Lauri Mälksoo is Professor of International Law at the University of Tartu in Estonia, member of the Institut de Droit International and of the Estonian Academy of Sciences. He has published widely on Russian and Soviet approaches to international law and human rights, including the monograph "Russian Approaches to International Law" (OUP, 2015).
The rule in international law which prohibits forcible seizure of territory has lately come under pressure, for example when Russia seized and annexed Crimea in 2014. In the presentation, we will take a look back at the history of this rule, including the Western non-recognition of the Soviet annexation of the Baltic States in 1940-1991, of which Mälksoo has written a leading monograph. Current threats to the rule will be discussed such as the ideas that great powers are entitled to historic justice which may differ from what international law dictates or there is a regional international law dictated by the leading great power in the region. With President Putin's demands to the US and NATO, these international legal questions have again become utterly topical.
Lauri Mälksoo is Professor of International Law at the University of Tartu in Estonia, member of the Institut de Droit International and of the Estonian Academy of Sciences. He has published widely on Russian and Soviet approaches to international law and human rights, including the monograph "Russian Approaches to International Law" (OUP, 2015).
*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by January 13, 2022.
Co-sponsored by Stanford University Library.
Gabriele Magni is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of the Global Policy Institute at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. His research examines the factors that shape political inclusion, solidarity and representation in advanced democracies. One stream of his work explores the link between economic inequality, immigration and welfare attitudes. A second stream examines LGBTQ rights and representation, focusing on LGBTQ candidates and politicians. His research has appeared in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and the British Journal of Political Science, among other outlets. He has also written for The Washington Post, Politico and The New Republic, and provided commentary to The New York Times, The Washington Post, FiveThirtyEight, NBC News and Reuters. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University’s Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance.
*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson (sj1874@stanford.edu) by February 10, 2022.
Co-sponsored by the Clayman Institute for Gender Research.
Challenger parties are on the rise in Europe. Like disruptive entrepreneurs, these parties offer new policies and defy the dominance of established party brands. In the face of these challenges and a more volatile electorate, mainstream parties are losing their grip on power. Drawing on research from her recent book, Professor Sara Hobolt explores why some challenger parties are so successful and what mainstream parties can do to confront these political entrepreneurs.
She has published five books and over 60 journal articles on European and EU politics and political behaviour.
Her most recent book is Political Entrepreneurs: The Rise of Challenge Parties in Europe (Princeton University Press, 2020, with Catherine De Vries). She is also the Chair of the European Election Studies (EES), a Europe-wide project studying voters, parties, candidates and the media in European Parliamentary elections. Professor Hobolt regularly provides commentary in the media on elections, Brexit, public opinion and European and EU politics.
*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact: Shannon Johnson (sj1874@stanford.edu) by January 6, 2022.
Online via Zoom
About the Seminar: In this time of great challenges, our democracies urgently need to produce citizens who can move from demanding change to making it. But the skills for doing so are not innate, they are learned. In this talk, Beth Simone Noveck will discuss how both citizens and governments can take advantage of digital technology, data, and the collective wisdom of our communities to design and deliver powerful solutions to contemporary problems. Drawing on the latest methods from data and social sciences, including original survey data from around the world, she proposes a practical set of methods for public servants, community leaders, students, activists, and anyone who wants to be a catalyst for positive social change.
In addition to Solving Public Problems, Beth is the author of Smart Citizens, Smarter State: The Technologies of Expertise and the Future of Governing (Harvard Univ Press 2015) and Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger and Citizens More Powerful (Brookings 2009) and co-editor of The State of Play: Law, Games and Virtual Worlds (NYU Press, 2005).
Online, via Zoom.
