Stanford University

Race and Ethnicity: Marking Difference in Europe and the U.S.

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This collaborative effort marks the recent publication of Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century (Norton, 2010) and Ethnic Europe: Mobility, Identity, and Conflict in a Globalized World (Stanford, 2010).  Both volumes are the result of national and international conferences, scholarly lectures, and class discussions that have taken place over several years under the auspices of CCSRE and TEC respectively.  Both also demonstrate the deep well of knowledge about and keen interest in the subjects of race and ethnicity in the U.S. and Europe on the part of faculty at Stanford University and beyond.
 
This workshop brings together the insights generated within both TEC and CCSRE with the aim of furthering our collective knowledge about race and ethnicity in contemporary global society.

This event is free and open to the public.

Sponsors include: The Europe Center (TEC) at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), and the Stanford Humanities Center. Co-sponsored by the Department of American Studies.

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Levinthal Hall
Stanford Humanities Center
424 Santa Teresa Street
Stanford, California

Ounia Doukoure Speaker

Amir Eshel

Dept of German Studies
Building 260, Room 204
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2030

(650) 723-0413 (650) 725-8421
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Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies
Professor of Comparative Literature
Professor of German Studies
Eshel.jpg MA, PhD

Amir Eshel is Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies. He is Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature and as of 2019 Director of Comparative Literature and its graduate program. His Stanford affiliations include The Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Modern Thought & Literature, and The Europe Center at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is also the faculty director of Stanford’s research group on The Contemporary and of the Poetic Media Lab at Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). His research focuses on contemporary literature and the arts as they touch on philosophy, specifically on memory, history, political thought, and ethics.

Amir Eshel is the author of Poetic Thinking Today (Stanford University Press, 2019); German translation at Suhrkamp Verlag, 2020). Previous books include Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past (The University of Chicago Press in 2013). The German version of the book, Zukünftigkeit: Die zeitgenössische Literatur und die Vergangenheit, appeared in 2012 with Suhrkamp Verlag. Together with Rachel Seelig, he co-edited The German-Hebrew Dialogue: Studies of Encounter and Exchange (2018). In 2014, he co-edited with Ulrich Baer a book of essays on Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt: zwischen den Disziplinen; and also co-edited a book of essays on Barbara Honigmann with Yfaat Weiss, Kurz hinter der Wahrheit und dicht neben der Lüge (2013).

Earlier scholarship includes the books Zeit der Zäsur: Jüdische Lyriker im Angesicht der Shoah (1999), and Das Ungesagte Schreiben: Israelische Prosa und das Problem der Palästinensischen Flucht und Vertreibung (2006). Amir Eshel has also published essays on Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, Paul Celan, Dani Karavan, Gerhard Richter, W.G. Sebald, Günter Grass, Alexander Kluge, Barbara Honigmann, Durs Grünbein, Dan Pagis, S. Yizhar, and Yoram Kaniyuk.

Amir Eshel’s poetry includes a 2018 book with the artist Gerhard Richter, Zeichnungen/רישומים, a work which brings together 25 drawings by Richter from the clycle 40 Tage and Eshel’s bi-lingual poetry in Hebrew and German. In 2020, Mossad Bialik brings his Hebrew poetry collection בין מדבר למדבר, Between Deserts.

Amir Eshel is a recipient of fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt and the Friedrich Ebert foundations and received the Award for Distinguished Teaching from the School of Humanities and Sciences.

Affiliated faculty of The Europe Center
Affiliated faculty of The Taube Center for Jewish Studies
Faculty Director of The Contemporary Research Group
Faculty Director of the Poetic Media Lab
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Amir Eshel Speaker
Cecile Alduy Speaker

Roland Hsu

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Affiliate
Hsu.jpg PhD

Roland Hsu is director of research of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project.

Hsu’s research is dedicated to bringing creative and multi-disciplinary thinking to the challenges of international cultural dialogue, and post-conflict peace and reconciliation.  His own research focuses on migration and ethnic identity formation.  His publications combine humanistic and social science methods and materials to answer what displaces peoples, how do societies respond to migration, and what are the experiences of resettlement. 

Currently he is pursuing the subject of displaced peoples, with plans to publish three books.  The three books address ethnicity, migration, and diaspora.  His first book, “Ethnic Europe: Mobility, Identity, and Conflict in a Globalized World” (Stanford University Press, 2010) revealed what it means to lay claim to ethnic difference in the traditional national cultures of Europe.  “Ethnic Europe” combines essays by leading scholars whom Hsu with research partners brought to Stanford.  The book is edited and begins with an essay by Hsu on how we think about ethnicity, and why recognizing ethnicity unsettles social tradition in increasingly globalized Europe.  Hsu continues to foster public questioning of the meaning and use of ethnicity by sponsoring programming on European political and cultural initiatives, and with blog postings on diversity policy and the politics of immigration in such publications as Le Monde Diplomatique.

