Stanford University

Culture

The Rise of Women in Muslim Political Parties

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This event is co-sponsored with The Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.

ABSTRACT

Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, Roza Otunbayva in Kyrgystan, Megawati Sukarno Putri in Indonesia: female Muslim leaders are seen as pioneers at the forefront of the empowerment of women in Muslim-majority countries and more generally the empowerment of women on a global scale. The younger generation of women Muslim leaders have forged their political struggle and discourse in the post-9/11 context. More recently, they have surfed the wave of hope and disillusion of the Spring revolution(s). A major difference with the first generation of female Muslim leaders is that the younger generation’s political identity is strongly grounded in Islamic references. They are (or have labelled themselves) as Islamists, Islamist democrats or Muslim democrats that propose an alternative to the exclusive secular discourse.

Through the experience of Sayida Ounissi, we explore the genuine and challenging role of a new generation of female leaders, in Muslim democrats or Islamist parties. This discussion goes beyond the common assumptions and clichés of the veil oppressed Muslim women, the question of the compatibility between Islam and democracy or Islam and feminism. It rather looks at the rise of young women Muslim democrats in Islamist or Muslim parties in a way to grasp the feminine, and sometimes feminist, re-definition of the Islamic tradition and Islamist or Muslim democrats discourse. It explores the modes of transmission of political struggle and ideologies, from fathers to daughters, and from mothers, whether passive or active Islamists, to daughters. Finally, it examines the challenges posed to their ascensions within their parties and society by analysing how these women are re-appropriating conservative Islamic codes, other cultural or religious practices, and the social and political concepts inherent to their respective local and global context, in order to secure legitimate ascension in their parties and societies.

SPEAKRER BIO

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Sayida Ounissi is a member of the Tunisian Assembly of People’s Representatives and Minister for Employment and Vocational Training.  She represents Tunisians living in the North of France for the Ennahdha Party and was first elected in October 2014 and reelected in October 2019.  In 1993, her family fled the dictatorship of Ben-Ali for France where she completed all of her schooling. In 2005, she joined the University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne for a double degree in History and Political Science. She obtained her Masters at the Institute for the Study of Economic and Social Development, and completed her studies with an internship at the African Development Bank in Tunis. In 2016, she was recruited by Prime Minister Youssef Chahed to join his Cabinet as Secretary of State in the Ministry of Employment and Vocational Training, charged with vocational training and private initiative. In 2018, she was promoted as the Minister for Employment and Vocational Training, becoming the youngest minister in Tunisia.

MODERATOR BIO

Portrait of Sophie Lemiere
Sophie Lemiere is a Political Anthropologist and FSI-Humanities Center International Visitor, 2019-20, at Stanford University. She is a former Fellow for the Democracy in Hard Places Initiative at the Ash Center for Democracy, Harvard University. In 2014, she received her PhD from Sciences-Po, France. Her thesis was the first study on the political role of gangs through umbrella NGOs in Malaysia. In 2019-2020, Sophie has been awarded the Visiting Fellowship at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University and the Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellowship at the International Forum for Democratic Studies (National Endowment for Democracy-NED), in Washington, D.C.

Encina Commons Room 123
Encina Commons
615 Crothers Way
Stanford, CA

Seminars
Arab Reform and Democracy Speaker Series

Callista Wells

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Callista Wells received an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Oxford and a BA from Pomona College where she majored in Asian Studies and minored in Chinese. Prior to joining the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center as the China Program Coordinator, Callista worked as a research assistant for Andrew Walder, the Denise O'Leary and Kent Thiry Professor and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. She also worked as an archives assistant while at Pomona College. 

Former China Program Coordinator

CANCELED - French Culture Workshop with Radhika Koul

This week's event-- Radhika Koul presents "The Drama of our World: Spectator and Subject in Medieval Kashmir and Early Modern Europe"-- will be postponed until further notice. 
 
Looking forward, The French Culture Workshop proposed Spring Quarter schedule is now available on their webpage. 

 

The French Culture Workshop is co-sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, the DLCL Research Unit, the France-Stanford Center, and the Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute.

Building 260, Room 252

Pigott Hall

Radhika Koul Speaker Stanford University
Workshops

The poietic mimesis of 18th c. French and Italian Literary Portraits

Literary scholars have generally been loath to analyze description as a practice and technique; as such, it has long suffered from critical disengagement. Academics disparage descriptions as long-winded, unnecessary rhetoric which readers skip on a regular basis. And yet, for unfathomable reasons, authors continue resorting to descriptions in their texts. 

The purpose of Cynthia's dissertation is to uncover the motivations underlying authors’ persistent recourse to descriptions. To that end, Cynthia examines 18th-century French and Italian novels and focus on a particular kind of descriptive element: characters’ “literary portraits”. Cynthia will show how in the 18th century, literary portraits were more than just sums of characters’ physical descriptions and moral traits. Instead, their function was to convey meaningful, crucial information that would eventually influence the outcome of a given text. In addition, Cynthia will demonstrate how this narrative function, disguised as “mere” description, was deployed along three main axes: aesthetic, ludic and pedagogic. Each axis will constitute a chapter of the dissertation, showing, respectively, how literary portraits were justified by three core concerns: aestheticizing the narration, entertaining readers, and instructing them in morality.

