PART OF THE FALL SEMINAR SERIES

Join us on October 19th for our weekly seminar from 12 PM - 1 PM PT featuring Genevieve Lakier, Professor of Law at University of Chicago's Law School and CPC Co-Director, Nate Persily. This series is organized by the Program on Democracy and the Internet, and the Cyber Initiative at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

For years now, scholars have expressed alarm at the tendency of government officials to pressure—or “jawbone”—social media companies into taking down what the officials consider to be harmful or offensive speech, even when no law requires it. Scholars have worried, for good reason, that the practice of jawboning allows government officials to evade the stringent constraints on their power to regulate speech imposed by the First Amendment. But relatively little attention has been paid to the constitutional question of whether, or rather when, government jawboning itself violates the First Amendment. In fact, answering this question turns out to be quite difficult because of deep inconsistencies in the cases that deal with jawboning, both in the social media context and beyond. In this talk, I will explore what those inconsistencies are, why the case law is so unclear about where the line between permissible government pressure and unconstitutional governmental coercion falls, and what kind of jawboning rule might be necessary to protect free speech values in a public sphere in which both private companies and government officials possess considerable power to determine who can and cannot speak.

Speaker Profile:

Genevieve Lakier teaches and writes about freedom of speech and American constitutional law. Her work examines the changing meaning of freedom of speech in the United States, the role that legislatures play in safeguarding free speech values, and the fight over freedom of speech on the social media platforms.
 
Genevieve has an AB from Princeton University, a JD from New York University School of Law, and an MA and PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago. Between 2006 and 2008, she was an Academy Scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International and Area Studies at Harvard University. After law school, she clerked for Judge Leonard B. Sand of the Southern District of New York and Judge Martha C. Daughtrey of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Before joining the faculty, Genevieve taught at the Law School as a Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer in Law. She will serve as the Senior Visiting Research Scholar at the Knight Institute at Columbia University for the 2021-2022 school year, where she will be supervising a project exploring the relationship between the First Amendment and the regulation of lies, disinformation and misinformation.

 

Wednesday, November 17, 2021, 8:00am - 9:30am (Shanghai time)

Designing effective climate change mitigation and adaptation policies requires comprehensive assessment of the projected damages from climate change. However,  current climate policy is informed by outdated models lacking empirical grounding. In this talk, we use subnational mortality records across 40 countries to generate data-driven estimates of the global mortality consequences of climate change. We show that both extreme cold and extreme heat raise mortality rates, especially for the elderly, the poor, and populations that experience these extremes infrequently. These heterogeneous nonlinear responses to warming lead to highly differentiated projected impacts of climate change across the globe. In this talk we focus in particular on the Asia-Pacific region, where mortality risk generally rises with a warming climate, but projected damages differ substantially within and across countries. We conclude by demonstrating how these results can be used to inform local adaptation policy within an individual city, using Chengdu, China as a case study, and point to new developments in climate science that will enable future improvements in mortality risk assessment across Asia. 

Tamma Carleton is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research combines economics with datasets and methodologies from remote sensing, data science, and climate science to quantify how environmental change and economic development shape one another. Tamma's current work focuses on climate change, water scarcity, and the use of remote sensing for global-scale environmental and socioeconomic monitoring. She is an active member of the Climate Impact Lab, an interdisciplinary team conducting an empirically-grounded global assessment of climate change impacts. Tamma joined the Bren School after a postdoc at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. She holds a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California, Berkeley, MSc.'s in Environmental Change and Management as well as Economics for Development from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Economics from Lewis & Clark College.

Jiacan Yuan is an Associate Professor of Climatology at the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at Fudan University, Shanghai, China. She is interested in understanding fundamental dynamical processes of the climate system and improving climate models, which could give us stronger predictive power and more accurate risk assessment of the changing climate. Jiacan’s current work focuses on understanding the physical processes and uncertainties in climate changes, with major emphases on compound heat-humidity extremes and sea level rise. She is also an active member of the Climate Impact Lab. Before joining Fudan University, Jiacan was an Assistant Research Professor at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Rutgers University. She holds a Ph.D. in Meteorology from Peking University.

 This event is part of the 2021 Fall webinar series, Perfect Storm: Climate Change in Asia, sponsored by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.

The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) will be accepting applications from eligible juniors on who are interested in writing their senior thesis on a subject touching upon democracy, economic development, and rule of law (DDRL) from any university department.  The application period opens on January 10, 2022 and runs through February 11, 2022.   For more information on the Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program, please click here.

Join us online via Zoom on Friday, January 21st at 12:00pm (PST) to learn more! 

REGISTER NOW

CDDRL faculty and current honors students will be present to discuss the program and answer any questions.