About the Seminar: For centuries, the world’s dominant power has been the state that wielded the world’s dominant navy. More recently, globalization has been remade, as a sea-based trade—85% of all global trade moves by sea. As does nearly 2/3rds of the world trade in oil and gas, while 93% of all data in the world moves along undersea cables that line the ocean floor. The oceans are vital, too, to our changing climate. All of which highlights the drama of China’s return to the high seas, and its rapid maritime and naval build-up. The net result: a new arms race, centered in the Western Pacific but reaching out into the Arctic and the Indian Oceans, and pulling in Russia, India, Japan and Europe. Bruce Jones, author of To Rule the Waves, will explore how our security, our prosperity, and our environment are being reshaped by the dynamics of sea power.
About the Speaker:
Bruce Jones is a senior fellow and director of the project on international order and strategy at the Brookings Institution. The author or co-author of several books on international order, his most recent work is “To Rule the Waves: How Control of the World’s Oceans Shapes the Fate of the Superpowers”.
Online, via Zoom.
About the Seminar: Saumitra Jha and Steven Wilkinson's book project, Wars and Freedoms, makes the case that, throughout human history, external wars are common catalysts for political change at home, and they do so in large part because of their impact on the organizational capacity of the disenfranchised. It draws widely from across the social sciences and humanities: literature; history; biography; psychology; sociology; economics; and political science. The book draws upon these diverse ways of knowing to provide evidence from across time and around the world of the relevance of a simple framework for understanding which types of external wars are conducive to the emergence of broad-based freedoms, the building of states, and the shrinking of wealth inequalities on one hand, and when instead, others have led to the building of military castes, or an increased propensity for political polarization, ethnic conflict, attempted coups, revolution and genocide on the other. In so doing, Wars and Freedoms provides a re-interpretation of the history of revolutions and political change, in order to make clear which lessons and episodes from history may be more germane for the future of democracy and freedoms in the twenty-first century.
Wars and Freedoms describes how there were historically three paths that connected organizational skills developed in external wars to the spread of democracy and democratic values: in the shadow of a crisis that threatened broad class conflict, through a more gradual process of state-building in response to ongoing external existential threats, and through the organizational efforts of committed military leaders. Of these, however, only the last, the most fragile and contingent, is still likely to emerge organically. Understanding the decline of other paths, however, can still help us understand both how political freedoms and democracy emerged, how our democracies may die, and what we may still be able to do about it.
About the Speaker:
Online, via Zoom.
Along with being a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Saumitra Jha is an associate professor of political economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and convenes the Stanford Conflict and Polarization Lab.
Jha’s research has been published in leading journals in economics and political science, including Econometrica, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Political Science Review and the Journal of Development Economics, and he serves on a number of editorial boards. His research on ethnic tolerance has been recognized with the Michael Wallerstein Award for best published article in Political Economy from the American Political Science Association in 2014 and his co-authored research on heroes with the Oliver Williamson Award for best paper by the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics in 2020. Jha was honored to receive the Teacher of the Year Award, voted by the students of the Stanford MSx Program in 2020.
Saum holds a BA from Williams College, master’s degrees in economics and mathematics from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD in economics from Stanford University. Prior to rejoining Stanford as a faculty member, he was an Academy Scholar at Harvard University. He has been a fellow of the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance and the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University, and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. Jha has consulted on economic and political risk issues for the United Nations/WTO, the World Bank, government agencies, and for private firms.
About the Seminar: What are the defining traits of an autocracy? Leading works answer this question in negative terms: autocracies are non-democracies. We propose instead a substantive definition of autocracy, which we believe better captures what scholars actually mean when they invoke the term. We define autocracy as exclusive rule. Between substantive autocracy and electoral democracy, there is a residual space, of regimes that do not fit under either concept. We call these regimes “non-autocratic non-democracies” or NANDs. A substantive understanding of autocracy has important theoretical and empirical implications. Theoretically, it ensures that claims about the population of autocratic regimes are ontologically coherent, and that we do not end up calling barely non-democratic regimes autocracies. Empirically, our measure reveals that the post-Cold War era has been even less autocratic than it is normally portrayed, and that concerns about a global turn toward "autocratization" are likely overblown.
