Stanford University

Terrorism

Seminar on the Regional Dimensions of Authoritarianism in the Arab World

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On March 30, 2010, Prof. Samer Shehata from Georgetown University gave a research seminar for the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at CDDRL titled The Regional Dimensions of Authoritarianism in the Arab World.  Prof. Shehata’s talk was in response to the research puzzle, as he called it, of the persistence of authoritarian politics at the regional level in the Arab world. He argued that the subject that has received most attention in political science is the question of authoritarianism and absence of democracy. The question of why there are no democracies has offered a number of possible reasons including: the qualities and consequences of oil and rentier politics; absent or weak civil societies in the Arab world; social class-based explanations; the issue of political liberalization instead of democratization; external factors such as US support for authoritarian regimes, which he argued has not decreased since the end of the Cold War; regional conflicts like Palestine/Israel and the Gulf wars; institutions of authoritarianism including how elections, parliaments and single parties work; Islamist politics creating deep divisions among opposition groups; and patronage, clientelism and the (absence of) social contract.

Prof. Shehata then proceeded to say that there has been some positive development in the approach to democracy in the Arab world, but that there remains insufficient attention to the regional dimensions of authoritarianism. He argued that the Arab world is authoritarian not just on the state level, but also on the regional level. As International Relations specialists have spoken about the existence of an Arab regional system, the institutional dimension of this system, such as the Arab League, needs to be studied.

He stated that there are three mechanisms of the reproduction of authoritarianism on the regional level: authoritarian learning, authoritarian cooperation, and regional organizations. Cases of authoritarian learning take both direct and indirect forms where certain regimes “learn” from one another. He gave the example of constitutional amendments that allow elections but that give the illusion of competition, where electoral outcomes are similar. In Tunisia, for example, Ben Ali “learned” from the Algerian experience by not allowing Islamists an electoral opening.

Authoritarian cooperation, he went to argue, occurs mainly regarding security matters. He gave the example of certain activists not being to allowed certain countries in the Arab world (like the Tunisian Moncif Marzouki, who was not allowed into Lebanon). Such “cooperation” widens the scope of authoritarianism beyond the borders of individual states.

Prof. Shehata’s ended with a discussion of the third mechanism, regional organizations. He talked about institutionalized cooperation within the Arab League and the GCC, calling the Arab League a “club for authoritarian regimes” that is not committed to democracy. An example of this in action is the Arab League accords on security and anti-terrorism which have ended up extending authoritarian rules across the Arab world. Another example is the Arab media charter that was put in place in February 2008, and which limits internet and media freedom. Prof. Shehata acknowledged that further research needs to be done on those three mechanisms and the floor was then opened to questions from the audience.

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Game Changers for Nuclear Energy

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Kate Marvel is a CISAC postdoctoral fellow working on energy security and nuclear nonproliferation.  She received a PhD in theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Scholar and a member of Trinity College. She chaired Cambridge University Student Pugwash and is a member of the Executive Board of International Student/Young Pugwash. Kate holds a BA in physics and astronomy from the University of California at Berkeley and has worked at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, California, and the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in South Africa.   She is active in outreach work and has lectured in settings as diverse as a community center in Lesotho, a physics institute in Tehran, and the Secret Garden Party Festival in the UK.

Tom Isaacs serves as the Director for the Office of Planning and Special Studies at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  During his sabbatical leave he will be in residence at CISAC, focusing his research on several interconnected sets of challenges to the effective management of the worldwide expansion of nuclear energy.  He will also play an important role in a collaborative project with CISAC and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Global Nuclear Future Initiative.

Tom's career spans more than two decades with the Department of Energy including managing policies and programs on the advancement of nuclear power and issues associate with security, waste management, and public trust.  He has degrees in Engineering, Applied Physics, and Chemical Engineering from Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania.