A diachronic perspective will identify a century’s worth of patterns and differentiate substantial, long-term changes from fleeting fads, while an interdisciplinary approach will uncover how literary descriptions borrowed/lent techniques from/to other fields of knowledge, such as esthetics, fine arts, anthropology, natural history, and medicine. Cynthia's approach, based on the analysis of descriptive practices, will bring to light the cohesive aspects and interactive relations between those seemingly disparate fields.
 
Cynthia Laura Giancotti-Vialle is a 5th year PhD student in the French and Italian department at Stanford University. She holds a B.A. in French and Chinese Languages and Cultures from the Università degli Studi di Milano in Italy and an M.A. in 19th c. French Literature from Paris VII-Paris Diderot. Her current area of research concerns descriptive practices in 18th c. fictional works, but is also interested in  modern life-writing and fictional representations of violence against women. 

 

The French Culture Workshop is co-sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, the DLCL Research Unit, the France-Stanford Center, and the Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute.

Building 260, Room 252

Pigott Hall

Cynthia Laura Giancotti-Vialle Speaker Stanford University
Workshops

The Human Rights Crisis in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region

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Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them. – George Orwell, 1984

Shorenstein APARC convened a multidisciplinary panel of experts on October 24, 2019, to provide historical context and critical social science analysis to the unfolding horrors in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Displaying the above quote from George Orwell’s 1984, Gardner Bovingdon, associate professor in the Central Eurasian Studies Department at Indiana University, characterized the mass detentions in XUAR as “one of the great, state-engineered human rights disasters of our time” and proceeded to describe the camps in Xinjiang as both “Orwellian and Kafkaesque.”

Over ten million Muslim minorities in the region are under lock-down control, and over one million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims have allegedly disappeared into internment camps. Beijing has characterized the camps as vocational training centers to fight Islamic extremism and recently claimed that most of the detainees have been released. Recent New York Times exposé based on an unprecedented leak of over 400-pages of internal Party documents made clear, however, that the camps are anything but job-training centers.

Broad Assault on Non-Han Culture

James Millward, professor of inter-societal history at Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, gave a quick overview of the worsening political situation in the XUAR, especially since 2009, when violent race riots broke out in Urumqi, ignited by a conflict between Uyghur and Han workers in Guangdong. The bloody incident marked a major turning point in Han-Uyghur relations, and Beijing’s own recalibration of its own policies towards the Uyghurs. When in early 2010 and, again, in 2013-2015, jihadist-style terrorist acts broke out in XUAR, Beijing’s response in 2014 was to launch an all-out “strike hard campaign.”

That same year, Xi Jinping also called an important Central Ethnic Work Conference where the leadership adopted a new approach to ethnic dissent in the XUAR. Instead of relying, as before, on material improvements and economic developments to placate the Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in the XUAR, Xi Jinping now also prescribed the need for “spiritual or psychological” means (jingshenshangde (精神上的)) to manage ethnic strife. What followed, Millward described, were new national security laws and national counterterrorism laws with vague, broad language that allowed all types of measures to be implemented. Then, in 2016, Chen Quanguo, former Party Secretary in Tibet Autonomous Region from 2011-2016, was transferred to the XUAR to apply the same draconian securitization and surveillance system he had put in place in Tibet. Millward described 2016 as a “watershed moment,” a turning point in the crack-down on ethnic dissent in XUAR. The number of criminal prosecutions in Xinjiang suddenly skyrocketed over thirteen-fold from just 27,000 to 363,000 cases between 2016-2018. The number of new security facilities, including camps, prisons and even kindergartens, also spiked in the XUAR during the same period.

In addition to such judicial and extra-judicial methods of repression in the XUAR, this all-encompassing campaign also included draconian assaults on non-Han, Islamic culture. Beginning in the early 2000s, that assault has included the razing of old Kashgar; the illegalizing of any Islamic symbols such as women’s headgear, men’s beards; prayer, and fasting on Ramadan. What earlier started as official discouragement “turned into de facto laws,” he explained: “[Y]ou get locked up in a camp for this kind of behavior.” This “broad, broad attack” on the “symbols and central aspects of Uyghur culture” has also included the erasure of Uyghur script in public places; the disappearance of Uyghur intellectual and cultural leaders, including Rahile Dawut, a renowned anthropologist; and Tashpolat Tiyip, an internationally-recognized geographer and former President of Xinjiang University. One million Han Party members and officials have also been sent to southern Xinjiang to stay in Uyghur homes to spot signs of “extremism,” such as copies of the Quran, religious DVDs, etc.

Totalitarian Politics of Land

Lauren Hansen Restrepo, assistant professor in growth and structure of cities at Bryn Mawr College and an expert on urbanization in Xinjiang next spoke from the panel. She used the lens of urban planning to describe two significant shifts in Beijing’s techniques of governance over the Uyghur population in the XUAR. From 2000-2009, before the Urumqi riots, the guiding principle for spatial development in Urumqi was that of a “dual-centered city” (shuangzhongxin; 双中心) – a relatively balanced vision with one development center located in the Uyghur heartland (Tianshan) and the other, in the Han super-majority region (Xinshi). This dual model of growth for Urumqi was abandoned in 2010, however, and a new spatial development policy called nankongbeikuo 南控北扩 or “control the south, develop the north” took its place. Construction halted in southern Urumqi where Uyghurs make up a majority of the population, and all resources were basically channeled to the northern part of the city.

