The lecture is preceded by a workshop at 10am in the same location. For additional information please access the DLCL site listing here.
Margaret Jacks Hall (Building 460)
Terrace Room (Room 429)
Stanford University
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Transitional Success and Failure in East Germany
What explains the variation in the democratic institutions of contemporary European and North American societies?
The implications of electoral rules and legislative institutions for social and economic outcomes are well established. For example, proportional electoral rules are associated with more extensive social policy in cross-country data sets, and within countries, the representation of regions in upper chambers of legislatures help explain fiscal flows.
The workshop is premised on the view that we are now entering a new phase in the development of post-Soviet Europe. Clearly, further NATO enlargement and EU expansion are unlikely to take place in the next few years, creating a zone of insecurity and potential instability dividing those countries which succeeded in winning integration into the EU and into NATO in recent years from those countries that have sought membership without any immediate prospects of achieving it. Moreover, even among countries that have been successful in achieving membership in recent years there remains continuing anxiety about the degree to which their new European partners are prepared to support their economic viability and guarantee their security, particularly in light of increased assertiveness from Moscow.
The central purpose of this workshop series is to analyze the new dynamics emerging within this region, focusing on the external influences exerted by Moscow and Brussels and how they interact with the internal dynamics of the “corridor” countries, and to explore possible scenarios for future stabilization and development.
This workshop will be held November 5 and 6, 2009 at Stanford. The primary focus will be the “corridor” of countries consisting of the Baltic and Central European members of the EU and NATO, together with Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova. Moscow and Brussels will enter as driving outside influences. The participants will include analysts and policymakers from the region itself as well as scholars from the relevant scholarly communities.
CISAC Conference Room
Martha Crenshaw, a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), has been awarded $500,000 by the National Science Foundation to identify patterns in the evolution of terrorist organizations and to analyze their comparative development.
The three-year grant is part of the Department of Defense's Minerva Initiative launched in 2008, which focuses on "supporting research related to basic social and behavioral science of strategic importance to U.S. national security policy."
Crenshaw's interdisciplinary project, "Mapping Terrorist Organizations," will analyze terrorist groups and trace their relationships over time. It will be the first worldwide, comprehensive study of its kind-extending back to the Russian revolutionary movement up to Al Qaeda today.
"We want to understand how groups affiliate with Al Qaeda and analyze their relationships," Crenshaw said. "Evolutionary mapping can enhance our understanding of how terrorist groups develop and interact with each other and with the government, how strategies of violence and non-violence are related, why groups persist or disappear, and how opportunities and constraints in the environment change organizational behavior over time."
According to Crenshaw, it is critical to understand the organization and evolution of terrorism in multiple contexts. "To craft effective counter-terrorism strategies, governments need to know not only what type of adversary they are confronting but its stage of organizational development and relationship to other groups," Crenshaw wrote in the project summary. "The timing of a government policy initiative may be as important as its substance."
"Mapping Terrorist Organizations" will incorporate research in economics, sociology, business, biology, political science and history. It will include existing research to build a new database using original language sources rather than secondary analyses. The goal is to produce an online database and series of interactive maps that will generate new observations and research questions, Crenshaw said.
The results, for example, could reveal the structure of violent and non-violent opposition groups within the same movements or conflicts, and identify patterns that explain how these groups evolve over time. Such findings could be used to analyze the development of Al Qaeda and its Islamist or jihadist affiliates, including the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, she said.
The findings may also shed light on what happens when a group splits due to leadership quarrels or when a government is overturned, Crenshaw said. "Analysis that links levels of terrorist violence to changes in organizational structures and explains the complex relationships among actors in protracted conflicts will break new ground," the summary noted.
Extensive information on terrorist groups already exists, but it has been difficult to compile and analyze. Despite such obstacles, Crenshaw said, violent organizations can be understood in the same terms as other political or economic groups. "Terrorist groups are not anomalous or unique," she wrote. "In fact, they can be compared to transnational activist networks."