Michael May is Professor Emeritus (Research) in the Stanford University School of Engineering and a senior fellow with the Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He is the former co-director of Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, having served seven years in that capacity through January 2000. May is a director emeritus of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he worked from 1952 to 1988, with some brief periods away from the Laboratory. While there, he held a variety of research and development positions, serving as director of the Laboratory from 1965 to 1971. May was a technical adviser to the Threshold Test Ban Treaty negotiating team; a member of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks; and at various times has been a member of the Defense Science Board, the General Advisory Committee to the AEC, the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, the RAND Corporation Board of Trustees, and the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Policy, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. May received the Distinguished Public Service and Distinguished Civilian Service Medals from the Department of Defense, and the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award from the Atomic Energy Commission, as well as other awards. His current research interests are in the area of nuclear and terrorism, energy, security and environment, and the relation of nuclear weapons and foreign policy.

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Thomas Isaacs

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Tom is Co-Principal Investigator for the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) Developing Spent Fuel Strategies (DSFS) project coordinating international cooperation on issues at the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle with emphasis on spent fuel management and disposal in Pacific Rim countries. Participants include senior nuclear officials from Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Canada, and the United States.

Tom advises national nuclear waste programs on facility siting, communications, stakeholder engagement, and public trust and confidence. He has worked with the Canadian Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) for 15 years.

Tom was recently named as the Chair of the recently formed Experts Team to support Southern California Edison  at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.

Previously Tom was a Consulting Professor at CISAC, lead advisor to the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, Member of the National Academy of Sciences Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board, Director of Planning at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and long time senior executive at the Department of Energy where he led the siting of Yucca Mountain as the nation’s candidate site for a geologic repository.

He has degrees in Engineering, Applied Physics, and Chemical Engineering from Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania.

 

Thomas Isaacs CISAC Consulting Professor Speaker
Katherine D. Marvel CISCA Postdoctoral Fellow Speaker
Michael M. May Professor of Management Science and Engineering, Emeritus; FSI Senior Fellow; CISAC Faculty Member Speaker
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Capote and Atxaga versus the Counterterrorists: Why Counterterrorism Fails

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Joseba Zulaika is Professor at the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno. Professor Zulaika holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Princeton University. His most recent publications include Terrorism: the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), and Contraterrorismo USA: profecía y trampa (Irun: Alberdania, 2009). Professor Zulaika’s ongoing research addresses the Bilbao Guggenheim Museoa and the ethnography of Bilbao with additional emphasis on global culture, architecture, museum politics, and tourism industries. His primary research interests include Basque culture and politics, the international discourse of terrorism, various traditional occupations (fishermen, hunters, farmers), diasporic and global cultures, history of anthropological thought, and theories of symbolism, ritual, and discourse.

Sponsored by the Iberian Studies Program at the Forum on Contemporary Europe, and the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University.

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Joseba Zulaika Professor, Center for Basque Studies Speaker University of Nevada, Reno
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The Six-Party Talks: Outlining a true restart

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Robert Carlin
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CISAC's Robert Carlin, John Lewis argue in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that the U.S. needs a 'serious reality check' when it comes to dealing with North Korea.

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• A lot has changed since the Six-Party Talks with North Korea began almost eight years ago.

• For starters, Pyongyang has now conducted two nuclear tests, making its nuclear status much less ambiguous.

• Consequently, Washington must adjust its goals in any future negotiations with the North--especially its stance that Pyongyang must first denuclearize.

Originally created to deal with an earlier nuclear crisis in 2002, the multi-party negotiations were intended to replace, and improve upon, the 1994 U.S.-North Korean Agreed Framework, which froze Pyongyang's fissile production program in an attempt to prevent the North from getting nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, whatever promise these talks first held vanished in October 2006 when North Korea decided to attempt a nuclear test. And any remaining shreds of promise disappeared completely last May with Pyongyang's second nuclear test.

So the North Korea we are dealing with today (i.e., a de facto nuclear weapon state) is much different than the North Korea we were dealing with in 2002 (i.e., a country whose nuclear status was ambiguous). Making matters worse, we have painted ourselves into a corner by vowing that we will never "accept" Pyongyang as a nuclear-armed state.

Escaping from this corner will require a delicate, but not impossible, diplomatic dance. We don't have to give up our ultimate goal of denuclearizing North Korea and bringing it within the confines of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But we do have to free ourselves from out-of-date thinking so we can actually tackle this challenge instead of merely posturing about it.

