Tides of nationalism rise in Asia, Stanford scholars offer historical lens
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Relations between China, Japan and South Korea are at one of their worst points in recent history. Stanford scholars at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center in the Freeman Spogli Institute have been sought for insight on why negative public sentiment toward each nation has grown – providing commentary to both local and international media.
The territorial disputes in the East China Sea and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visit to Yasukuni Shrine have added to the growing friction. Reconciliation now seems a far prospect, and there is a real chance of an accidental spark setting off conflict. At the heart of the matter are propaganda or global ‘PR’ wars that those countries are waging, associate director for research Daniel C. Sneider says.
Shorenstein APARC director Gi-Wook Shin and Sneider lead the Divided Memories and Reconciliation project, an ongoing research initiative, that attempts to understand how historical memory of the World War II period came to exist, and in turn, informs people’s perspectives in Northeast Asia.
Shin and Sneider write in Foreign Affairs that wartime narratives cannot and will not easily change. They highlight urgent issues such as compensation for victims of forced labor in wartime Japan, and the coordination of public apologies.
On the Asan Forum, Shin says that the perception gap continues to widen between the countries. Historical memories are not only rooted in the colonial and wartime injustices, but more complex historical, cultural and political relations.
The United States may play a pivotal role in facilitating diplomacy and breaking through the stalemate of the reconciliation process. As U.S. President Barack Obama travels to Asia later this week, now is the time to confront the questions of history. Sneider makes a similar suggestion in the Washington Post, saying the United States should abandon its position of neutrality and step forward.
Research findings from the Divided Memories and Reconciliation project have been incorporated into a textbook and two volumes, one of which was co-edited with Daniel Chirot of the University of Washington. Confronting Memories of World War II: European and Asian Legacies (University of Washington Press, April 2014) compares the lasting influence of World War II in Asia and Europe. Sneider was interviewed upon the release of the book, covered by the Stanford Report.
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Public Goods, Reciprocity, and the Causal Effect of Expected Cooperation in Representative Samples
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Voluntary cooperation in public goods problems crucially affects the functioning and long-term fate of economic and political systems. Previous research emphasizes that cooperation in public goods games correlates with expectations about cooperation by others among students and other selected demographic subgroups. However, determining if this reciprocity effect is causal and a general feature of individual behavior requires the use of randomized experiments in combination with large-scale samples that are representative of the population. We fi elded large-scale representative surveys (N=8,500) in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States that included a public goods game in combination with a novel randomized experiment and a survey instrument eliciting individual's conditional contribution schedules. We find a positive causal effect of higher expected cooperation on individual contributions that is most pronounced among positive reciprocity types which account for about 50% of all individuals. We also show that positive reciprocity is unevenly distributed: It is more widespread among richer, younger and more educated respondents. Therefore, socio-demographic characteristics matter for understanding behavior in social dilemmas because of their association with conditionally cooperative strategies.
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Graduate Student Grant Competition Winners Announced
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Research grants from The Europe Center’s newly instituted “Graduate Student Grant Competition” were awarded in Fall 2013 to sixteen Stanford students and in Spring 2014 to ten additional students. The bi-annual competition is part of The Europe Center's efforts to support student research focused on Europe. Funds are available for Ph.D. candidates and early graduate students in the humanities and social sciences whose research or approved dissertation projects advance our knowledge of Europe. Professional students whose interests focus on some aspect of European politics, economics, history, or culture are also encouraged to apply.
Winning proposals from the first two rounds of the Graduate Student Grant Competition were selected from a wide range of disciplines, including political science, history, literature, anthropology, psychology and music. “This is a terrific group of energetic scholars with innovative proposals. I am really looking forward to learning about the results of their research,” stated Ken Scheve, director of The Europe Center. This year’s sponsored projects spanned many regional and substantive areas, from Kate Kreindler’s “Commercializing Orientalization: The Emergence of Trade Networks in Central Italy from the 9th through the 6th centuries BCE,” to Vladimir Troyansky’s “Resettlement of the North Caucasian Refugees in the Balkans, 1860-1878,” to Simon Ejdemyr’s “Unintended Consequences: Particularistic Government Policies and Anti-Immigration Sentiment.” For the complete list of awardees and their research project titles, please visit the grant's awardee page.
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Europe Center grants support student research focused on Europe. For some of the awardees, this means the opportunity to study in European archives, libraries and museums, such as the British Library shown here.
REUTERS/Paul Hackett
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The Europe Center Lectureship on Europe and the World
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The Europe Center recently initiated a distinguished annual lectureship named, The Europe Center Lectureship on Europe and the World. The lectures are intended to promote awareness of Europe's lessons and experiences with a goal of enhancing our collective knowledge of both contemporary global affairs and Europe itself. Each year, faculty affiliates at the Center select a renowned intellectual to deliver the lectureship on a topic of significant scholarly interest. The Europe Center invites you to the inaugural annual lectures of this series by Adam Tooze, Barton M. Briggs Professor of History, Yale University.
