Stanford University

Top British advisor joins Stanford as visiting scholar

News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs

Steve Hilton, senior advisor to British Prime Minister David Cameron, will join Stanford as a visiting scholar at the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Hilton, who will also be a visiting fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, will arrive in May and spend his year on campus teaching, researching and writing.

“We look forward to having Steve Hilton in residence at FSI starting later this spring,” said Coit Blacker, FSI’s director. “Lively and engaging, Steve is certain to bring a fresh perspective to many of the issues and challenges that are of ongoing concern to our faculty, fellows and students.”

As Cameron’s top advisor, Hilton’s primary responsibility is the development and implementation of domestic policy. He specializes in the promotion of enterprise and economic growth, public service reform, family policy, decentralization, and government transparency and accountability.

Hilton will focus on innovation in government, public services and communities around the world while at Stanford. He will work with a wide range of centers and organizations across the university, including FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and The Europe Center; the Graduate School of Business' Center for Social Innovation; the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society; and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design.

"I'm delighted to be joining the academic community at Stanford and greatly look forward to an exhilarating and productive year,” Hilton said. “It will be a huge pleasure to be able to focus on our most pressing social and governmental challenges."

Before Cameron’s election as prime minister in 2010, Hilton served as his chief strategist and developed the ideas associated with the modernization of the British Conservative Party.

Hilton previously ran Good Business, a corporate responsibility consulting firm, and is the author of Good Business: Your World Needs You. The book makes the case for businesses to play a more direct and active role in advancing social progress.

Hero Image
Hilton SQUARE
All News button
1

China's Military Modernization and National Security Strategy

-

China's defense budget has grown over the past two decades to become the second largest in the world, though still far below that of the United States. The steady growth of the People's Liberation Army's (PLA) capabilities and effectiveness influence not only Beijing's security policies, but the behavior of states within, and increasingly beyond, East Asia, including the United States. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, whose experience with the Chinese military includes assignments as the U.S. defense attaché and assistant army attaché to the People's Republic of China (PRC), will discuss the PLA's modernization efforts and address the evolving role of the military in the PRC's comprehensive national security strategy.

Karl Eikenberry is the Payne Distinguished Lecturer at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University (FSI). Within FSI he is an affiliated faculty member with the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. He is also and an affiliated researcher with the Europe Center. Prior to his arrival at Stanford, he served as the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from May 2009 until July 2011, where he led the civilian surge directed by President Obama to reverse insurgent momentum and set the conditions for a transition to full Afghan sovereignty.


**Please note: All remarks are off the record.**

Philippines Conference Room

Karl Eikenberry Payne Distinguished Lecturer, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies Speaker Stanford University
Lectures
Oksenberg Conference

Straub on U.S.-North Korea nuclear agreement

News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs
In an agreement with Washington, Pyongyang will allow nuclear inspectors into North Korea and also receive much-needed nutritional assistance. David Straub speaks with the media on Pyongyang's moratorium on nuclear testing, cautioning that denuclearization is still a distant goal but arguing that the deal is a positive move overall.
Hero Image
KJU NEWSFEED
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (center) visits a Korean People's Army unit in a picture released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency in January 2012.
Distributed by Reuters
All News button
1

Nationalism qua Modernization: The Greek War of Independence

-

*PLEASE NOTE:  This event has been moved from the Reuben W. Hills Conference Room to the CISAC Conference Room (C231) in Encina Hall Central, 2nd floor.

This lecture aims to situate the Greek War of Independence in the wider context of the clash between Tradition and Modernity in the European periphery. Focusing on the emergence of nationalism as a movement and an ideology, I explore the Greek War of Independence in terms of both its political dimensions and also its contribution to a much broader societal change. I argue that the Greek struggle for independence may be interpreted as a ‘Greek exit’ from tradition. In this respect, on the one hand, it constitutes an undoubtedly unique event of momentous importance per se, and yet, on the other hand, another instance of a prolonged and very intricate process of societal transformation.

Pantelis Lekkas is Associate Professor of Political Sociology at University of Athens. He received his B.A. in Sociology from Sussex University and his PhD from Cambridge University. His research interests include on Greek nationalism, the theories of nationalism, political and historical sociology, and classical and modern social theory. Among his publications are Marxon Classical Antiquity:Problems of Historical Methodology (1988), Nationalist Ideology: Five Working Hypotheses in Historical Sociology (1992), and Playing with Time: Nationalism and Modernity (2001).

