As Christmas celebrations for 2015 wind down, Stanford historian and archaeologist Ian Morris discusses the global reach of different aspects of the Christmas holiday, and compares theories of the relative influence of "soft power" cultural exports and "hard power" military and economic intervention on world societies.
States make war, and wars make states. The second clause of Tilly's dictum assumes that the fiscal effort that states exert to wage war persists over time. This paper investigates the effect of war on long-term fiscal capacity as a function of two types of war financing instruments: taxes and loans. Tax-waged wars are argued to exert lasting effects on state capacity, as new taxes require enhancements of the state apparatus as well as complementary fiscal innovations. Loan-waged wars may not contribute to long-term state capacity, as countries might default once the war is over, thus preempting any persistent fiscal effect. Importantly, the way war is waged might be endogenous. To cope with this possibility, I exploit unanticipated crashes in the nineteenth-century international capital markets, which temporarily banned warring states from borrowing regardless of their (un)observed characteristics. The analysis shows that countries that fought wars while the international credit markets were down have today higher fiscal capacity, measured by income tax ratios as well as the size of the tax administration. Altogether, the paper advances the conditions under which wars exert positive and lasting effects on state building.
Didac Queralt is a junior professor at the Institute of Political Economy and Governance (IPEG) in Barcelona. He received his Ph.D. from the NYU Politics Department in September 2012.
His research lies at the intersection of comparative political economy and international relations, with a focus on the political economy of fiscal capacity building in Europe (East and West) and the Americas. Using formal methods, he investigates tax compliance in scenarios of low fiscal capacity, as well as the replacement of old forms of taxation (e.g. trade taxes) by modern extractive technologies (e.g. income taxation) that result from deliberate investment in the tax administration. He analyzes the theoretical predictions using contemporary data from developing economies in Latin America and Eastern Europe, as well as historical data for European powers in the pre-modern era.
In addition, he investigates the origins of direct taxation in the Western World, both with macro- and micro-data, as well as the electoral politics underlying the expansion of the fiscal state. Currently, he is involved in a quasi-experimental test of the legacy of pre-modern wars on state capacity, and an field experiment on tax progressivity in Colombia,
This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.
Encina Hall West, Room 400 (Graham Stuart Lounge)
Didac Queralt
Junior Professor
Speaker
Institute of Political Economy and Governance (IPEG), Barcelona
David Straub, associate director of the Korea Program, says that the recent "Comfort Women" agreement vindicates the victims and should be good for overall Korea-Japan relations.
After nearly five years since the start of the uprising, Syria finds itself divided and embattled, with no end in sight. More significantly, more than half of the Syrian population is displaced and the death toll surpassed 300,000 by all counts. The Syrian tragedy persists and, more than any other case of mass uprising in the region, continues to be shrouded in political power-plays and contradictions at the local, regional, and international levels. Defined increasingly by an absence of a clear favorable outcome, considering existing parties to the conflict, the logic of the lesser evil reigns supreme. This lecture is an attempt to understand the roots and dynamics of the tragic Syrian uprising, with particular attention to its background and to the recent Russian intervention.
Speaker Bio
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Bassam Haddad is Director of the Middle East Studies Program and Associate Professor in the Department of Public and International Affairs at George Mason University, and is Visiting Professor at Georgetown University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011). Haddad is currently editing a volume on Teaching the Middle East After the Arab Uprisings, a book manuscript on pedagogical and theoretical approaches. His most recent books include two co-edited volumes: Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of an Old Order? (Pluto Press, 2012) and Mediating the Arab Uprisings (Tadween Publishing, 2013). Haddad serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal a peer-reviewed research publication and is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of the critically acclaimed film series, Arabs and Terrorism, based on extensive field research/interviews. More recently, he directed a film on Arab/Muslim immigrants in Europe, titled The "Other" Threat. Haddad is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and serves on the Editorial Committee of Middle East Report. He is the Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute, an umbrella for five organizations dealing with knowledge production on the Middle East and Founding Editor of Tadween Publishing.
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CISAC Central Conference Room Encina Hall, 2nd Floor 616 Serra St Stanford, CA 94305
Bassam Haddad
Associate Professor
George Mason University
With the nearing of the fifth anniversary of the January 25 Revolution, this panel examines the nature of politics under the rule of the current military sponsored regime in Egypt. What implications will the recent legislative elections have for political stability and the cohesion of the ruling coalition? How is the regime responding to the various economic challenges it currently confronts? In what ways has the persistence of state repression affected and shaped the space for political contestation and resistance?