“Making Peace in Europe 1917-1919: Brest-Litovsk and Versailles”
Date: Wednesday, Apr 30, 2014
Time: 4:00 - 5:30 pm
Location: Koret Taube Room, Gunn-SIEPR
“Hegemony: Europe, America and the Problem of Financial Reconstruction, 1916-1933”
Date: Thursday, May 1, 2014
Time: 4:00 - 5:30 pm
Location: Koret Taube Room, Gunn-SIEPR
“Unsettled Lands: The Interwar Crisis of Agrarian Europe”
Date: May 2, 2014
Time: 4:00 - 5:30 pm
Location: Bechtel Conference Center
Reception: 5:30 - 6:15 pm
RSVP by Apr 23, 2014
On the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, Adam Tooze will deliver three lectures about the history of the transformation of the global power structure that followed from Imperial Germany’s decision to provoke America’s declaration of war in 1917. Tooze advances a powerful explanation of why the First World War rearranged political and economic structures across Eurasia and the British Empire, sowed the seeds of revolution in Russia and China, and laid the foundations of a new global order that began to revolve around the United States and the Pacific. These lectures will present an argument for why the fate of effectively the whole of civilization changed in 1917, and why the First World War’s legacy continues to shape our world today.
Tooze is the author of The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2006) and Statistics and the German State 1900-1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (2001), among numerous other scholarly articles on modern European history.
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Cold War Internationalism: The Case of Labor
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Global Europe, from the Atlantic to the Pacific
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José Manuel Durão Barroso, President of the European Commission, will be visiting Stanford to deliver his talk, "Global Europe, from the Atlantic to the Pacific." President Barroso's political career began in 1980 when he joined the Social Democratic Party (PSD). He was named President of the party in 1999 and re-elected three times. During the same period, he served as Vice President of the European People's Party. As State Secretary for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation he played a key role as mediator in the signing of the peace accords for Angola in Bicesse in 1991, and as Minister for Foreign Affairs he was a driving force in the self-determination process in East Timor between 1992 and 1995. Under his leadership, the PSD won the general election in 2002 and he was appointed Prime Minister of Portugal in April of that year. He remained in office until July 2004 when he was nominated by the European Council and elected by the European Parliament to the post of President of the European Commission. In June 2009 the European Council unanimously nominated him for a second term as President of the European Commission, and he was re-elected to the post by an absolute majority in the European Parliament in September 2009.Image
Please note: this event is open to Stanford students, faculty, staff and invited guests.
Co-sponsored by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, The Europe Center and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.
McCaw Hall, Arrillaga Alumni Center
José Manuel Durão Barroso
President
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The European Commission
Lectures
In the Eye of the Beholder: How Leaders and Intelligence Organizations Assess Intentions
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Abstract: How do policymakers infer the long-term political intentions of their states' adversaries? A new approach to answering this question, the “selective attention thesis,” posits that individual perceptual biases and organizational interests and practices influence which types of indicators a state's political leaders and its intelligence community regard as credible signals of an adversary's intentions. Policymakers often base their interpretations on their own theories, expectations, and needs, sometimes ignoring costly signals and paying more attention to information that, though less costly, is more vivid (i.e., personalized and emotionally involving). In contrast, intelligence organizations typically prioritize the collection and analysis of data on the adversary's military inventory. Over time, these organizations develop substantial knowledge on these material indicators that they then use to make predictions about an adversary's intentions. An examination of three cases based on 30,000 archival documents and intelligence reports shows strong support for the selective attention thesis and mixed support for two other approaches in international relations theory aimed at understanding how observers are likely to infer adversaries' political intentions: the behavior thesis and the capabilities thesis. The three cases are assessments by President Jimmy Carter and officials in his administration of Soviet intentions during the collapse of détente; assessments by President Ronald Reagan and administration officials of Soviet intentions during the end of the Cold War; and British assessments of Nazi Germany before World War II.
About the Speaker: Professor Keren Yarhi-Milo is an Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University’s Politics Department and the Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs. Her research and teaching focus on international relations and foreign policy, with a particular specialization in international security, including foreign policy decision-making, interstate communication and crisis bargaining, intelligence, and US foreign policy in the Middle East.
Professor Yarhi-Milo’s forthcoming book (Princeton University Press) titled, “Knowing The Adversary: Leaders, Intelligence Organizations, and Assessments of Intentions in International Relations,” explores how and why civilian leaders and intelligence organizations select and interpret an adversary’s signals of intentions differently.
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Keren Yarhi-Milo
Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs
Speaker
the Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs, Princeton University
Seminars
Cold War Internationalism: The Case of Labor
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Sandrine Kott was educated in France (Paris), Germany (Bielefeld and Berlin) and the USA (New York). She has been a Professor of European contemporary history at the University of Geneva since 2004. Her principal fields of expertise are the history of social welfare and labor law in France and Germany since the end of the nineteenth century and labor relations in those countries of real socialism, in particular in the German Democratic Republic. Since 2004, she has developed the transnational and global dimensions of each of her fields of expertise in utilizing the archives and resources of international organizations and particularly the International Labor Organization. She has published over 80 articles in French, German and Anglo-Saxon journals and collective volumes, edited 4 volumes and published 6 books.