Hsu’s second book, “Migration and Integration: New Models for Mobility and Coexistence” (University of Vienna Press, 2016) asks what displaces people, and how do migrants return or resettle.  Co-edited with Christoph Reinprecht (University of Vienna) “Migration and Integration” compares international and internal migration in East and South-East Asia, North Africa and Southern Europe, Western and Eastern Europe, and Scandinavia.  Based on Hsu’s design with faculty partners of a series of visiting fellowships, workshops, and an international conference, Hsu and Reinprecht invited scholars from multiple disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences to contribute to this volume on the history, politics, and culture of migration and integration in an illuminating East-West comparison.

His third book in this series of studies on displaced peoples is “Global Diaspora: Communities of Mind and Place”, co-edited with Dag Blanck (Uppsala University) from Oxford University Press (in process).  Essays in this book will ask how models of resettled communities and diasporas should be revised to help us understand today’s migrant experience.  Combining thirty historical and contemporary case studies, this book on “Diaspora” to be published in the Oxford University Press Handbook series, will help us rethink what has been the consequence of labeling a migrant community as a diaspora, why contemporary displacements due to war, poverty, and climate change disperse peoples more widely, and how we can understand the emerging experience of real and virtual migrant communities.

A fourth project under consideration in this series will be a web-based, curated and dynamic clearing house of the new thinking from scholars, policy leaders, and non-governmental actors on migration and refugees in national, regional, and trans-national settings.

Hsu developed this interest through his teaching and lecturing at Stanford, the University of Chicago, and European universities, and working with scholars, and policy and civil society leaders who have been invited to co-sponsored programming.  Working with Stanford and international university, government, and NGO partners, the list of co-sponsored conferences, workshops, seminars, and public events includes:

  • Authors and artists: Ian McEwan, Orhan Pamuk, Aris Fioretos.
  • Conferences/workshops/seminars: Stanford Faculty Working Group on Responding to Refugees; New thinking on Nobel Laureate Nelly Sachs; Diversity and Community in Sweden in film and the arts; Writings and Response to Ayaan Hirsi Ali; Roundtable on Salmon Rushdie’s “Joseph Anton: A Memoir”; Hannah Arendt in the Humanities; Ethnic Europe; Conscience; Democracy in Adversity and Diversity; Migration and Integration
  • Scholars/Analysts: Francis Fukuyama, Vali Nasr, Olivier Roy, Timothy Garton Ash, Istvan Deak
  • Journalists: John Micklethwait (Editor, the Economist), Josef Joffe (Die Zeit), Frederick Mitterand. 
  • Policy leaders: Catherine Ashton (EU High Representative and Vice President), Jan Eliasson (former UN Secretary General), Jonathan Phillips (Permanent Secretary, UK Northern Ireland Office), Lionel Jospin (former French Prime Minister), Daniel Cohen Bendit, European Ambassadors to the US, Foreign Ministers and Presidents from Austria, Sweden, Switzerland, Poland, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Algeria, Ukraine, Spain, Basque Region

Hsu’s previous research and teaching explored a wide range of historical and cultural ruptures.  At the University of Chicago, Hsu taught courses on literature and the visual arts (including themes of “evil”, “revolution”, and the authorial “other” in world literature).  His dissertation on public monuments, history texts, and the political use of the French Revolution reveals the role of history and revolution in legitimizing modern French regimes.  This research inspires his work on conflict and reconciliation in Europe.

At the University of Idaho, Hsu was Assistant Professor of History, completing research on visual representations of revolution and reception theory in nineteenth-century France, and teaching undergraduate and graduate courses on nineteenth-century European intellectual and political history, world history (ancient through modern), empire, colonial and post-colonial eras, and the French Revolution.

At Stanford, Hsu was awarded a three-year Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship in the Introduction to Humanities Program.  Serving as a Fellow he conducted research on collective memory, and was inspired by Stanford faculty and students to turn his focus to post-conflict and post-atrocity research.  He has increasingly focused on investigating the history and future of post-conflict studies and models for truth and reconciliation and emancipation, using material and methods from the humanities (history, philosophy, literary criticism, visual arts) and the social sciences (political science, sociology, anthropology.)