Mediterranean Studies Forum, 2011-12 Greece & Turkey Lecture Series 
Co-sponsored by The Europe Center

CISAC Conference Room

Pantelis Lekkas Associate Professor of Political Sociology Speaker University of Athens
Seminars

Arie M. Dubnov

450 Serra Mall, Bldg. 200
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 723-1585 (650) 804-6932
0
Dubnov_cropped.jpg

Arie Dubnov is an Acting Assistant Professor at Stanford University’s Department of History. Dubnov holds a BA, an MA, and a Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and is a past George L. Mosse Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His fields of expertise are modern Jewish and European intellectual history, with a subsidiary interest in nationalism studies. He is the author, most recently, of Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). In addition, Dubnov has published essays in journals such as Nations & Nationalism, Modern Intellectual History, History of European Ideas, The Journal of Israeli History and is the editor of the collection [in Hebrew] Zionism – A View from the Outside (The Bialik Institute, 2010), seeking to put Zionist history in a larger comparative trajectory. At Stanford Dubnov teaches courses in European intellectual history alongside Jewish and Israeli history.

 

"Human Terrain" and post-film discussion

-

From the film’s website: ‘Human Terrain’ is two stories in one. The first exposes a new Pentagon effort to enlist the best and the brightest in a struggle for hearts and minds. Facing long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military initiates ‘Human Terrain Systems’, a controversial program that seeks to make cultural awareness the centerpiece of the new counterinsurgency strategy. Designed to embed social scientists with combat troops, the program swiftly comes under attack as a misguided and unethical effort to gather intelligence and target enemies. Gaining rare access to wargames in the Mojave Desert and training exercises at Quantico and Fort Leavenworth, ‘Human Terrain’ takes the viewer into the heart of the war machine and a shadowy collaboration between American academics and the military.

The other story is about a brilliant young scholar who leaves the university to join a Human Terrain team. After working as a humanitarian activist in the Western Sahara, Balkans, East Timor and elsewhere, and winning a Marshall Scholarship to study at Oxford, Michael Bhatia returns to Brown University to take up a visiting fellowship. In the course of conducting research on military cultural awareness, he is recruited by the Human Terrain program and eventually embeds with the 82nd Airborne in eastern Afghanistan. On the way to mediate an intertribal dispute, Bhatia is killed when his humvee hits a roadside bomb.

War becomes academic, academics go to war, and the personal tragically merges with the political, raising new questions about the ethics, effectiveness, and high costs of counterinsurgency.

Following the screening, James Der Derian (the film's Co-Director and Executive Producer) will discuss the film with the audience.

For more information about the film, please visit the Human Terrain website. 

CISAC Conference Room

James Der Derian Co-Director and Executive Producer, “Human Terrain” Professor (Research), Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University Speaker
Joseph Felter Senior Research Scholar, CISAC Speaker

Norman M. Naimark

CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C235
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

(650) 723-6927 (650) 725-0597
0
Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Robert & Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies
Professor of History
Professor, by courtesy, of German Studies
Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
Naimark,_Norman.jpg MS, PhD

Norman M. Naimark is the Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies, a Professor of History and (by courtesy) of German Studies, and Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution and (by courtesy) of the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies. Norman formerly served as the Sakurako and William Fisher Family Director of the Stanford Global Studies Division, the Burke Family Director of the Bing Overseas Studies Program, the Convener of the European Forum (predecessor to The Europe Center), Chair of the History Department, and the Director of Stanford’s Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

Norman earned his Ph.D. in History from Stanford University in 1972 and before returning to join the faculty in 1988, he was a professor of history at Boston University and a fellow of the Russian Research Center at Harvard. He also held the visiting Catherine Wasserman Davis Chair of Slavic Studies at Wellesley College. He has been awarded the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (1996), the Richard W. Lyman Award for outstanding faculty volunteer service (1995), and the Dean's Teaching Award from Stanford University for 1991-92 and 2002-3.

Norman is interested in modern Eastern European and Russian history and his research focuses on Soviet policies and actions in Europe after World War II and on genocide and ethnic cleansing in the twentieth century. His published monographs on these topics include The History of the "Proletariat": The Emergence of Marxism in the Kingdom of Poland, 1870–1887 (1979, Columbia University Press), Terrorists and Social Democrats: The Russian Revolutionary Movement under Alexander III (1983, Harvard University Press), The Russians in Germany: The History of The Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (1995, Harvard University Press), The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe (1998, Westview Press), Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing In 20th Century Europe (2001, Harvard University Press), Stalin's Genocides (2010, Princeton University Press), and Genocide: A World History (2016, Oxford University Press). Naimark’s latest book, Stalin and the Fate of Europe: The Postwar Struggle for Sovereignty (Harvard 2019), explores seven case studies that illuminate Soviet policy in Europe and European attempts to build new, independent countries after World War II.

 

Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
Affiliated faculty at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Hide publication sections
Off
Norman M. Naimark Professor of Eastern European Studies; Professor of History; CISAC Affiliated Faculty; Europe Center Research Affiliate and FSI Senior Fellow by courtesy Moderator
Conferences
Subscribe to Europe