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Sandrine Kott
University of Geneva
Professor of European contemporary history
Seminars
New FSI initiative expands global research opportunities for students
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Zack Bonzell came to Stanford with a strong interest in human biology and political science. Last summer, the undergraduate had the chance to fuse his interests while doing field research with faculty at the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI).
During a two-week internship, he travelled to Guatemala with FSI senior fellows Paul Wise, Beatriz Magaloni, Alberto Díaz-Cayeros and Scott Rozelle to learn about the country’s rural health care system by shadowing doctors and interviewing mothers in an impoverished area about the issues leading to the area’s high rates of child malnutrition.
“That experience was an ideal way to blend my interests and gave me a better idea of how to craft my course of study at Stanford,” said Bonzell, who is now a junior. “One of the things that really struck me was when Paul Wise said the health outcomes we were seeing are the result of extreme material deprivation. These people are sick because they are poor. That gave me more of an interest in political economy.”
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Students conduct interviews about nutrition with REAP in China. Photo Credit: Matt Boswell |
FSI is now expanding its educational opportunities for students, like Bonzell, who want to do research on global issues in Asia, Latin America, Europe and Africa.
The Stanford Global Student Fellows program (SGSF) is being funded in large part through a $1.25 million anonymous gift that will help grow existing programs and create new offerings for graduates and undergraduates.
“This program deepens FSI’s commitment to its mission of educating the next generation of leaders in international affairs,” said FSI Director Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar. “It also offers outstanding opportunities for Stanford students to work closely with the leading thinkers on global policy issues.”
The program, which is part of FSI’s efforts to expand student opportunities, will build on the institute’s undergraduate mentorship programs that allow students to work on faculty research projects each quarter. Those positions will now be available during the summer. Some of the positions will be connected to projects in FSI’s new International Policy Implementation Lab, an initiative that gives students a close-up view of how academics and policy influencers can address some of the world’s thorniest issues.
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PoliSci 114S students work together in a UN conflict simulation. Photo Credit: Rod Searcey |
Building on FSI’s experience placing students in research opportunities, the program will create and expand summer field research internships. The two- to six-week internships this summer will give undergraduates the opportunity to work with FSI senior fellows in China, Guatemala, India and Mexico who study global health, conflict resolution, governance and poverty reduction. In coming years, the program will likely include additional fieldwork projects in Rwanda, Tanzania and Brazil. The SGSF program covers all travel expenses for students and provides students with an opportunity to work closely with a faculty member and a team of other students on an ongoing research project addressing real-world problems in a specific region.
“What makes FSI such an incredible institution is that it attracts faculty who have very pragmatic interests,” Bonzell said. “It seeks to wed academic work with a more direct impact, and there’s a lot of potential for more students to think along similar lines.”
The Stanford Global Student Fellows will also allow FSI to work closely with its partners, including the Program in International Relations, the Haas Center for Public Service, and Stanford in Government to provide opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students.
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Mexican Ambassador Eduardo Medina Mora and Jorge Olarte, '13, speaking with students at the US-Mex FoCUS event. Photo Credit: Rod Searcey |
One of the program’s new initiatives geared toward undergraduates is the Global Policy Summer Fellowships. The fellowships help secure placement and a $6,000 stipend for students interested in interning at international policy and international affairs organizations. This summer, The Europe Center at FSI is placing students at the Center for European Policy Studies and Bruegel, two Brussels-based think tanks. Future positions will be created with six offerings abroad and two based in the United States.including the Program in International Relations, the Haas Center for Public Service, and Stanford in Government to provide opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students.
The Stanford Global Student Fellows program will also commit $400,000 to create a Mentored Global Research Fellowship that will provide research opportunities for students to conduct their own overseas research under the close mentorship of a faculty member. The program will award stipends of $6,000 for summer undergraduate projects and $9,000 for summer graduate projects, and $1,500 for smaller projects executed during the school year.
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Thomas Hendee '13 chatting with children in rural Guatemala. Photo Credit: Maria Contreras |
The faculty advisory committee overseeing the development and implementation of these new programs includes Scott Rozelle, the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow and the co-director of FSI’s Rural Education Action Program; Stephen Stedman, a senior fellow at FSI and the deputy director of CDDRL; and Lisa Blaydes, assistant professor of political science.
The application deadline for all summer programs is Feb. 28, 2015. The deadline to apply for academic quarterly programs is the end of the first week of each quarter, beginning in the fall of 2014.
For more information, students should contact Elena Cryst at ecryst@stanford.edu and watch for postings on FSI’s student program Facebook page. Students can also sign up for the program’s distribution and announcement list.
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