In the wake of the 2014 Central Ethnic Work Conference, however, the “logic of total security” took over and there began a precipitous move towards what Restrepo called “a totalitarian politics of land.” The central government took control and began to more directly govern how development worked in XUAR. “Regional planning has broken every logic of urban planning in China,” she stated, resulting in the isolation and even greater marginalization of Uyghur-dominated urban centers. According to Restrepo, cities and larger regions in XUAR are being reconfigured to come under the direct management of central ministry-level powers and quasi-military entities called the bingtuan, respectively.

Open Air Prisons

Next, Darren Byler, an anthropologist who had recently received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington, focused on Uyghur dispossession and “terror capitalism” in the city of Urumqi. He first described the mass migration of Han people in the 1990’s into the XUAR, which caused increasing tensions with the Uyghurs.

With economic development, however, also came communications infrastructure, and in 2010, with the installment of 3G networks in Xinjiang, smartphone use began to spread. By 2012, nearly 40-50 percent of XUAR’s population were also on WeChat, China’s most popular messaging app. Uyghurs formed a vibrant, virtual public sphere on WeChat where they often formed networks centered on their religious identity. According to Byler, Uyghurs mainly focused on personal piety, rather than on political/radical forms of Islam. But after the violent jihadi-style attacks in 2013-2015, the Chinese state increasingly collapsed Islamism with radicalism extremism and equated visible signs of religiosity like beards on men, women’s veils and regular prayer with pre-terrorist tendencies. The impetus for this intense politicization of Islamism by the authorities, Byler also explained, originated with the U.S.’ war on terror.

The XUAR is a key zone of the Belt and Road Initiative and a region rich in natural resources, Byler pointed out, and control over this Northwestern area is essential to Xi Jinping’s ambitions. Byler described extensive use of cameras, digital media and biometric checkpoints, prisons, internment camps and, more recently, coerced labor to accomplish tight control over the Uyghurs. Byler also explained how, since the spring of 2017, the local police instituted a point-based ranking system for Uyghurs that assessed, for example, whether he or she owned religious tracts, his/her daily prayer practices, and ties to foreign countries.

In the internment camps themselves, the detainees undergo boot camp-style ideological and Chinese language training in conditions akin to medium security prisons. Pictures of blindfolded captives with their hands tied behind their backs, guards with tasers and weapons, all belied the Chinese government’s characterization of these camps as benign, vocational training centers. And, now, Byler described, in factories, such as textile factories, associated with these camps, detainees are coerced to provide low-cost labor at a time when average labor costs in China are rising. In a grim conclusion, Byler stated, “what's being built through this is . . . open air prisons. The whole space [of XUAR] is prison, it’s camps all the way down . . . . You can't move . . . without showing your I.D. and having your face scanned, and so it's just impossible to escape.”

State-engineered Human Rights Disaster

Indiana University’s Gardner Bovingdon, whose research focuses on politics in contemporary Xinjiang and the region’s modern history, was the last panelist to speak at the event. He first situated this “great, state-engineered human rights disaster[ ]” within the CCP’s framework of “minzu regional autonomy,” which the Party-state had established after 1949. Minzu being variously translated as “nationality” or “ethnicity,” the framework formally recognized and accorded some measure of political autonomy to people who are culturally different. In fact, however, communist ideology, Bovingdon noted, has always faced tensions between (i) “the goal of respecting and protecting cultural difference” and (ii) “the goal of integrating the land and the peoples into a unified polity.”

According to Bovingdon, prior to 2009, commercialization of Uyghur culture through tourism and consumption seemed to be the Party’s preferred way of dealing with the securitization problem in the XUAR. But the CCP’s ever-shifting attitude towards the nation’s multi-ethnicity issue went all the way back to the Soviet collapse in 1991. The paramount concern of the Chinese Communist Party ever since has been to avert the outcome that had felled their erstwhile communist neighbor and preserve the Party and the nation. Scholarly responses to the Soviet collapse in the 1990’s included an analysis that exhorted the government to “weaken the concept of minzu and minzu consciousness”; lessen “minzu centrism” and vitiate the notion of minzu independence. Exhortations to “de-politicize and culturalize” the problem of ethnic minorities continued into the 2000’s. Then, more recently, scholars have proposed moving away from policies that mimic those of the former Soviet Union and adopting “second generation minzu policies” that promote “fusion and collective flourishing” of the various peoples.

Regardless of the official academic discourse, however, Bovingdon asserted that the best explanation for policy changes in the XUAR remained the transfer of Chen Quanguo as Party Secretary from Tibet to Xinjiang in 2016. Under him, the Chinese Communist Party transported and scaled-up a set of policies that had previously been applied to the unrest in Tibet. These policies do not “weaken” minzu consciousness, Bovingdon suggested, but rather intensifies them. These policies are, in fact, “signs of a flailing, terrified Party,” Bovingdon asserted, “that doesn’t know what to do with the Uyghurs, but also feels no constraints from the international community on its behavior. And so the biggest problem now is to find a way to put constraints on a system that has operated untrammeled with devastating consequences.”

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A mix of ethnic Uyghur and Han shopkeepers hold large wooden sticks as they are trained in security measures on June 27, 2017 next to the old town of Kashgar, in the far western Xinjiang province
A mix of ethnic Uyghur and Han shopkeepers hold large wooden sticks as they are trained in security measures on June 27, 2017 next to the old town of Kashgar, in the far western Xinjiang province, China.
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Rosalind Galt

Shorenstein APARCStanford UniversityEncina Hall E301Stanford, CA 94305-6055
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Visiting Scholar at APARC
2019-2020 Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia
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Rosalind Galt joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) in Fall 2019 from King’s College London, where she is a professor of Film Studies.