Panelists
Joel Beinin Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History,
Stanford University
Lisa Blaydes Associate Professor of Political Science,
Stanford University
Amr Hamzawy ARD Visiting Scholar,
CDDRL, Stanford University
Nancy Okail Executive Director,
The Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy
(via Skype)
Hesham Sallam Associate Director, ARD
CDDRL, Stanford University
Moderator:
Larry Diamond Senior Fellow, FSI;
Senior Fellow Hoover Institute,
Stanford University
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Joel Beinin is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History. He received his A.B. from Princeton University in 1970, his M.A. from Harvard University in 1974, and his A.M.L.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1978 and 1982. He also studied at the American University of Cairo and and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He lived in Egypt in 1969, 1980-81, 1985, 1986, 1994, 2004-05, and 2006-08 and in Israel in 1965-66, 1970-73, 1987, 1988, 1993, and 1993. He has taught Middle East history at Stanford University since 1983. From 2006 to 2008 he served as Director of Middle East Studies and Professor of History at the American University in Cairo. His research and writing focuses on workers, peasants, and minorities in the modern Middle East and on Israel, Palestine, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Beinin has written or edited nine books, most recently Social Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa; co-edited with Frédéric Vairel (Stanford University Press, 2011) and The Struggle for Worker Rights in Egypt (Solidarity Center, 2010). His articles have been published in leading scholarly journals as well as The Nation, Middle East Report, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Le Monde Diplomatique, and others. He has appeared on Al-Jazeera TV, BBC radio, National Public Radio, and many other TV and radio programs throughout North America, and in France, Egypt, Singapore, and Australia, and has given frequent interviews to the global media. In 2002 he served as President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America.
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Lisa Blaydes is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. She is the author of Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Professor Blaydes received the 2009 Gabriel Almond Award for best dissertation in the field of comparative politics from the American Political Science Association for this project. Her articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, International Studies Quarterly, International Organization, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Middle East Journal, and World Politics. During the 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 academic years, Professor Blaydes was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. She holds degrees in Political Science (PhD) from the University of California, Los Angeles and International Relations (BA, MA) from Johns Hopkins University.
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Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He also serves as the Peter E. Haas Faculty Director of the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford. For more than six years, he directed FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, and he continues to lead its programs on Liberation Technology, Arab Reform and Democracy, and Democracy in Taiwan. He is the founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and also serves as Senior Consultant at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. His sixth and most recent book, In Search of Democracy (Routledge, 2016), explores the challenges confronting democracy and democracy promotion, gathering together three decades of his work on democratic development, particularly in Africa and Asia. He has also edited or co-edited more than 40 books on democratic development around the world.
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Amr Hamzawy is a visiting scholar at the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy. He studied political science and developmental studies in Cairo, The Hague, and Berlin. After finishing his doctoral studies and after five years of teaching in Cairo and Berlin, Hamzawy joined the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Washington, DC) between 2005 and 2009 as a senior associate for Middle East Politics. Between 2009 and 2010, he served as the research director of the Middle East Center of the Carnegie Endowment in Beirut, Lebanon. In 2011, he joined the Department of Public Policy and Administration at the American University in Cairo, where he continues to serve today. Hamzawy also serves as an associate professor of political science at the Department of Political Science, Cairo University. 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. Dr. Hamzawy is a former member of the People’s Assembly after being elected in the first Parliamentary elections in Egypt after the 25th of Jan 2011 revolution. He is also a former member of the Egyptian National Council for Human Rights. Hamzawy contributes a daily column and a weekly op-ed to the Egyptian independent newspaper Shorouk.
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Nancy Okail is the Executive Director of TIMEP. She brings more than 15 years of experience promoting democracy and development in the Middle East and North Africa region to this role. Prior to joining TIMEP, Dr. Okail was the director of Freedom House’s Egypt program. She has also worked with the Egyptian government as a senior evaluation officer of foreign aid and has managed programs for Egyptian pro-democracy organizations that challenged the Mubarak regime. She was also one of the defendants convicted and sentenced to prison in the widely publicized case of 43 non-governmental organization workers charged with using foreign funds to foment unrest in Egypt. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex in the U.K. where her dissertation examined the power relations of foreign aid.
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Hesham Sallam is a Research Associate at CDDRL and serves as the Associate-Director of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy. He is also a co-editor of Jadaliyya ezine and a former program specialist at the U.S. Institute of Peace. His research focuses on Islamist movements and the politics of economic reform in the Arab World. Sallam’s research has previously received the support of the Social Science Research Council and the U.S. Institute of Peace. Past institutional affiliations include Middle East Institute, Asharq Al-Awsat, and the World Security Institute. He is editor of Egypt's Parliamentary Elections 2011-2012: A Critical Guide to a Changing Political Arena (Tadween Publishing, 2013). Sallam received a Ph.D. in Government (2015) and an M.A. in Arab Studies (2006) from Georgetown University, and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh (2003).