Hsu has more than twelve years of administrative leadership experience.  At FSI Hsu teamed with staff and faculty to build the Europe Center from its founding as the European Forum, to its growth into the Forum on Contemporary Europe, and ultimately a research center at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Hsu’s contributions to the growth of the Europe Center included building multiple research scholar exchange and fellowships (with new funding) for residencies at the Europe Center.  Hsu also cultivated institutional partnerships with more than six European universities for on-going cooperative programming and scholar exchange.

Currently, Hsu is Director of Research for the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project at Stanford University. 

Previously at Stanford, Hsu has held the following appointments:

  • Associate Director of the Stanford Humanities Center
  • Associate Director of the Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Global Studies
  • Project Director, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages
  • Senior Associate Director of Undergraduate Advising and Research
  • Acting Associate Director of the Introduction to Humanities Program
  • Post-doctoral Fellow, Introduction to Humanities Program
  • Research Coordinator, Program in Writing and Rhetoric

Hsu earned his Ph.D. in Modern European History at the University of Chicago.  He holds an M.A. in Art History from Chicago, and a dual B.A. in Art History and also English Literature from the University of California, Berkeley.

 

Director of Research
Affiliate, The Europe Center
Roland Hsu Speaker
Pavle Levi Speaker
Paula Moya Speaker
David Palumbo-Liu Speaker
Matthew Snipp Speaker
Hazel Markus Speaker
Monica McDermott Speaker
Ramon Saldivar Speaker
Workshops

No Picnic: The Dynamics of Culture in the Contemporary Arab World

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In this analysis of the region, Hicham Ben Abdallah points out that, while political issues are important to understanding the authoritarian political structures of the Arab world, it is also important to understand the dynamics of culture.  Ben Abdallah demonstrates the proliferation of cultural practices through which societies and individuals learn to live in a complex mix of parallel and conflicting ideological tendencies -- with the increasing Islamicization of everyday ideology developing alongside the proliferation of secular forms of cultural production, while both negotiate for breathing room under the aegis of an authoritarian state. 

He describes how the state takes advantage of a segmented cultural scene by posing as a restraint against the extremes of the salafist norm, while channeling modernist cultural expression into safe institutional and patronage reward systems  and into a commercialized process of "festivalization," all of which celebrate a depoliticized "Arab" identity. 

Hicham Ben Abdallah refers us to the deep history of Islam, which protected divergent cultural and intellectual influences as the patrimony of mankind.  He suggests a new cultural paradigm, inspired by this history while understanding the necessity for political democratization and cultural modernism.  We must, he argues, be unafraid to face the challenges implied in the tension between the growing influence of a salafist norm and the widespread embrace of implicitly secular cultural practices throughout the Arab world.   

Hicham Ben Abdallah El Alaoui received a B.A. in Politics from Princeton University, and an M.A in Politics from Stanford University. He recently founded the Moulay Hicham Foundation for Social Science Research on North Africa and the Middle East, and serves as its Director.   

Through this Foundation he has established the Program on Good Governance and Political Reform in the Arab World, at The Freeman Spogli Institute's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University.  Hicham Ben Abdallah is a member of the Advisory Board of the Freeman Spogli Institute. 

He has also recently founded a program in Global Climate Change, Democracy and Human Security (known as the "Climate Change and Democracy Project), in the Division of Social Sciences, Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, at the University of California, Santa Barbara.   

In 1994, at Princeton University, Hicham Ben Abdallah endowed the Institute for the Trans-regional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia.  This Institute has become an important venue for study and debate on the region. 

Hicham Ben Abdallah is also active in global humanitarian and social issues. He serves on the Human Rights Watch Board of Directors for the Middle East and North Africa.   He has worked with the Carter Center on a number of initiatives, including serving as an international observer with the Carter Center delegations during elections in Palestine in 1996 and 2006, and in Nigeria in 2000.  In 2000, he served as Principal Officer for Community Affairs with the United Nations Mission in Kosovo . 

Hicham Ben Abdallah is also an entrepreneur in the domain of renewable energy.  His company, Al Tayyar Energy, develops projects that produce clean energy at competitive prices.  He has implemented several of these projects in Asia, Europe and North America.

CISAC Conference Room

Hicham Ben Abdallah

CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Consulting Professor
Ben_Abdallah.jpg MA

Hicham Ben Abdallah received his B.A. in Politics in 1985 from Princeton University, and his M.A. in Political Science from Stanford in 1997. His interest is in the politics of the transition from authoritarianism to democracy.