Crenshaw should know. Widely respected as a pioneer in terrorism studies, the political scientist was one of a handful of scholars who followed the subject decades before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. She joined CISAC in 2007, following a long career at Wesleyan University, where she was the Colin and Nancy Campbell Professor of Global Issues and Democratic Thought. In addition to her research at Stanford, Crenshaw is a lead investigator at START, the Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism at the University of Maryland.
End goal
Crenshaw wants to use the findings to better analyze how threats to U.S. security evolve over time. "Terrorist attacks on the United States and its allies abroad often appear to come without warning, but they are the result of a long process of organizational development," she wrote. "Terrorist organizations do not operate in isolation from a wider social environment. Without understanding processes of development and interaction, governments may miss signals along the way and be vulnerable to surprise attack. They may also respond ineffectively because they cannot anticipate the consequences of their actions." The project seeks to find patterns in the evolution of terrorism and to explain their causes and consequences. This, in turn, should contribute to developing more effective counter-terrorism policy, Crenshaw said.
Conflicts to be mapped
Ambassador Simons will seek to honor the broad scholarship of his friend Alexander Dallin by situating a discussion of emerging states within a vision of Eurasia as a world region equally shaped and driven by its own internal dynamic(s). Simons will argue that across the region shared experience and shared features are just as weighty as differences: civil societies are weak, markets are distorted or incomplete, politics features struggle among elites over resources and tends toward semi-authoritarian rule even where democratic forms take hold. Yet there is cause for hope. Simons focuses on states, but he sees states consolidating almost everywhere, so that as resurgent Russia presses on its neighbors, they can now press back. Stable development of strong state institutions within which new civil societies can take root and grow is possible and should be the top priority, but it will come only if the nationalism that gives content to these new states is civic and inclusionary rather than ethno-religious on the East Central European model. The U.S. can help or hinder its emergence everywhere in Eurasia, but if it wishes to help it must realize that in this part of the world the path to democracy leads through state development, and that it can best act as a City on the Hill if its policy centers on today's emerging new states, since they must be the incubators of tomorrow's new civil societies.
The Annual Alexander Dallin Lecture was founded in 1998 to honor Professor of History and Political Science Alexander Dallin, a founder of Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at Stanford and CREEES director, 1985-89 and 1992-94. The Dallin Lecture is co-sponsored by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center
'Survival' editor's note:
In the June-July 2009 issue of the journal 'Survival,' Scott D. Sagan argued the current case for the United States to adopt a declaratory policy of nuclear no first use. 'Survival' invited four experts from Europe, Asia and North America to comment on Sagan's argument. The author concludes the debate with his own final thoughts.
Note from editor of Survival:
In the June-July 2009 issue of Survival, Professor Scott D. Sagan argued the current case for the United States to adopt a declaratory policy of nuclear no first use. Survival invited four experts from Europe, Asia and North America (listed below) to comment on Sagan's argument, with a final conclusion from the author:
Morton H. Halperin worked on nuclear issues in the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Clinton administrations in the Department of Defense, the National Security Council and the State Department. He is a member of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States and senior advisor to the Open Society Institute. He has written numerous books and articles on nuclear policy.
Bruno Tertrais is a senior research fellow at the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research and a contributing editor to Survival. He is the author of War Without End (New York: The New Press, 2005).
Keith B. Payne is president and co-founder of the National Institute for Public Policy, head of the Graduate Department of Defense and Strategic Studies of Missouri State University, Washington, D.C. campus, a member of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Review of the United States, Policy Panel chairman of the U.S. Strategic Command's Senior Advisory Group, and a member of the Department of State's International Security Advisory Board.
K. Subrahmanyam is an Indian strategic analyst and journalist. He served as the director of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses and has held a number of other government positions, including chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee.
Scott D. Sagan is professor of political science at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation.
616 Serra Street
Encina Hall S238
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Jonas Linde is a Research Fellow in political science at the University of Gothenburg. His main field of interest is comparative politics, with a focus on the political development in European post-communist countries. Linde's recent research has dealt with public attitudes, system support and corruption, mainly in Central and Eastern Europe. He is currently involved in a research project on the diversity of post-communist political regimes. As an Anna Lindh Fellow at the Forum on Contemporary Europe in Fall 2009, Linde will work on a book chapter on public support for democracy and non-democratic alternatives.
