Stanford University

History

The Declassification Engine 2.0: Exploring the History of Official Secrecy and the Future of Open Government

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About the Topic: Recent revelations indicate the extent to which the government has used data-mining as a tool for surveillance, and the lengths to which it used official secrecy to conceal the scope and nature of its activities, all in the name of national security. What if data-mining could also be a tool for citizens to ensure government accountability? This talk will describe new research using computational methods to explore large corpora of declassified documents. It includes efforts to detect unstudied events, identify topics deemed particularly sensitive, and measure how official secrecy shapes the official record. This work is still exploratory in nature, and the challenges to be overcome are political and ethical, and not just technical. But it is already clear that computational methods will be essential if the government is to adopt a more enlightened, risk-management approach to official secrecy.

About the Speaker: Matthew Connelly’s work seeks to offer new, more productive ways to think about the history – and future – of world politics. He works with computer scientists and statisticians to try to uncover the scope and nature of official secrecy, and venture predictions about what a fuller accounting might reveal about major global threats. His publications include A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria's Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (2002), and Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (2008). He has written research articles in Comparative Studies in Society and History; The International Journal of Middle East Studies and The American Historical Review, and published commentary for The Atlantic Monthly and The National Interest. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1997.

CISAC Conference Room

Matthew Connelly Professor of History Speaker Columbia University
Seminars

The Development of U.S. Missile Defense Policy, 1961-1972

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ABOUT THE SPEAKER: James Cameron, Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at CISAC for 2013-14, completed his PhD in July 2013 at the University of Cambridge. James is very interested in the contribution history can make to informing today’s debates on nuclear strategy and U.S.-Russian relations. After completing his master’s in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Oxford, he was a business consultant specializing in the former Soviet Union. 

His dissertation, “The Development of United States Anti-Ballistic Missile Policy, 1961-1972”, used the transformation of the American anti-ballistic missile (ABM) program from John F. Kennedy to Richard M. Nixon as a prism through which to examine changing patterns of presidential nuclear leadership during this period. Employing both new American and Russian sources, the thesis shows how successive occupants of the Oval Office and their most trusted advisers managed the tension between their publicly articulated nuclear strategies and their inner convictions regarding the utility of nuclear weapons during this pivotal decade of the Cold War.


ABOUT THE TOPIC: Richard Nixon did not believe in mutual assured destruction. Yet he signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 1972, which enshrined MAD as a central fact of the U.S.-Soviet strategic nuclear balance. Conversely his predecessors, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, publicly defended American nuclear superiority and pushed ahead with ABM, despite their private skepticism regarding the utility of both and desire to moderate the arms race. Employing newly available evidence from declassified telephone recordings and documents, this paper attempts to account for this contradiction. It does so by placing the perpetual presidential struggle to reconcile private convictions with public demands at the center of the emergence of assured destruction and the limitation of ABM as elements of U.S.-Soviet détente through strategic arms control.

CISAC Conference Room

James Cameron Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow, CISAC Speaker
Barton J. Bernstein Professor Emeritus, Department of History, Stanford University Commentator
Seminars

CHINA IN TRANSITION

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About the speaker: One of the most renowned China specialists, Roderick MacFarquhar’s publications include The Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Chinese Intellectuals, The Sino-Soviet Dispute, China under Mao; Sino-American Relations, 1949-1971; The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao; the final two volumes of the Cambridge History of China (edited with the late John Fairbank); The Politics of China nd (3rd ed.): Sixty Years of the People’s Republic of China; and a trilogy, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution; and Mao’s Last Revolution (co-author John Fairbank). He was the founding editor of “The China Quarterly,” and has been a fellow at Columbia University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Royal Institute for International Affairs. In previous personae, he has been a journalist, TV commentator, and Member of Parliament. 