About the Speakers:
Jason Brownlee
Jason Brownlee, a former post-doctoral fellow at CDDRL, is now a professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, where he researches and teaches about authoritarianism US foreign policy, and Southwest Asian politics.
Ashley Anderson
Ashley Anderson is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. Her research interests are concentrated in the Middle East where she studies issues of contentious politics, political mobilization and regime change.
Killian Clarke
Killian Clarke is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, where he is affiliated with the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. His research and teaching focuses on protest, revolutions, and regime change in the Middle East.
Online, via Zoom.
About the Seminar: Better regulation or regulatory policy and governance has been on the agenda of Western governments for about 20 years. The OECD regularly publishes overviews and adopts recommendations.
In Germany, the adoption of the Normenkontrollrat Act in 2006 and the subsequent establishment of the National Regulatory Control Council (NKR) as the national oversight body marked the beginning of the Better Regulation Policy. The presentation explains the working methods of the NKR as well as the highlights of its work, especially with regard to efforts to reduce unnecessary bureaucracy, to improve the preparation of draft legislation, and to digitalize and modernize the administration in Germany.
About the Speaker:
Online, via Zoom.
Join us Tuesday, December 7th from 12 PM - 1 PM PST for “Media Choices, Niche Behavior, and Biases in Online Information” featuring Sandra González-Bailón, Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at University of Pennsylvania. This seminar series is organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.
The quality of our democracies relies on the quality of the information that citizens consume but we still know very little about how citizens engage with the news “in the wild”. In this talk, I will discuss two papers that examine that question in different settings. The first paper analyzes the media choices of a representative panel of the U.S. population (N ~ 55,000) as they consume TV, web, and YouTube content over a period of 44 months. Less than 10% of the panelists (N ~ 5,300) view and browse news on the three platforms. This small group of news hyper-consumers is formed predominantly by older male users with higher education. We find no evidence of substitution effects in the time these users spend consuming news on each of the three platforms, but consuming news across the media landscape is a choice that only a small and unrepresentative slice of the population makes. These results help us characterize the digital equivalent of the ‘opinion leaders’ first proposed to understand the effects of mass media. The hyper-consumers we identify in our analyses create the elite of opinion leaders that have a disproportionate influence in how news content is selected, circulated, and (ultimately) algorithmically amplified. That this small group is far from representing the population at large is one of the ways in which online information may perpetuate important biases in the salience of some topics over others. The second paper analyzes news sharing in social media during one of the largest protest mobilizations in U.S. history to examine ideological asymmetries in the posting of news content. We extract the list of URLs shared during the mobilization period and we characterize those web sites in terms of their audience reach and the ideological composition of that audience. We also analyze the reliability of the sites in terms of the credibility and transparency of the information they publish. We show that there is no evidence of unreliable sources having any prominent visibility during the protest period, but we do identify asymmetries in the ideological slant of the sources shared, with a clear bias towards right-leaning domains. Our results suggest that online networks are contested spaces where the activism of progressive movements coexists with the narratives of mainstream media, which gain visibility under the same stream of information but whose reporting is not necessarily aligned with the activists’ goals.
About the speaker:
Sandra González-Bailón is an Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, and affiliated faculty at the Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences. Her research lies at the intersection of network science, computational tools, and political communication. She is the author of Decoding the Social World (MIT Press, 2017) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Networked Communication (OUP, 2020). More information on her research can be found at https://sandragonzalezbailon.
Her articles have appeared in journals like PNAS, Nature, Science, Political Communication, The Journal of Communication, and Social Networks, among others. She is the author of the book Decoding the Social World (MIT Press, 2017) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Networked Communication (OUP, 2020). She serves as Associate Editor for the journals Social Networks, EPJ Data Science, and The International Journal of Press/Politics, and she is a member of the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science. She leads the research group DiMeNet (/daɪmnet/) — acronym for Digital Media, Networks, and Political Communication.