Her research broadly addresses the relationships between world cinema and geopolitics, including European cinema’s responses to the end of the Cold War and the global financial crisis; colonialism’s impact on film aesthetics; and cinema’s engagement with sexual and gender dissidence as a mode of globalization. During her time at Shorenstein-APARC, Galt conducted research for a book on the role of the popular Malay figure of the pontianak, or female vampire, in cultures of decolonization in Malaysia and Singapore.

Galt is the author of Queer Cinema in the World, coauthored with Karl Schoonover (2016), Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (2011), and The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map (2006), and the coeditor of Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories (2010).

She holds a PhD in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University and an MA (Hons) in Film and Television Studies and English Literature from the University of Glasgow.
 

The Struggle for Political Change in the Arab World

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DAY 1: Friday October 11

 

8:30 – 9:00am         Breakfast

 

9:00 – 9:15am         Introductory Remarks

 

9:15 – 11:15am       Panel 1: The Boundaries of Authoritarianism post-Arab Uprisings

Amr Hamzawy, Stanford University

“The Discourse of Authoritarianism in Egypt”

Sean Yom, Temple University

“Mobilization without Movement: The Curse of the Arab Spring in Jordan”

Samia Errazzouki, University of California, Davis

“Political and Economic Stagnation in Morocco: Twenty Years into King Mohamed VI’s Reign”

Chair: Lisa Blaydes, Stanford University

 

11:15-11:30am        Coffee Break

 

11:30-1:30pm          Panel 2: Popular Uprisings and Uncertain Transitions

Thomas Serres, University of California, Santa Cruz

“Beyond the ‘Isaba: A Political Economy of the Algerian Hirak”

Lindsay Benstead, Portland State University

“Religious Ideology or Clientelism? Explaining Voter Preferences in Tunisia’s Transitional Elections”

Khalid Medani, McGill University

"The Prospects and Challenges of Democratic Consolidation in Sudan: Understanding the Roots, Dynamics and Potential of an “Impossible” Revolution""

Chair: Hicham Alaoui, Harvard University

 

1:30-2:30pm             Lunch

 

2:30-4:30pm             Panel 3: Politics, Succession and Sectarianism in the GCC States

Toby Matthiesen, Oxford University

“Saudi Arabia and the Arab Counter-Revolution”

Michael Herb, Georgia State University

“Monarchical Institutions and the Decay of Family Rule in the Gulf”

Farah Al-Nakib, California Polytechnic State University

“Kuwait's New Urbanism: Palace Projects and the Erosion of the Public”                                   

Chair: Hesham Sallam, Stanford University

 

DAY 2: Saturday October 12

 

8:30 – 9:00am          Breakfast

 

9:00 – 11:00am       Panel 4: Social Strife and Proxy Conflict in the Middle East

Lina Khatib, Chatham House

“Syria’s Conflict: The Intersections of the International and the Domestic”

Stacey Philbrick Yadav, Hobart and William Smith Colleges,

“Can Allies in War Become Partners in Peace? 
Foreign Agendas, Foreign Investment, and Peacebuilding in Yemen”

David Patel, Brandeis University

“Institutions and Competition in Post-Occupation Iraq”

Chair: Amr Hamzawy, Stanford University

 

11:00-11:15am        Coffee Break

 

11:15-1:15pm          Panel 5: International Forces in the Arab Political Arena

Lisa Blaydes, Stanford University

“Will China's 'Belt and Road' Initiative Steady or Destabilize Arab Authoritarians?”  

Abbas Milani, Stanford University,

“Iran and its Role in the Prospects of Democracy in the Arab World”

Colin Kahl, FSI, Stanford University

“US Policy Toward a Changing Middle East”

Ayca Alemdaroglu, FSI, Stanford University

“The Rise and Fall of ‘neo-Ottomanism’”

Chair: Larry Diamond, Stanford University

 

SPEAKER BIOS

 

 

 

hicham alaoui

Hicham Alaoui is an established voice calling for political reform in the Arab world. He is currently a research fellow based at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, and is pursuing a D.Phil. at the University of Oxford.  Previously at Stanford, he was a Consulting Professor at the Center for Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law, and advisory board member at the Freeman Spogli Institute. He has published on democratic reforms in the Middle East for journals such as Politique Internationale, Le Debat, Pouvoirs, Le Monde Diplomatique, and Journal of Democracy. He has contributed to The New York Times, Le Monde, La Nouvelle Observateur, El Pais, and Al-Quds. He also served on the MENA Advisory Committee for Human Rights Watch. He holds degrees from Princeton and Stanford. [Back to top]

 

 

 

ayca

Ayça Alemdaroğlu (Ph. D. Cambridge, 2011) (Ph. D. Cambridge, 2011) is the associate director of the Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program and research assistant professor of sociology at Northwestern University. Her research has engaged with a broad range of theoretical and ethnographic issues, including youth culture and politics, gender and sexuality, experiences of modernity, nationalism, eugenics and higher education. Between 2011-2015, Alemdaroğlu taught in the Anthropology Department and Introductory Studies at Stanford University. Her most publications include "Spatial Segregation and Class Subjectivity in Turkey” published in Social and Cultural Geography; and “Dialectics of Reform and Repression: Unpacking Turkey’s Authoritarian Turn” (with Sinan Erensu) in ROMES. [Back to top]