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Stanford Center at Peking University

Roderick MacFarquhar Leroy B. Williams Research Professor of History and Political Science Speaker Harvard University
Lectures

Arabs and Israelis: Conflict and Peacemaking in the Middle East

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Abstract:  

Arabs and Israelis: Conflict and Peacemaking in the Middle East is a new, ground-breaking textbook on the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is the first on this hyper-sensitive subject to have been team-written by a Palestinian, an Israeli, and an Egyptian representing a broader Arab perspective: The book presents competing narratives that the different parties have developed and adopted with respect to the conflict's various milestones and provides a toolbox for analyzing past, current and future developments in the conflict and in the efforts to resolve it.

At the CDDRL seminar, two of the book's three authors, Shai Feldman and Khalil Shikaki will address the challenges associated with teaching the Arab-Israeli conflict and the manner in which they suggest overcoming these challenges. In addition, they will share what insights they gain from the historical record of the efforts to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict when assessing the likely prospects of the most recent attempt to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, launched and orchestrated by Secretary of State John Kerry. 

Speaker bios:

Shai Feldman is the Judith and Sidney Swartz Director of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies and Professor of Politics at Brandeis University. Prof. Feldman is also a Senior Fellow and a member of the Board of Directors of Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs where he serves as Co-Chair of the Middle East Security Project. In 1997-2005, he was Head of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University and in 2001-2003, he served as a member of the UN Secretary General’s Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters. Educated at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Prof. Feldman was awarded his Ph.D. by the University of California at Berkeley in 1980.

Prof. Feldman is the author of numerous publications. These include five books: Israeli Nuclear Deterrence: A Strategy for the 1980s (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); The Future of U.S.-Israel Strategic Cooperation (Washington D.C.: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1996); Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control in the Middle East (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997); Bridging the Gap: A Future Security Architecture for the Middle East (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997 – with Abdullah Toukan (Jordan); and, Track-II Diplomacy: Lessons from the Middle East (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003 – with Hussein Agha, Ahmad Khalidi, and Zeev Schiff).

 

Khalil Shikaki is a professor of political science and director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah. Since 2005 he has been a senior fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. He earned his PhD in Political Science from Columbia University in 1985, and taught at several Palestinian and American universities. Between 1996-99, Prof. Shikaki served as the dean of scientific research at al Najah University in Nablus. Since 1993 he has conducted more than 200 polls among Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and, since 2000, dozens of joint polls among Palestinians and Israelis.

He is the co-author of the annual report of the Arab Democracy Index. His recent publications include “The future of Israel-Palestine: a one-state reality in the making,” NOREF Report, May 2012; "Coping with the Arab Spring; Palestinian Domestic and Regional Ramifications," Middle East Brief, no. 58, Crown Center for Middle East Studies, Brandeis University, December 2011; Public Opinion in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The Public Imperative During the Second Intifada, with Yaacov Shamir, Indiana University Press, 2010.

CISAC Conference Room

Seminars

Peter Pirker

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

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Visiting Scholar, The Europe Center
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Peter Pirker holds a PhD in history and a MA in Political Science from the University of Vienna. He is lecturer at the Department of Goverment, University of Vienna and the Department of History at the Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt. From 2014 to 2016 he will be co-principal investigator of the project Politics of remembrance and the transition of public spaces. A political and social analysis of Vienna, 1995-2015 at the University of Vienna. In 2012 he was Visiting Fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. His research interests include transnational resistance, intelligence and exile during National Socialism, post-war Central Europe, politics of history. Currently he is working on the project Democratic Resistance which investigates the journalistic, intelligence and political activities of the Anglo-American correspondent G.E.R. Gedye in Central Europe from 1925 to 1960.

He has published four monographs, among them Subversion deutscher Herrschaft. Der britische Kriegsgeheimdienst SOE und Österreich (Vienna University Press, 2012), Ich war mit Freuden dabei. Der KZ-Arzt Sigbert Ramsauer (with Lisa Rettl, Milena, 2010) and co-edited six volumes on regional and local National Socialist rule in Austria, biographies of victims of Nazism, Wehrmacht deserters, exiles and members of the resistance, most recently Wehrmachtsjustiz. Kontext, Praxis, Nachwirkungen (Braumüller Verlag, 2011).