Without a doubt, in 2010, the diplomatic dance is far more difficult than it was before October 2006. The dilemma is that Pyongyang has likely concluded that Washington can neither wrest away its nuclear weapons status nor build enough international pressure to convince it to do so. Most critically, North Korea's two nuclear tests appear to have transformed the country's self-image and bargaining strategy. Pyongyang sees no reason to heed the call for negotiations explicitly designed to relieve the regime of what it worked so long and hard to achieve.

Put another way, the last eight years of talks may have convinced Pyongyang that Washington will never be able to force the North into giving up its tiny, but politically crucial, nuclear stockpile. This may also signal that the space for negotiations has narrowed, and that there is less room to find the golden midpoint: Giving Pyongyang enough of what it wants (i.e., prestige, security, respect, and/or material rewards) so that it will surrender its nuclear weapons.

Things never should have gotten so bad, but numerous failed policies since 2002 have produced consequences that cannot be erased by U.S. presidential cycles. In other words, simply because a new president is sworn into office doesn't mean the other players will blindly accept an offer to turn back the clock or indulge U.S. attempts to press the "reset" button.

So what do we do now? For starters, Washington needs to accept the reality that North Korea is a country with nuclear weapons; that there is--in the short term at least--little we can do about it; and that continuing to focus on denuclearizing Pyongyang gains us nothing. In fact, the only way to advance U.S. interests on the nuclear issue with North Korea is to admit that the ground has shifted. We don't have to shout it from the rooftops, but getting the North to abandon its nuclear weapons program cannot remain our overriding objective, as crucial as that might seem. Rather, it's time we refocused our work, keeping the nuclear problem on the agenda but not letting it completely dominate our approach.

To move forward constructively, we should first resume efforts by several U.S. administrations--from Reagan to Bush to Clinton--to prod the North into becoming a state more fully integrated into the global community. That will take years of hard work, conducted simultaneously on several fronts, but we had better get on with it. Next, we need to sit down and talk with the North Koreans to better refine our assumptions about what will work and what won't work.

Waiting around for significant political change in Pyongyang to solve our problems is the longest of long shots. North Korea as we know it isn't going to disappear any time soon, and the problems that flow from its anomalous policies won't lessen if Washington keeps banging its collective head against the same old wall.

 

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FCE Announces Book Release: "Ethnic Europe: Mobility, Identity, and Conflict in a Globalized World"

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The Forum on Contemporary Europe is pleased to announce the release of "Ethnic Europe: Mobility, Identity, and Conflict in a Globalized World" (Stanford University Press, 2010) edited by FCE Associate Director Roland Hsu.

Ethnic Europe offers accessible, comprehensive, and influential thinking on immigration, and the challenge of how we are to defend minority identity and encourage social solidarity in our world of global migration.  Focused on Europe as a destination for global immigration, eleven of the most influential social science and humanities authors address the increasingly complex challenges facing the expanding European Union—including labor migration, strains on welfare economies, local traditions, globalized cultures, Islamic diasporas, separatist movements, and threats of terrorism.  The authors confront the struggle shared in Europe and the U.S. to balance minority rights and social cohesion.  For the first time in one volume, these writers give startling insight into Europe’s fast-growing communities, taking the reader from global views to local detail.  From questions of high politics (If Europe includes Turkey, where does Europe end?) to local culture wars (How does McDonalds appeal to Catalans?), this collection engages theory, history, and generalized views of diasporas, including the details of neighborhoods, borderlands, and the popular literature and new media and films spawned by the creative mixing of ethnic cultures.

Roland Hsu, Associate Director of Stanford University’s Forum on Contemporary Europe at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, edited, and wrote the opening essay to make “Ethnic Europe” a foundation text and approachable guide to the experience of ethnic politics, migrant life, and movements for integration and exclusion.  With his experience at the Forum bringing scholarship, policy, and public comment to bear of our most pressing issues, Hsu offers this book on “Ethnic Europe” as an approachable guide to the general and specific of ethnic politics, migrant life, and movements for integration and exclusion. 

Roland Hsu earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, and before coming to Stanford was Assistant Professor of European History at the University of Idaho.  Hsu currently teaches, in addition to his research and work at the Forum, in the Humanities at Stanford University.