 

 

 

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Lindsay J. Benstead  is Associate Professor of Political Science in the Mark O. Hatfield School of Government and Director of the Middle East Studies Center (MESC) at Portland State University. Previously, she served as Fellow in the Middle East Program and the Women’s Global Leadership Initiative at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC (2018-2019) and Kuwait Visiting Professor at SciencesPo in Paris (fall 2016). She is an Affiliated Scholar in the Program on Governance and Local Development (GLD) at the University of Gothenburg and Yale University. Benstead has conducted surveys in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Jordan and contributes to the Transitional Governance Project. Her research on women and politics, public opinion, and survey methodology has appeared in Perspectives on Politics, International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Governance, and Foreign Affairs. She holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy and Political Science from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and served as a doctoral fellow at Yale University and a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton University. [Back to top]

 

 

 

lisa blaydes

Lisa Blaydes is a Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. She is the author of Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2011). 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. She holds degrees in Political Science (PhD) from the University of California, Los Angeles and International Relations (BA, MA) from Johns Hopkins University. [Back to top]

 

 

 

Larry Diamond

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. For more than six years, he directed FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, where he now leads its Program on Arab Reform and Democracy and its Global Digital Policy Incubator. 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 research focuses on democratic trends and conditions around in the world, and on policies and reforms to defend and advance democracy. His 2016 book, In Search of Democracy, explores the challenges confronting democracy and democracy promotion, gathering together three decades of his writing and research, particularly on Africa and Asia. He is author of Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, published in 2019 by Penguin Press. He is now writing a textbook on democratic development. [Back to top]

 

 

 

samia e

Samia Errazzouki is a PhD student focusing on early modern Northwest African history. Prior to UC Davis, she worked as a journalist based in Morocco reporting for the Associated Press, and later, with Reuters. Samia also worked as a research associate in Morocco with the University of Cambridge, researching the dynamics of surveillance and citizen media in light of the "Arab Spring." She is currently a co-editor with Jadaliyya. Her work and commentary has appeared in various platforms including The Washington Post, BBC, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, the Carnegie Endowment's Sada Journal, the Journal of North African Studies, and the Middle East Institute, among others. Samia holds an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University and a BA in Global Affairs from George Mason University. [Back to top]

 

 

 

amr hamzawy cropped

Amr Hamzawy is a Senior Research Scholar at CDDRL. He studied political science and developmental studies in Cairo, The Hague, and Berlin. He was previously an associate professor of political science at Cairo University and a professor of public policy at the American University in Cairo. Between 2016 and 2017, he served as a senior fellow in the Middle East program and the Democracy and Rule of Law program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC. 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. He is currently writing a new book on contemporary Egyptian politics, titled Egypt’s New Authoritarianism. Hamzawy is a former member of the People’s Assembly after being elected in the first Parliamentary elections in Egypt after the January 25, 2011 revolution. He is also a former member of the Egyptian National Council for Human Rights. Hamzawy contributes a weekly op-ed to the Egyptian independent newspaper al-Shorouk and a weekly op-ed to the London based newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi. [Back to top]

 

 

 

michael herb square 620x620

Michael Herb is professor and chair of political science at Georgia State University. His work focuses on Gulf politics, monarchism and the resource curse. He is the author of The Wages of Oil: Parliaments ‎and Economic Development in Kuwait and the UAE (Cornell University Press, 2014) and All in the Family: Absolutism, Revolution, and Democracy in the Middle Eastern Monarchies (SUNY ‎‎1999), in addition to numerous articles. He maintains the Kuwait Politics Database, a comprehensive and authoritative source of information on Kuwaiti elections.  He has twice won Fulbright awards to study in Kuwait. [Back to top]

 

 

 

colin kahl

Colin H. Kahl is co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation, the inaugural Steven C. Házy Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and a Professor, by courtesy, in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. He is also a Strategic Consultant to the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. From October 2014 to January 2017, he was Deputy Assistant to the President and National Security Advisor to the Vice President. In that position, he served as a senior advisor to President Obama and Vice President Biden on all matters related to U.S. foreign policy and national security affairs, and represented the Office of the Vice President as a standing member of the National Security Council Deputies’ Committee. From February 2009 to December 2011, Dr. Kahl was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East at the Pentagon. In this capacity, he served as the senior policy advisor to the Secretary of Defense for Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel and the Palestinian territories, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen, and six other countries in the Levant and Persian Gulf region. In June 2011, he was awarded the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service by Secretary Robert Gates. From 2007 to 2017 (when not serving in the U.S. government), Dr. Kahl was an assistant and associate professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. From 2007 to 2009 and 2012 to 2014, he was also a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a nonpartisan Washington, DC-based think tank. From 2000 to 2007, he was an assistant professor of political science at the University of Minnesota. In 2005-2006, Dr. Kahl took leave from the University of Minnesota to serve as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where he worked on issues related to counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and responses to failed states. In 1997-1998, he was a National Security Fellow at the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University. Current research projects include a book analyzing American grand strategy in the Middle East in the post-9/11 era. A second research project focuses on the implications of emerging technologies on strategic stability. He has published numerous articles on international security and U.S. foreign and defense policy in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, International Security, the Los Angeles Times, Middle East Policy, the National Interest, the New Republic, the New York Times, Politico, the Washington Post, and the Washington Quarterly, as well as several reports for CNAS. His previous research analyzed the causes and consequences of violent civil and ethnic conflict in developing countries, focusing particular attention on the demographic and natural resource dimensions of these conflicts. His book on the subject, States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the Developing World, was published by Princeton University Press in 2006, and related articles and chapters have appeared in International Security, the Journal of International Affairs, and various edited volumes. Dr. Kahl received his B.A. in political science from the University of Michigan (1993) and his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University (2000). [Back to top]