Nabil Mouline

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Visiting Scholar, ARD
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Nabil Mouline is a senior researcher in The French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and The School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS). Prior to this, he was a research professor at the Institute of Political Studies of Paris (Sciences Po).
 
He earned a Ph.D. in history from the Paris-Sorbonne University and a Ph.D. in political science from the Institute of Political Studies of Paris (Sciences Po).
 
He is the author, among other works, of The Imaginary Caliphate of Ahmad al-Mansûr: Power and Diplomacy in Morocco in the 16th Century (PUF, Paris, 2009) and The Clerics of Islam: Religious Authority and Political Power in Saudi Arabia (PUF, Paris, 2011). Cambridge University Press and Yale University Press will publish the English translation of these two books in 2014 respectively.
 
During his residency at Stanford, he will work on a book on the sociological history of Saudi Arabia.

Ian Morris

450 Serra Mall
Building 110
Stanford, CA 94305-2145

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Jean and Rebecca Willard Professor in Classics
Fellow of the Archaeology Center
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Ian Morris is Jean and Rebecca Willard Professor of Classics and a Fellow of the Archaeology Center at Stanford University. He grew up in Britain and studied at Birmingham and Cambridge Universities before moving to the University of Chicago in 1987 and on to Stanford University in 1995. He directed Stanford’s archaeological excavations at Monte Polizzo in Sicily between 2000 and 2007 and has served at Stanford as Senior Associate Dean of Humanities and Sciences, Chair of the Classics department, and Director of the Stanford Archaeology Center and Social Science History Institute. He has served as a contributing editor at Stratfor, the Roman Professor of International Studies at the LSE, the Australian Army's Professor of Future Land Warfare, and as a member of the Max Planck Institute's Scientific Advisory Board. In 2012 he was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy.

He has published thirteen books and more than a hundred essays in scholarly journals and newspapers. His book Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History, and What they Reveal About the Future (published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2010) won three literary awards, was named as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, Nature, and the London Evening Standard, and has been translated into fourteen languages. Foreign Policy magazine ranked it number 2 among the books global thinkers were reading in 2011. His most recent book, Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Values Evolve, was published by Princeton University Press in 2015. His next book looks at Britain's relations with Europe and the wider world--all the way back to 6000 BC, when rising sea levels physically separated the British Isles from the European continent.

Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center

Summer of 2013: A Focus on Egypt and Turkey

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The Mediterranean Studies Forum presents a panel discussion about the popular protests and recent developments in the Middle East.

Co-sponsored by the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, the CDDRL Program on Arab Reform and Democracy, and the Stanford Humanities Center Workshop on Ethnic Minorities, Religious Communities and Rights and Democracy in the Modern Middle East and Central Asia.

 

Amr Adly (Stanford University), “Egypt after June 30th: Between Abortive and Potential Fascism”

Adly is postdoctoral fellow in Stanford CDDRL’s Arab Reform and Democracy Program. He received his Ph.D. in political and social Sciences from the European University. His research focuses on state reform and development in the context of the Middle East. He is currently working on a project about entrepreneurial reforms in Egypt and Tunisia after the Arab Spring.

 

Ayça Alemdaroğlu (Stanford University), “Youth and Politics in Turkey”

Alemdaroglu is a lecturer in Stanford's Introductory Studies Program. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Cambridge. Her research and teaching interests include social inequality and change, youth experiences, gender and sexuality, experiences of modernity, commercialization of education, nationalism and eugenics. In Winter 2014, she will teach ANTHRO 149A/URBANST144 Tahrir to Taksim: Cities and Citizens in the Middle East.

 

Alexander Key (Stanford University), “Should It Matter What We Call It? Islamic, Democratic, and Spring Politics”

Key is assistant professor of Arabic and comparative literature at Stanford. He received his Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Harvard University. His research focuses on literary and intellectual history of the Arabic and Persian-speaking worlds from the seventh century, together with Western political thought and philosophy. He is currently working on two book projects about the Arabic philosophy of language during the 11th century. Key is founding editor of New Middle Eastern Studies, where he has edited articles on women Iran's nuclear program, Salafi conceptions of citizenship, and art in the Arab Spring. 

