honored to have been elected as the AAS Vice President and look forward to steering it through its next chapter of development,” says Oi, a China expert who has served on the Stanford faculty since 1997. She is the William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics in the department of political science, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the founding director of the China Program at APARC, and the founding Lee Shau Kee Director of the Stanford Center at Peking University.
One of my most firmly held beliefs is that area studies — with their in-depth, multidisciplinary perspective — offer invaluable insights into trends and pressing problems that traditional disciplines often miss.
Jean Oi
In a letter to AAS members, Oi highlights her desire to attract to the AAA the younger generation of scholars, who increasingly focus on their disciplines rather than on area expertise. “As Asia gains in importance, our responsibility to educate scholars who not only possess mastery over their disciplinary knowledge but also area expertise seems increasingly critical,” she says.
Representing all the regions and countries of Asia and all academic disciplines, the AAS is the largest organization of its kind. The Association’s objectives are to promote cooperative activities and exchange of information within the field of Asian studies, facilitate contact and exchange of information between scholars and scholarly organizations in North America interested in Asian studies and those in other countries, and provide means for the publication of research and educational materials designed to advance Asian studies.
Oi’s research focuses on comparative politics, Chinese political economy, corporate restructuring, and governance in Asia. She has conducted fieldwork in China since the mid-1980s and has written extensively on China's rural politics, central-local relations, and how China’s political and economic institutions have adapted to the tensions and opportunities wrought by the country’s dramatic transformation. Her most recent book, the edited volume, Fateful Decisions: Choices That Will Shape China's Future, analyzes today's most critical demographic, economic, social, political, and foreign policy challenges facing China's leaders that will determine the country's future course. Her newest research project focuses on China going global with its Belt and Road Initiative.
Oi brings to her new role with the AAS over three decades of experience in advancing social science research on contemporary China, and a track record of building platforms for Asia education, research, and engagement that benefit scholars, students, and professionals across disciplines. She has been a member of the AAS since 1974. Her commitment to the organization is reflected in her previous service to the organization, including as a member and chair of the China and Inner Asia Council, and her responsibilities on the Annual Conference Program Committee.
Reassessing China’s Capabilities and Goals for Strategic Competition
On the World Class podcast, Oriana Skylar Mastro argues that in order to set effective policy toward China, the United States needs to better understand how and why China is projecting power.
Engaging China: Fifty Years of Sino-American Relations
Was the strategy of engagement with China worthwhile? Experts Mary Bullock, Thomas Fingar, David M. Lampton, and Anne Thurston discuss their recent release, "Engaging China: Fifty Years of Sino-American Relations."
The Rise of Anti-Chinese Sentiments in South Korea: Political and Security Implications
APARC and Korea Program Director Gi-Wook Shin shares insights on rising anti-China sentiments in South Korea and their implications for the upcoming South Korean presidential election.
APARC’s Jean Oi, a China expert, will begin her term with the AAS in March 2022, serving on a four-year leadership ladder of vice president, president, and past president. Representing all the regions and countries of Asia and all academic disciplines, the AAS is the largest professional association of its kind.
This is a virtual event. Please click here to register and generate a link to the talk.
The link will be unique to you; please save it and do not share with others.
China’s rapidly growing local government debt problem has long been recognized by foreign observers as a risk, but inside China, only recently was this problem called out as alarming. Why has local government debt been allowed to grow with little direct intervention from central authorities? Based on a forthcoming paper, Oi will show how a “grand bargain” the central authorities entered into with the localities allowed Beijing to take the lion’s share of tax revenues after 1994, but also allowed localities to gain new resources and power as a quid pro quo. While the bargain provided an expedient and seemingly successful strategy that worked for more than a decade to fuel rapid local state-led growth, it had significant costs that are now becoming increasingly visible. Because land finance was the core means by which localities raised revenue, Oi also will help explain why the problems with property developers like Evergrande are so important to China’s future economy.
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Jean C. Oi is the William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics in the Department of Political Science and a senior fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. She directs the China Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and is the Lee Shau Kee Director of the Stanford Center at Peking University. Professor Oi has published extensively on China’s reforms. Recent books include Fateful Decisions: Choices That Will Shape China’s Future, co-edited with Thomas Fingar (Stanford University Press, 2020); Zouping Revisited: Adaptive Governance in a Chinese County, co-edited with Steven Goldstein (Stanford University Press, 2018); and Challenges in the Process of China’s Urbanization, co-edited with Karen Eggleston and Yiming Wang (2017). Current research is on fiscal reform and local government debt, continuing SOE reforms, and the Belt and Road Initiative.
Join us on Tuesday, January 18 from 12 PM - 1 PM PST for Free Speech on Public Platforms featuring Professor Jamal Greene of Columbia Law School in conversation with Daphne Keller, Director of the Program on Platform Regulation at the CPC. This weekly seminar series is jointly organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet and the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.
It is commonly assumed that social media companies owe their freedom to moderate solely to their status as private actors. This seminar explores the adequacy of that assumption by considering the hypothetical construct of a state-run social media platform. Jamal Greene argues that the categorical nature of First Amendment norms leave the doctrine ill-equipped to order regulation of such a platform, and that international human rights norms, while less categorical, remain immature in this space. Greene suggests that the most promising area of legal intervention would address the development of procedural rather than substantive norms.
Speaker:
Jamal Greene is the Dwight Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, where he teaches courses in constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, and the law of the political process. He is the author of How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession With Rights Is Tearing America Apart, as well as numerous articles and book chapters on constitutional law and theory. He is also a co-chair of the Oversight Board, an independent body that reviews content moderation decisions on Facebook and Instagram. He served as a law clerk to the Hon. Guido Calabresi on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and for the Hon. John Paul Stevens on the U.S. Supreme Court. He earned his J.D. from Yale Law School and his A.B. from Harvard College.
Join us for our winter seminar series starting Tuesday, January 11 from 12 PM - 1 PM PST. The first in the session is Cloud Governance Challenges and features leaders from the Carnegie Endowment’s Cloud Governance Project and Marietje Schaake of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, in conversation with Kelly Born of the Hewlett Foundation. This weekly seminar series is jointly organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet and the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.
Central to the ongoing digital transformation is the growth of cloud computing, which is enabling remarkable gains in efficiency, innovation, and connectivity around the world. However, the cloud also accentuates many preexisting digital policy challenges and brings to the fore new ones. It increases the consequences of disruption resulting from cyberattacks and natural disasters, and raises the stakes associated with ensuring equitable access to the digital environment. It also creates some new challenges associated with the concentration of the cloud market in the hands of a few hyperscale providers. Left to their own devices, cloud providers lack the incentives to comprehensively address these issues, and governments’ ability to fill the gap is being challenged by the pace of the developments in the cloud technology landscape. To promote more coherent and effective governance of the cloud, concerned players must recognize the challenges, interconnections, and policy tradeoffs across issue areas. They will need to apply a combination of regulation, self-regulation, and industry standards, while balancing competing private, national, and international interests.
Speakers:
Kelly Born, Director, Cyber Initiative, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
Ariel Eli Levite, Nonresident Senior Fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Vishnu Kannan, Special Assistant to the President, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Marietje Schaake, International Policy Director, Cyber Policy Center
FSI researchers work to understand continuity and change in societies as they confront their problems and opportunities. This includes the implications of 
Chris Hoofnagle
Zahra Takhshid