 

 

 

lina khatib

Lina Khatib is Head of the Middle East and North Africa Program at Chatham House. She was formerly director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut and co-founding Head of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Her research focuses on the international relations of the Middle East, Islamist groups and security, political transitions and foreign policy, with special attention to the Syrian conflict. She is a research associate at SOAS, was a senior research associate at the Arab Reform Initiative and lectured at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published seven books and also written widely on public diplomacy, political communication and political participation in the Middle East. She is a frequent commentator on politics and security in the Middle East and North Africa at events around the world and in the media. [Back to top]

 

 

 

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Toby Matthiesen is a Senior Research Fellow in the International Relations of the Middle East at the Middle East Centre, St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford. He was previously a Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and at the London School of Economics and Political Science and gained his doctorate from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). He is the author of Sectarian Gulf: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the Arab Spring That Wasn't (Stanford University Press, 2013), and The Other Saudis: Shiism, Dissent and Sectarianism (Cambridge University Press, 2015). His current research focuses on Sunni-Shii relations and the legacies of the Cold War in the Middle East. [Back to top]

 

 

 

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Khalid Medani is currently associate professor of political science and Islamic studies at McGill University, and has also taught at Oberlin College and Stanford University. Dr. Medani received an A.B. in development studies from Brown University (1987), an MA in development studies from the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University (1994), and a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley (2003). His research focuses on the political economy of Islamic and ethnic politics in Egypt, Sudan and Somalia. He has published widely on the roots of civil conflict and the funding of the Islamic movement in Sudan, the question of informal finance and terrorism in Somalia, the obstacles to state building in Iraq, and the role of informal networks in the rise of Islamic militancy. Dr. Medani has worked as a researcher at the Brookings Institution and at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). He also served as a Homeland Security Fellow at Stanford University from 2006-2007, and has worked with a variety of international organizations including the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and the UN Office of the Coordinator of Humanitarian Affairs. Dr. Medani has also served as a senior consultant for a variety of governments on issues such as the roots of Islamic militancy, the Darfur crisis, youth politics in Sudan, and electoral reforms in Morocco including the governments of the United States, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Norway. He is a previous recipient of a Carnegie Scholar on Islam award from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. [Back to top]

 

 

 

milani

Abbas Milani is the Hamid & Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies and Adjunct Professor at the Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. He has been one of the founding co-directors of the Iran Democracy Project and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His expertise is U.S.-Iran relations as well as Iranian cultural, political, and security issues. Until 1986, he taught at Tehran University’s Faculty of Law and Political Science, where he was also a member of the Board of Directors of the university’s Center for International Relations. After moving to the United States, he was for fourteen years the Chair of the Political Science Department at the Notre Dame de Namur University. For eight years, he was a visiting Research Fellow in University of California, Berkeley’s Middle East Center. [Back to top]

 

 

 

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Farah Al-Nakib is Assistant Professor of History at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo.  She received her PhD (2011) and MA (2006) in History from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Her book Kuwait Transformed: A History of Oil and Urban Life (Stanford University Press, 2016) analyzes the relationship between the urban landscape, the patterns and practices of everyday life, and social behaviors and relations in Kuwait, and traces the historical transformation of these three interrelated realms in the shift from the pre-oil to oil eras. Her current research focuses on collective memory and forgetting in Kuwait, and on the Iraqi invasion and occupation of Kuwait in 1990-91.  Her articles have been published in numerous peer reviewed journals and various edited volumes. Until 2018 Al-Nakib was Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for Gulf Studies at the American University of Kuwait. [Back to top]

 

 

 

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David Siddhartha Patel is the Associate Director for Research at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. His research focuses on religious authority, social order, and identity in the contemporary Arab world. He conducted independent field research in Iraq on the role of mosques and clerical networks in generating order after state collapse, and his book, Order Out of Chaos: Islam, Information, and Social Order in Iraq, is being prepared for publication by Cornell University Press. Patel has also recently written about the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood; ISIS in Iraq; and dead states in the Middle East. He teaches courses on Middle Eastern politics, research design, and GIS and spatial aspects of politics. Before joining the Crown Center, Patel was an assistant professor of government at Cornell University. Patel received his B.A. from Duke University in Economics and Political Science and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in Political Science, where he also was a fellow at CDDRL and CISAC. He studied Arabic in Lebanon, Yemen, Morocco, and Jordan. [Back to top]

 

 

 

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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). [Back to top]

 

 

 

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Thomas Serres is a lecturer in the Politics Department at UC Santa Cruz and a specialist of North African and Mediterranean politics and his scholarship focuses on questions of crisis, economic restructuring and authoritarian upgrading. His first book was published in French by Karthala in 2019. It studies the politics of catastrophization in post-civil war Algeria and is entitled Algeria and the Suspended Disaster: Managing the Crisis and Blaming the People under Bouteflika. He has also recently co-edited the volume North Africa and the Making of Europe: Governance, Institutions, Culture, which was published by Bloomsbury Academic Press in 2018. [Back to top]