 

Kabir Tambar  (Stanford University), “Popular Protest and the Politics of the Present in Turkey”Panelists will discuss the contemporary political situation in the Middle East with special respect to Egypt and Turkey.

Tambar is assistant professor of anthropology at Stanford. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. As an anthropologist of the Middle East and Muslim world, he has published widely on secular political identities, contemporary appropriations of and challenges to Turkish nationalism, and the politics of devotional affect in Alevi Muslim contexts. His book, The Reckoning of Pluralism: Political Voice and the Demands of History in Turkey, is coming out from Stanford University Press in 2013.

Bechtel Conference Center

Amr Adly

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street, C145
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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ARD Postdoctoral Fellow
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Amr Adly has a Ph.D. from the European University Institute-Florence, Department of political and social sciences (Date of completion: September 2010). His thesis topic was "The political economy of trade and industrialization in the post-liberalization period: Cases of Turkey and Egypt". The thesis was published by Routledge in December 2012 under the title of State Reform and Development in the Middle East: The Cases of Turkey and Egypt.

He has several other academic publications that have appeared in the Journal of Business and Politics, Turkish Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies, in addition to articles in several other periodicals and newspapers in English and Arabic. 

Before joining Stanford, he worked as a senior researcher at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, heading the unit of social and economic rights, and at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a diplomat.

At Stanford, he is leading a research project on reforming the regulatory environment governing entrepreneurship after the Arab Spring in Egypt and Tunisia, which will result in policy papers as well as conferences in the two countries.

CV
Amr Adly Speaker Stanford University
Ayça Alemdaroğlu Speaker Stanford University
Alexander Key Speaker Stanford University
Kabir Tambar Speaker Stanford University
Conferences

Yfaat Weiss

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

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Visting Professor and Anna Lindh Fellow, The Europe Center
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Professor Yfaat Weiss teaches in the department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry and heads The Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History. In 2008-2011 she headed the School of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and in 2001-2007 she headed the Bucerius Institute for Research of Contemporary German History and Society at the University of Haifa. Weiss was a Senior Fellow at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna (2003), a visiting scholar at Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture in Leipzig (2004), a visiting Fellow at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research (2005-2006), at the Remarque Institute of European modern history of the University of New York (2007) and at the International Institute for Holocaust Research – Yad Vashem (2007-2008).

In 2012 she was awarded the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought.

The scope of her publications covers German and Central European History, and Jewish and Israeli History. Her research concentrates on questions of ethnicity, nationalism, nationality and emigration.  A selected list of her publications include:

  • Schicksalsgemeinschaft im Wandel: Jüdische Erziehung im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland 1933- 1938. Hamburger Beiträge zur Sozial- und Zeitgeschichte Band XXV. Hamburg: Christians, 1991
  • Zionistische Utopie – israelische Realität:Religion und Politik in Israel. München: C.H. Beck, Eds. Michael Brenner., 1999
  • Staatsbürgerschaft und Ethnizität: Deutsche und Polnische Juden am Vorabend des Holocaust. Schriftenreihe der Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte. München: Oldenbourg, 2000
  • Challenging Ethnic Citizenship: German and Israeli Perspectives on Immigration. New York:Berghahn, Eds. Daniel Levy., 2002
  • Lea Goldberg, Lehrjahre in Deutschland 1930-1933. Toldot – Essays zur jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010
  • A Confiscated Memory: Wadi Salib and Haifa's lost Heritage. New York:Colombia University Press, 2011
  • Before & After 1948: Narratives of a Mixed City. Amsterdam: Republic of Letters, Eds. Mahmoud Yazbak., 2011
  • Kurz hinter der Wahrheit und dicht neben der Lüge: Zum Werk Barbara Honigmanns, München: Fink, Eds. Amir Eshel., 2013

  • "...als Gelegenheitsgast, ohne jedes Engagement". Jean Améry", Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, Eds. Ulrich Bielefeld, 2014. (to be published)

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