The case studies below are integral teaching tools for the Leadership Academy for Development workshops conducted around the world.
At the NATO Summit in Wales in September 2014, NATO leaders were clear about the security challenges on the Alliance’s borders. In the East, Russia’s actions threaten our vision of a Europe that is whole, free and at peace. On the Alliance’s southeastern border, ISIL’s campaign of terror poses a threat to the stability of the Middle East and beyond. To the south, across the Mediterranean, Libya is becoming increasingly unstable. As the Alliance continues to confront theses current and emerging threats, one thing is clear as we prepare for the 2016 Summit in Warsaw: NATO will adapt, just as it has throughout its 65-year history.
In August 2013, Douglas E. Lute was sworn-in as the Ambassador of the United States to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). From 2007 to 2013, Lute served at the White House under Presidents Bush and Obama, first as the Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan, and more recently as the Deputy Assistant to the President focusing on Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. In 2010, AMB Lute retired from the U.S. Army as a Lieutenant General after 35 years on active duty. Prior to the White House, he served as the Director of Operations on the Joint Staff, overseeing U.S. military operations worldwide. He served multiple tours in NATO commands including duty in Germany during the Cold War and commanding U.S. forces in Kosovo. He holds degrees from the United States Military Academy and Harvard University.
A light lunch will be provided. Please plan to arrive by 11:30am to allow time to check in at the registration desk, pick up your lunch and be seated by 12:00 noon.
Co-sponsored by The Europe Center, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.
Private Workshop organized by Prof. Ken Scheve.
Karen Dawisha is the author of Putin’s Kleptocracy. Who Owns Russia? and the Walter E. Havighurst Professor of Political Science and Director of the Havighurst Center at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, The Europe Center, and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.
Encina Hall 3rd Floor
616 Serra Street
The European Union led the world in wheat production and exports in 2014-15. Yet Europe is also the region where productivity has slowed the most. Yields of major crops have not increased as much as would be expected over the past 20 years, based on past productivity increases and innovations in agriculture.
Finding the causes of that stagnation is key to understanding the trajectory of the global food supply.
Logically, it would seem that climate change would affect crops. But in the overall picture of agriculture, it's hard to figure out how much. European farming is a complex venture, and other possible stagnating factors include changes in government policy. For example, farm subsidies are no longer based on productivity and the use of fertilizer is now controlled to reduce runoff into water supplies. Ongoing positive factors include improvements in farm management practices and advances in crop genetics.
Historically, scientists relied on models to estimate the effects of climate change. Now Stanford's Frances C. Moore has for the first time statistically quantified the relative importance of climate in the stagnation of European crops. She found that warming and precipitation trends are affecting European grain harvests. Moore is a PhD candidate in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources.
"This study is sobering in that it shows climate drags on some of the crops in this region," said David Lobell, co-author of the paper. "Yet this new approach to looking at the problem will help us understand more quickly what impacts require more attention, and that can only be positive in the long term." Lobell is an associate professor of environmental Earth system science and the deputy director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford. He is also a senior fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. He studies ways to improve crop yields in major agricultural regions, with emphasis on adaptation to climate change.
"This is a major step in using quantitative analysis to disentangle the effect of climate change in a complicated system," said Dáithí Stone, a pioneer in comparing actual seasonal weather forecasts with what those forecasts would have been if human activities had not emitted greenhouse gases. "It demonstrates that the signal has become large enough that we may see the effect of climate change in a complicated system like agriculture." Stone is a research scientist in the Computational Chemistry, Materials and Climate Group of Berkeley Lab.
Moore considered two factors in the study: actual crop yields and expected crop yields given historic temperature and precipitation trends. She applied statistical analyses to look for patterns in regional maps of actual European yields of wheat, maize (known in the United States as corn), barley and sugar beets, from 1989 to 2009.
The study found that climate trends can explain 10 percent of the slowdown in wheat and barley yields, with changes in government policy and agriculture likely responsible for the remainder of the stagnation. Moore found evidence that long-term temperature and precipitation trends since 1989 reduced overall European yields of wheat by 2.5 percent and barley by 3.8 percent, while slightly increasing maize and sugar beet yields.
Moore also wanted to find out to what extent farmers had adapted their practices to accommodate changing conditions. She applied power analysis, a statistical tool to test the effect of adaptation. But she discovered the test was not effective in the context of this study.
"We think farmers have been hurt already by warming and drying trends in Italy," Moore said. Undaunted by the limits of statistical analysis to measure farmer adaptation, she is planning another way to find out. "I have been doing this work in front of a computer – in the future I would like to go to Italy," she said. "It would be interesting to talk to the farmers."
Leslie Willoughby is an intern at Stanford News Service.
Frances C. Moore, Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources: (617) 233-3380, fcmoore@stanford.edu
Dan Stober, Stanford News Service: (650) 721-6965, dstober@stanford.edu
This colloquium is the final event of the year-long working group on 'The Contemporary." The workshop examines the “contemporary” with a focus on defining moments such as: 1945, 1973, 1989, and 2001. In recent years the concept of the contemporary has been taken up within limited disciplinary discourses and in the context of distinct geographical settings. The horizon of this workshop, however, is the global. We employ a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to the hybrid term “contemporary” as it intersects various fields and serves as a heuristic device to understand phenomena in politics, culture, and the arts. In this spirit, our colloquium brings together scholars from various fields and disciplines that all are grappling with questions such as 1. what is this thing we call "the contemporary," and how do traditional disciplinary methods need to adapt to new challenges faced by the unique cultural objects of the contemporary moment?
For more information on this colloqium and to view videos of the presentations, please visit The Contemporary website
Co-sponsored by the Department of Literatures, Cultures and Language, Department of Literatures, Cultures and Language Research Units, The Europe Center, Stanford Humanities Center and Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.
Stanford Humanities Center
Department of Comparative Literature
Stanford University
Building 260, Room 201
Stanford, CA 94305-2030
Russell Berman is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution where he co-directs the Working Group on Islamism and the International Order. He holds a courtesy appointment at the Freeman Spogli Institute. He formerly served as Senior Advisor on the Policy Planning Staff of the United States Department of State and has been awarded a Mellon Faculty Fellowship at Harvard and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for research in Berlin; he has also been honored with the Bundesverdienstkreuz of the Federal Republic of Germany.
His books include The Rise of the Modern German Novel: Crisis and Charisma (1988) and Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture (1998), both of which won the Outstanding Book Award of the German Studies Association. Some of his other books include Anti-Americanism in Europe: A Cultural Problem (2004), Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007) and Freedom or Terror: Europe Faces Jihad (2010). In his books and many articles Berman has written widely on the cultural history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, critical theory, and cultural dimensions of trans-Atlantic relations, as well as on topics between Europe and the Middle East. His commentary on current events has appeared in The New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times Internationale Politik, Telos, Daily Beast, the Los Angeles Review Books, die Welt, die Neue Zuercher Zeitung, die Weltwoche, and American Greatness and elsewhere.