 

Asia Health Policy Program (AHPP) 2021-22 Colloquium series "Aligning Incentives for Better Health and More Resilient Health Systems in Asia”

Friday, November 12, 2021, 7:30am - 8:30am (Jakarta time)

Dr. Alatas will discuss her research on promoting vaccination in Indonesia and the impact of the pandemic on Indonesia’s society and economy more generally, including on poverty, human capital, and development.

Vivi Alatas is an  economist with passion for evidence-based solutions.  She is CEO of Asakreativita, a consulting and Edtech company that she established in 2020. Formerly she was a Lead Economist of the World Bank, where she led a team of seasoned local and international economists in producing several flagship reports for national and global audiences, including ‘Targeting Poor and Vulnerable Households in Indonesia’, ‘Making Poverty Work in Indonesia’ , ‘Indonesia’s Rising Divide’, ‘Indonesia Jobs Report’ and “Aspiring Indonesia – Expanding the Middle Class”. She has presented various of these research findings to the President, Vice President, Ministers and Deputy Ministers. She also has written several journal articles on poverty, inequality and labour issues. Some of the papers were written in collaboration with Nobel Laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Angus Deaton (who was also her advisor at Princeton).

PART OF THE FALL SEMINAR SERIES

Join us at the weekly Cyber Policy Center (CPC) seminar on Tue, October 12th from 12 PM - 1 PM PST featuring Soojong Kim, postdoctoral fellow at the Program on Democracy and the Internet. This session will be moderated by Co-Director of the CPC, Nate Persily. This is part of the fall seminar series organized by the Program on Democracy and the Internet, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.

There has been growing concern about online misinformation and falsehood. It has been suspected that the proliferation of misleading narratives is especially severe on Facebook, the world’s largest social media site, but there has been a lack of large-scale systematic investigations on these issues. This talk will introduce a series of ongoing research projects investigating online groups promoting misleading narratives on Facebook, including anti-vaccine groups, climate change denialists, countermovements against racial justice movements, and conspiracy theorists. The presentation will discuss the prevalence, characteristics, ecosystem of misleading narratives on Facebook, and implications for potential interventions.

Speaker Profile:

Soojong Kim is a postdoctoral fellow, jointly affiliated with the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) and the Digital Civil Society Lab (DCSL) at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. His research centers around digital media, social networks, and information propagation. As a former computer scientist, he is also interested in developing and applying computational methods, including online experiments, large-scale data analysis, and computational modeling.

 

The Taliban’s shock takeover of Kabul in August 2021 has implications for South Asia far beyond Afghanistan’s borders. The Taliban does not have transnational political ambitions, but it is closely tied to the Pakistan security establishment, and its victory will resonate among other networks of terrorists. This webinar will explore the regional geopolitical consequences of the Taliban takeover. It will examine the Taliban victory’s impact on Pakistan’s regional strategy, on security in disputed Kashmir, on the role of China in the region, and on the trajectory of Islamist groups across the region.

Javid Ahmad is a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council and was, until recently, Afghanistan’s ambassador to the UAE. He was previously a nonresident fellow with the Modern War Institute at West Point and worked with U.S. defense contractors, where he provided counterterrorism/economic analysis to U.S. government and business clients on South Asia/Central Asia. He has worked for the Pentagon’s AfPak Hands, the German Marshall Fund in Washington, and NATO in Brussels. He has written for Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, New York Times, Foreign Policy, The National Interest, The Hill, and CNN. He studied at Beloit College and Yale University.

C. Christine Fair is a Professor in the Security Studies Program within Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. Her most recent book is In Their Own Words: Understanding Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (OUP, 2019).  She has authored or co-edited several books, inter alia: Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War (OUP, 2014); Pakistan’s Enduring Challenges (UPenn, 2015), Policing Insurgencies (OUP, 2014); Political Islam and Governance in Bangladesh (Routledge, 2010); Treading on Hallowed Ground: (OUP, 2008); The Cuisines of the Axis of Evil and Other Irritating States (GlobePequot, 2008).  She has a PhD from the University of Chicago, Department of South Asian Languages and Civilization. She causes trouble in Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi.

Avinash Paliwal is Senior Lecturer in International Relations and Deputy Director of the SOAS South Asia Institute. He specialises in South Asian strategic affairs. He is author of the much-acclaimed book My Enemy’s Enemy - India in Afghanistan from the Soviet Invasion to the US Withdrawal (2017), and is currently authoring a strategic history of India's near east. Avinash holds an MA and PhD in International Relations from King’s College London, and a BA (Hons) in Economics from the University of Delhi.