 

 

 

stacey philbrick yadav

Stacey Philbrick Yadav is Associate Professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She has written extensively about Islamist-Leftist and intra-Islamist dynamics in Yemen, including Islamists and the State: Legitimacy and Institutions in Yemen and Lebanon, and was a contributor to the “Rethinking Political Islam” project at the Brookings Institution. Focusing increasingly on Yemen’s evolving war dynamics, she co-edited Politics, Governance, and Reconstruction in Yemen’s War for the Project on Middle East Political Science and the spring 2019 issue of Middle East Report devoted to the conflict. Philbrick Yadav serves on the executive committee of the American Institute for Yemeni Studies, and is currently a non-resident fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. [Back to top]

 

 

 

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Sean Yom is Associate Professor of Political Science at Temple University and Senior Fellow in the Middle East Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His research explores authoritarian politics, institutional stability, and historical identity in these countries, as well as their implications for US foreign policy. His publications include From Resilience to Revolution: How Foreign Interventions Destabilize the Middle East (Columbia University Press, 2016); the Routledge textbooks Societies of the Middle East and North Africa (2019) and Government and Politics of the Middle East and North Africa (2019); and numerous articles in academic journals and popular media. He is currently writing a new book, under contract, on the history and politics of Jordan. [Back to top]

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The Largest Cohort of High School Students Successfully Completes the SKSP Online Course on Korea at Stanford

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This year, the Sejong Korean Scholars Program (SKSP) concluded its sixth year with its largest cohort of 22 students from across the United States. The SKSP is an intensive online course offered by the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE) at Stanford University for exceptional U.S. high school students who want to engage in an in-depth study of Korea, exploring its history, religion, culture, and relationship with the United States. Students who successfully complete the course earn credit from the Stanford Continuing Studies Program and a Certificate of Completion from SPICE, Stanford University.

Each year from March to June, students in the SKSP online course carry out rigorous coursework that consists of weekly readings, online lectures, assignments, discussion posts, and “virtual classroom” video conferencing sessions, where students engage in live discussion with each other and a guest speaker who is an expert-scholar on the topic of the week. As their culminating final project, students write independent research papers which are printed in journal format at the conclusion of the course.

The SKSP online course offers a unique opportunity for high school students to study Korea and U.S.–Korean relations in a college-level-type course that draws on the wealth of expertise and scholarship on Korean Studies at Stanford University. Top scholars, experts, and former diplomats at Stanford University as well as other universities in the United States provide thematically organized online lectures. The themes for each week include traditional Korean culture, religion, colonial history, the Korean War, post-war recovery, North Korea, modern South Korean society and its educational system, and Korea’s transnationalism. In addition to the recorded online lectures, the guest speakers for the weekly virtual classroom sessions engage in discussions with students and provide answers to their questions.

The co-instructors for the course, as well as guest speakers, often note the quality and maturity of students’ thoughtful insights and questions. Co-instructor HyoJung Jang has noted that “the talented and engaged high school students who participate in the SKSP online course bring their intellectual curiosity, critical thinking skills, and enthusiasm for learning about Korea and its popular culture. On top of their full academic load at their respective high schools across the country, these students go above and beyond to commit to SKSP’s demanding coursework and participate fully in the course as Korea scholars-in-training.”

“Over the past four months, our students have formed a community where they actively engage in intellectual discussions with each other—exchanging their ideas, thoughts, reflections, experiences, and perspectives on various topics,” commented co-instructor Jonas Edman. “For instance, some students contributed their own interpretations and explanations for the stark difference between the Taiwanese colonial experience and memory of Japanese rule and that of Korea. When discussing the issue of ‘comfort women’ during Japanese colonial rule in Korea, one student shared a personal story about his great-great-grandmother’s similarly painful experience under foreign rule in Eastern Europe and powerfully advocated for the importance of justice. Other students shared about their assessments of the roles of the U.S. and South Korean leaders—in addition to the roles played by North Korea, China, and Russia—on the outbreak of the Korean War and its aftermath.”

Alongside their academic engagement with each other, students have also bonded over their shared interests in Korean food and popular culture, namely “K-pop, K-dramas, and K-movies.” Some students chose to write their final research papers on analyzing Korean popular culture. Other discussions on the modern Korean education system have even incorporated students’ personal observations of the education issues portrayed in a popular Korean drama. These interests are encouraged, as students are urged to creatively explore the topics most interesting to them for their final research paper.

One of the strengths of the SKSP online course is that it encourages high school students to consider different perspectives on various issues, think critically about those different perspectives, and develop their own informed opinions. Reflecting on her participation in the course, Chloee Robison, a high school student from Indiana, said, “SKSP was a unique opportunity to explore my interest in Korean history. Even though I am not of Korean heritage, I felt deeply connected to the course material, and I found the lectures to be quite informative and engaging. Coming from a region that is largely homogeneous, hearing the perspectives of diverse-minded students opened my eyes to issues and ideas that I would have otherwise been blind to. I am so grateful to everyone involved in the course, and I would recommend it to all students who wish to challenge themselves and expand their knowledge of Korean history and culture.” Chloee’s research project on Korea’s March First Movement earned first place in Indiana’s National History Day competition.