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Hind Arroub

616 Serra St.
Encina Hall, C151
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Hind Arroub is a Visiting Scholar at CDDRL in the calendar year 2010, affiliated with the Program on Good Governance and Political Reform in the Arab World, and an associate researcher at the Laboratory of Sociology "Culture et Societe en Europe", affiliated with the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) and the University of Strasbourg in France.

She has a PhD in Law and Political Science from Mohammed V University of Juridical, Economic and Social Sciences in Rabat. Her work takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of international law, political and social sciences, human rights and media, and her research interests revolve around Morocco and the Arab World with a focus on: politics and religion, authoritarian regimes and democracy, riots and social movements, media freedom, human rights, and global politics' relationship to the Arab World (such as the Iraq war, international terrorism and the impact of globalization).

Hind was a lecturer in Hassan II University of Law in Casablanca where she taught "Constitutional Law and the Political". She has 10 years experience in journalism in Morocco and abroad, and is one of the founders of the Moroccan academic journal Wijhat Nadar (Point of view) and member of its editorial board and scientific committee. She is also a human rights activist. She has participated in, organized and managed a number of conferences, study days, colloquia, round tables, and workshops in Morocco and France.

Hind's first book "Revolutions in the Era of Humiliocracy'", co-authored with the Moroccan Professor of Futurism Mahdi El-Mandjra, addresses major questions of democracy in Morocco and the Arab world and other international issues related to the Middle East and North Africa region. 

She is also the author of "The ‘Makhzan' in Moroccan Political Culture" (2004) and "Approach to the Foundations of Legitimacy of the Moroccan Political System", published in November 2009.

Hind is also a poet, she has a poetry collection in Arabic called "Milad Nassim Assef" (Birth of a Stormy Breeze).

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The Long Shadow of Vietnam

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Please join Marvin Kalb to discuss the impact of the Vietnam War on presidential/strategic decisions about national security issues. 

Marvin Kalb is also a contributing news analyst for National Public Radio and Fox News Channel. In addition, he is frequently called upon to comment on major issues of the day by many of the nation's other leading news organizations.

Kalb had a distinguished 30-year broadcast career, working for both CBS News and NBC News, where he served as Chief Diplomatic Correspondent, Moscow Bureau Chief, and moderator of Meet the Press. Among his many honors are two Peabody Awards, the DuPont Prize from Columbia University, the 2006 Fourth Estate Award from the National Press Club and more than a half-dozen Overseas Press Club awards. He has lectured at many universities, here and abroad. Kalb was the founding director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

A graduate of the City College of New York, Kalb has an M.A. from Harvard and was zeroing in on his Ph.D. in Russian history when he left Cambridge in 1956 for a Moscow assignment with the State Department. The following year, he joined CBS News, the last correspondent hired by Edward R. Murrow. Kalb has authored or co-authored 10 nonfiction books and two best-selling novels. His latest book, The Media and the War on Terrorism (co-edited with Stephen Hess), was the recipient of the 2004 Arthur Rowse Award for Press Criticism. He is currently engaged in research for a book on U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and its impact on American politics and foreign policy.

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Marvin Kalb James Clark Welling Presidential Fellow at The George Washington University and Edward R. Murrow Professor Emeritus at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government Speaker
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Fear Factor: Understanding the Origins and Consequences of Beliefs about National Security and the Threats We Face

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The routine employment of torture on the popular television series 24 has given rise to the charge that the program lends verisimilitude to  the questionable premise that torture is a legitimate and effective means of interrogation. A growing body of evidence suggests the critics' charge is correct. Indeed, the Dean of the US Military Academy at West Point grew sufficiently concerned about the pernicious effects 24 was having on his cadets that he traveled to California to meet with the show's creators to ask them to tone down the use of torture on the program. The Intelligence Science Board has echoed the critics' concerns, arguing that similar reality-distorting attitudes towards torture can be seen in the public at large. But how and why can a wholly fictional program like 24 actually influence political reality? Is this case something of an exception, or more akin to the rule?  Unfortunately, evidence suggests that fiction and other socially constructed portrayals of political reality-including propaganda, false flag operations and conspiracy theories-have long exercised demonstrable effects on political reality, often in unforeseen and unintentional ways.