Abstract: The 1995 launch of a sounding rocket from Andoya in Norway allegedly misinterpreted as an attack in Russia and the so-called "Cuban Missile Crisis" in 1962 have one thing in common: they have both been referred to as "the closest we came to nuclear war." The 1962 crisis has mostly been studied from an American perspective due to the availability of documentary evidence and of the Kennedy tapes, until the 1990s when Cuba and the Soviet Union were given a voice, with the rest of the world still largely absent from the understanding of the event. The 1995 close call has been controversial and is remembered in conflicting ways: an alarmist and an untroubled one.
In this presentation, I will offer new findings on those two cases, based on previously untapped primary sources on the experience of and threat perception during the so-called "Cuban Missile Crisis" in 13 countries worldwide and on an oral history workshop I organized in London for the 20th anniversary of the 1995 "Black Brant event", which gathered for the first time Norwegian, American and Russian participants in the event. By focusing on those two events as exemplary cases of near use of nuclear weapons, I will outline a research program on such cases and its implication for social sciences and for the teaching of post-1945 world history to the next generations.
About the Speaker: Benoît Pelopidas is a CISAC affiliate and lecturer in International Relations at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS), University of Bristol. He was a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC for the 2011-2012 academic year.
He received his Ph. D. in political science from Sciences Po (Paris) and the University of Geneva in 2010 and was a postdoctoral fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in 2010-2011. Since 2005, he has been teaching international relations at Sciences Po (Paris), the University of Geneva and the Monterey Institute of International Studies (Graduate School of International Policy and Management).
In 2010, he won the "outstanding student essay prize" from the Doreen and Jim McElvany Nonproliferation Essay Competition and in 2011, he was awarded the "Best Graduate Paper 2010" from the International Security Studies Section of the International Studies Association. Also in 2011, he won the SNIS Award 2010 for the Best Thesis in International Studies from the Swiss Network for International Studies. A book based on his dissertation is forthcoming in French by Sciences Po University Press.
He published When Empire Meets Nationalism: Power Politics in the US and Russia (with Didier Chaudet and Florent Parmentier; Ashgate, 2009) as well as articles in The Nonproliferation Review, the European Journal of Social Sciences, the Swiss Political Science Review, and the French Yearbook of International Relations. His research focuses on epistemic communities in international security, renunciation of nuclear weapons as a historical possibility, the uses of nuclear history and memory and French nuclear policies.
Lecturer in International Relations at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS)
University of Bristol, United Kingdom
This paper studies how private information is incorporated into prices, using a unique setting from the eighteenth century that is closer to stylized models of price discovery than modern-day markets. Specifically, the paper looks at English securities traded in both London and Amsterdam. Private information reached Amsterdam through sailing boats that sailed only twice a week and in adverse weather could not sail at all. Results are consistent with a Kyle model in which informed agents trade strategically. Most importantly, the speed of information revelation in Amsterdam depended on the expected time until the private signal would become public.
"Mental Calisthenics and Self-Reflexive Fiction" is chapter 27 of the The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, edited by Lisa Zunshine and published by Oxford University Press.
The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies considers, via a variety of methodologies and combinations of interdisciplinary approaches, how the architecture that enables human cognitive processing interacts with cultural and historical contexts. Organized into five parts (Narrative, History, Imagination; Emotions and Empathy; The New Unconscious; Empirical and Qualitative Studies of Literature; and Cognitive Theory and Literary Experience), the volume uses case studies from a wide range of historical periods (from the fourth century BCE to the twenty-first century) and national literary traditions (including South Asian, postcolonial anglophone and francophone, Chinese, Japanese, English, Iranian, Russian, Italian, French, German, and Spanish).
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The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, edited by Lisa Zunshine
After an American hostage was mistakenly killed in a CIA drone strike, Stanford historian Priya Satia argues that oversight of and attitudes toward the drone program should be examined in light of continuing civilian deaths in the AfPak region in the April 30, 2015 edition of The Huffington Post.
As Peter Longerich's definitive biography of Joseph Goebbels is published in English translation, Stanford emeritus professor James J. Sheehan provides an overview of Goebbels' contributions to the Third Reich and reviews Longerich's efforts, including those involved in the heroic undertaking of evaluating Goebbels 32 volumes-worth of diary in the May 13, 2015 edition of The New York Times.