The popularity and demand for Stanford’s SKSP online course on Korea grows each year. Interested high school students are encouraged to apply early for the program. The application period is between late August and early October each year for enrollment in the online course the following year. The online application can be found on the SPICE website at sejongscholars.org.

To be notified when the next Sejong Korean Scholars Program application period opens, join our email list or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

The Sejong Korean Scholars Program is one of several online courses for high school students offered by SPICE, Stanford University, including the China Scholars Program, the Reischauer Scholars Program (on Japan), and the Stanford e-Japan Program.

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Students in Stanford’s SKSP online course learn about Korea from many angles, including both traditional and contemporary Korean culture.
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Seasons Of The RSP: An Online Teacher's Reflection on Teaching About Japan

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Since joining SPICE in 2005, my annual calendar has revolved around not spring flowers, caterpillars dangling from trees, and falling leaves around the beautiful Stanford campus, but the schedule of the Reischauer Scholars Program (RSP), Stanford’s online course on Japan and U.S.–Japan relations for U.S. high school students. As the manager and instructor of the RSP, I have had the pleasure (and truly, the honor) of teaching this online course for 14 years. We accept applications beginning in August, outreach efforts ramp up in September and October, and new cohorts of talented U.S. high school students are selected every November. With January comes the updating of the syllabus with new readings, topics, and video lectures, and identifying and inviting guest speakers for the virtual classes. And the highlight of my year—every year—is on February 1, when the new cohort signs into our online learning platform ready to engage in this new community, connect over shared interests, learn from their differences, and to embark upon the RSP journey together.

It is now early June, and the 2019 Reischauer Scholars Program is, unbelievably, soon coming to an end. This year’s RSP journey has led us through explorations of tales of samurai, the modernization of Meiji Japan through the lens of filmmaker Ozu Yasujiro, comparative perspectives on colonial and wartime legacies through textbooks, and lessons on civil liberties as told by someone who was sent to a Japanese American internment camp with his family as a 9-year-old boy.

While this online course has always approached the study of Japan and U.S.–Japan relations with an intense academic rigor befitting Stanford University, I also wanted to offer students access to the personal stories of practitioners who play an active role in Japanese society and the U.S.–Japan relationship that we study. One of the wonderful aspects of teaching online is that for our weekly virtual classroom sessions—where all students meet synchronously using Zoom video conferencing software—we are able to welcome guest speakers to join us from anywhere in the world.

As we explored the U.S.–Japan security relationship this year and the controversies surrounding the presence of U.S. military bases in Okinawa, for example, students met with an Okinawan native who works on the U.S. Air Force Base in Kadena. Learning about how her experiences and perspectives inform her own efforts to enhance U.S.–Japan relations gave the students new insight into the impact of international policy upon individuals and the communities in which they live.

For our module on U.S.–Japan diplomacy we were joined by the Principal Officer of the U.S. Consulate in Sapporo, Rachel Brunette-Chen, who talked about how her interests in connecting the U.S. and Japan have informed her career in the U.S. State Department. RSP students often cite international relations and diplomacy as two high-interest fields for their future undergraduate studies and career aspirations, so they made the most of this opportunity to ask thoughtful questions about careers in Foreign Service. Given the diverse career tracks available in the State Department, students were inspired to learn that they could take their multidisciplinary interests and apply them in an international context for years to come.

As we grappled with the various challenges facing modern Japanese society during the last few weeks of class—including students mired in a test-centric system, the demographic realities of an aging population and declining birth rates, pervasive issues of gender inequality, and minority rights, among others—it was important to gain an understanding of how these issues are being addressed and experienced by real people. Our final guest speaker for the 2019 RSP, a Japanese American entrepreneur and educator living and working in Tokyo, shared his first-hand perspectives on the state of entrepreneurship and innovation in contemporary Japan.

Perhaps the most memorable of the online video conferencing sessions this year were the two joint virtual classes with the students of the Stanford e-Japan Program. Stanford e-Japan is an online course that engages Japanese high school students in the study of U.S. society and U.S.–Japan relations, and is comprised of students from across Japan. The rich, open discussions and friendly international camaraderie fostered during these joint sessions are always a delight to observe. I know that many of my RSP students—and many of the Stanford e-Japan students, as well—will treasure these experiences and relationships for years to come.

In our virtual class on diplomacy, one student asked, “How can we, as high school students, make a real impact on the U.S.–Japan relationship?” “By taking the initiative to be active participants in courses like the Reischauer Scholars Program,” replied Ms. Brunette-Chen, “you are already on your way. In sharing what you learn about Japan, you are also raising awareness about the importance of the U.S.–Japan relationship among your peers and school communities.” Indeed, these 2019 Reischauer Scholars are already on their way. As the spring flowers, dangling caterpillars, and fall leaves continue to come and go in the years ahead, I am eager to see the different ways in which their impact upon U.S.–Japan relations will continue to take shape. Who knows? Perhaps a few will return to the RSP years from now—this time not as students, but as guest speakers who coach and inspire the Reischauer Scholars of the future.

To be notified when the next Reischauer Scholars Program application period opens, join our email list or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

The Reischauer Scholars Program is one of several online courses for high school students offered by SPICE, Stanford University, including the China Scholars Program, the Sejong Scholars Program (on Korea), and the Stanford e-Japan Program.

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High school student honorees of SPICE's online course on Japan
Student honorees of the 2018 Reischauer Scholars Program with Consul General Tomochika Uyama and RSP Instructor Naomi Funahashi.
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