Through the lens of the invasion panic that gripped Great Britain in the late nineteenth century, Greenhill will explore how and why national security-related "social facts"-i.e., things that are deemed to be "true" simply because they are widely believed to be true-can become broadly adopted and disseminated and, by extension, thereby influence the development and conduct of national security policy. Greenhill will further explore what this historical case can tell us about the theoretical and policy implications such "social facts" may hold for the threats we face today, including terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Kelly M. Greenhill is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Tufts University and Research Fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. She holds a Ph.D. and an S.M. from M.I.T., a C.S.S. from Harvard University, and a B.A. from UC Berkeley. Greenhill previously held pre- or post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard University's Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and at CISAC.

Her work has appeared in a variety of venues, including the journals International Security, Security Studies, and International Migration as well as in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and in briefs prepared for the U.S. Supreme Court. Greenhill has two books shortly forthcoming with Cornell University Press: the first, Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion and Foreign Policy, focuses on the use of large-scale population movements as instruments of state-level coercion; and the second, Sex, Drugs and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict (co-edited with Peter Andreas), examines the politicization and manipulation of crime and conflict-related statistics. She is currently at work on a new book, a cross-national study that explores why, when, and under what conditions, fiction, so-called "social facts" and other non-factual sources of information-such as rumors, conspiracy theories and propaganda-materially influence the development and conduct of national security policies.

Lynn Eden is Associate Director for Research at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University. Eden received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan, held several pre- and post-doctoral fellowships, and taught in the history department at Carnegie Mellon before coming to Stanford. In the area of international security, Eden has focused on U.S. foreign and military policy, arms control, the social construction of science and technology, and organizational issues regarding nuclear policy and homeland security. She co-edited, with Steven E. Miller, Nuclear Arguments: Understanding the Strategic Nuclear Arms and Arms Control Debates (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989). She was an editor of The Oxford Companion to American Military History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), which takes a social and cultural perspective on war and peace in U.S. history. That volume was chosen as a Main Selection of the History Book Club.

Eden's book Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004; New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2004) explores how and why the U.S. government--from World War II to the present--has greatly underestimated the damage caused by nuclear weapons by failing to predict damage from firestorms. It shows how well-funded and highly professional organizations, by focusing on what they do well and systematically excluding what they don't, may build a poor representation of the world--a self-reinforcing fallacy that can have serious consequences, from the sinking of the Titanic to not predicting the vulnerability of the World Trade Center to burning jet fuel. Whole World on Fire won the American Sociological Association's 2004 Robert K. Merton Award for best book in science, knowledge, and technology.

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Kelly M. Greenhill CISAC Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science, Tufts University Speaker

Lynn Eden

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Lynn Eden is a Senior Research Scholar Emeritus. She was a Senior Research Scholar at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation until January 2016, as well as was Associate Director for Research. Eden received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan, held several pre- and post-doctoral fellowships, and taught in the history department at Carnegie Mellon before coming to Stanford.

In the area of international security, Eden has focused on U.S. foreign and military policy, arms control, the social construction of science and technology, and organizational issues regarding nuclear policy and homeland security. She co-edited, with Steven E. Miller, Nuclear Arguments: Understanding the Strategic Nuclear Arms and Arms Control Debates (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989). She was an editor of The Oxford Companion to American Military History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), which takes a social and cultural perspective on war and peace in U.S. history. That volume was chosen as a Main Selection of the History Book Club.

Eden's book Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004; New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2004) explores how and why the U.S. government--from World War II to the present--has greatly underestimated the damage caused by nuclear weapons by failing to predict damage from firestorms. It shows how well-funded and highly professional organizations, by focusing on what they do well and systematically excluding what they don't, may build a poor representation of the world--a self-reinforcing fallacy that can have serious consequences, from the sinking of the Titanic to not predicting the vulnerability of the World Trade Center to burning jet fuel. Whole World on Fire won the American Sociological Association's 2004 Robert K. Merton Award for best book in science, knowledge, and technology.

Eden has also written on life in small-town America. Her first book, Crisis in Watertown (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), was her college senior thesis; it was a finalist for a National Book Award in 1973. Her second book, Witness in Philadelphia, with Florence Mars (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), about the murders of civil rights workers Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman in the summer of 1964, was a Book of the Month Club Alternate Selection.

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Lynn Eden Senior Research Scholar and Associate Director for Research, CISAC Commentator
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