Moderator:

Arzan Tarapore is the South Asia research scholar at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, where he leads the newly-restarted South Asia research initiative. He is also a senior nonresident fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research. His research focuses on Indian military strategy and contemporary Indo-Pacific security issues. He previously held research positions at the RAND Corporation, the Observer Research Foundation, and the East-West Center in Washington. Prior to his scholarly career, he served as an analyst in the Australian Defence Department, which included an operational deployment to Afghanistan. Arzan holds a PhD in war studies from King’s College London.

 

North Carolina time: 19 October, 2021, 8:00-9:30 pm; Singapore time: 20 October, 2021, 8:00-9:30am

Viewed alongside other world regions, Southeast Asia is uniquely vulnerable to major damage by global warming. Its coastlines are lengthy and subject to searise. Its urban centers of economic and political gravity are mainly riverine or deltaic. Its agriculture requires optimal levels and rhythms of waterflow, as do its polluted main veins, the Mekong and the Irrawaddy.  In already tropical conditions, heatwaves are especially enervating.  Nor has the region escaped extreme weather events.  The ten most afflicted countries worldwide in that regard include Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.  With this background in mind, Angel Hsu and Melissa Low, two scholars with deep regional and policy knowledge will consider questions such as:  What has been and is being done, by whom, and with what chances of success?  Can currently worsening trends be reversed?  Mitigated?  Or is adaptation the sole plausible recourse?  Who will represent the interests of the unborn generations who will suffer the long-term consequences of present-day indifference and delay?  Will effective policy require authoritarian politics?  Given that the largest current and historical emitters of greenhouse gases are, respectively, China and the US, what roles should and will they play?  And how, if at all, will global versions of these questions be addressed and answered in November in Glasgow at COP26?

Angel Hsu founded and heads the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Data-Driven EnviroLab, an interdisciplinary research group that innovates quantitative approaches to pressing environmental issues.  Her research into the causes and consequences of climate change explores the interfacing of science and policy.  Her many publications include coverage of Malaysia, Viet Nam, and especially China.  In February 2021 she spoke on global climate trends before the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, having addressed US-China climate relations at the University of Pennsylvania in 2020.  Illustrating Prof. Hsu’s commitment to public outreach was her selection as a TED 2018 Age of Amazement Speaker and earlier as an inaugural member of the Grist 50, an annual list of “emerging leaders” working on “fresh, real-world solutions” to the world’s “biggest challenges,” global warming included.  She holds a PhD in Environmental Policy from Yale University.

Melissa Low has published, presented, and advised on climate change in multiple forums.  She is currently researching the relative transparency of climate action and reporting in Southeast Asia.  She provides policy analyses and conducts workshops to improve understanding of the Paris Agreement and track whether countries are keeping their promises.  For that work, in 2021, she received Singapore’s EcoFriend Award and its Public Service Medal.  Having taken part in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of Parties for many years, she is now on the steering committee that coordinates NGOs under the UNFCCC. She holds a University of Strathclyde LLM (with distinction) in Climate Change Law and Policy and an MSc in Environmental Management at the National University of Singapore, where is pursuing a PhD in geography.  Her master’s thesis on the run-up to the Paris Agreement won NUS’s Shell Best Dissertation Award.

This event is part of the 2021 Fall webinar series, Perfect Storm: Climate Change in Asia, sponsored by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.

Download transcript of talk

 

This event is open to the public online via Zoom, and limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford affiliates may be available in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines.

 

The latest tensions between Europe and America in the wake of the Afghanistan pullout and the Australian submarine deal reflect more than just temporary friction, but rather may indicate profound shifts in the geopolitical order that could signal the dissipation of the Atlantic alliance three decades after the end of the Cold War and nearly eight decades after its birth.

For more than four decades, William Drozdiak has been regarded as one of the most knowledgeable American observers of European affairs. During his tenure as foreign editor of the Washington Post, the newspaper won Pulitzer Prizes for its international reporting on the Israeli—Palestinian conflict and the collapse of the Soviet communist empire. He also served as the Post’s chief European correspondent, based at various times in Bonn, Berlin, Paris and Brussels, and covered the Middle East for Time magazine. He later became the founding executive director of the German Marshall Fund’s Transatlantic Center in Brussels and served for ten years as president of the American Council on Germany. Before becoming a journalist, he played professional basketball in the United States and Europe for seven years. His highly acclaimed book, “Fractured Continent: Europe’s Crises and the Fate of the West,” was selected by the Financial Times as one of the best political books of 2017. His latest book, “The Last President of Europe: Emmanuel Macron’s Race to Revive France and Save the World,” which focuses on France’s youthful president and his efforts to shape the future of Europe and a new world order, was published by Hachette and PublicAffairs in April 2020.

 

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by October 18, 2021.

This event is co-sponsored by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.