He has lectured in numerous universities and think tanks in North America and Europe. His work for the advancement of peace and conflict resolution has brought him to Kosovo as a special Assistant to Bernard Kouchner, and to Nigeria and Palestine as an election observer with the Carter Center. He has published in journals such Le Monde,  Le Monde Diplomatique,Pouvoirs, Le Debat, The Journal of Democracy, The New York Times, El Pais, and El Quds.

In 2010 he has founded the Moulay Hicham Foundation which conducts social science research on the MENA region. He is also an entrepreneur with interests in agriculture, real estate, and renewable energies. His company, Al Tayyar Energy, has a number of clean energy projects in Asia and Europe. 

Hicham Ben Abdallah Visiting Scholar Speaker CDDRL
Seminars

Ethnic Conflict Resolution in the 21st Century: A Functioning Model from Europe

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The 21st century has been branded the century of the worldwide return of ethnonationalisms. Conflicts based on cultural differences are boiling up in many regions, leading to civil wars and to the breakup of states. Many of these conflicts are direct and indirect consequences of modernization and transnationalization; and they are usually as complex as they are enduring and difficult to settle, because rooted in the "deep“ dimensions of culture and religion. The result is in many cases a conflict pattern where political solutions are often only of temporary value, because the far deeper rooted ethnic and cultural dimensions sooner or later undermine them and spiral the conflict up again. As a consequence, there is a new debate today about the advantages of partition and separation, and an increasing number of scholars and politicians seems to believe that the still most humane lasting solution for ethno-cultural conflicts is to institutionally divide ethnic groups once and for all, accepting to a certain extent (non-recurring) ethnic cleansing and new flows of refugees. Answering such approaches (like the one of Jerry Z. Muller propagated paradigmatically in Foreign Affairs, March/April 2008), Roland Benedikter presents a functioning and long-term proven model from Central Europe, where different ethnic groups have managed it to find a unique institutional arrangement that permits them to live together without territorial and political partition. In presenting core features of the model of autonomy of the Autonomous Province of South Tyrol, a border region between Northern Italy and Austria where three ethnic groups coexist and have made the area formerly ridden by civil wars (until 1972) now one of the wealthiest regions of Europe, Roland Benedikter shows how cornerstones of this model may be successfully applied also to other ethnic conflict regions.

Roland Benedikter, Dott. Dr. Dr. Dr., is European Foundation Fellow 2009-2013, in residence at the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies of the University of California at Santa Barbara, with duties as the European Foundations Research Professor of Political Sociology. His main field of interest is the multidimensional analysis of what he calls the current "Global Systemic Shift", which he tries to understand by bringing together the six typological discourses (and systemic order patterns) of Politics, Economy, Culture, Religion, Technology and Demography. Roland is currently working on two major book projects: One about the "Global Systemic Shift", and one about the "Contemporary Cultural Psychology of the West", the latter comparing culturo-political trends in the European and American hemispheres. With both projects he is also involved in European Policy Advice.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Roland Benedikter Speaker
Seminars

The Role of Ushahidi as a Liberation Technology

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Patrick Meier is the Director of Crisis Mapping at Ushahidi and the co-founder of the International Network of Crisis Mappers. He serves on the boards of the Meta-Activism Project (MAP) and Digital Democracy. Patrick was previously the co-director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative's (HHI) Program on Crisis Mapping and Early Warning. He has consulted for several international organizations on numerous crisis mapping and early warning projects in Africa, Asia and Europe.

Patrick is completing his PhD at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. His dissertation focuses on the the impact of information and communication technologies on the balance of power between repressive regimes and popular movements. He has an MA in International Affairs from Columbia University and is an alum of the Sante Fe Institute's (SFI) Complex Systems Summer School.

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Patrick Meier

N/A

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CDDRL Fellow 2010-2011
Meier.jpg PhD

Patrick Meier is the Director of Crisis Mapping at Ushahidi and the co-founder of the International Network of Crisis Mappers. He serves on the boards of the Meta-Activism Project (MAP) and Digital Democracy. Patrick was previously the co-director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative's (HHI) Program on Crisis Mapping and Early Warning. He has consulted for several international organizations on numerous crisis mapping and early warning projects in Africa, Asia and Europe.

Patrick is completing his PhD at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. His dissertation focuses on the the impact of information and communication technologies on the balance of power between repressive regimes and popular movements. He has an MA in International Affairs from Columbia University and is an alum of the Sante Fe Institute's (SFI) Complex Systems Summer School.

Patrick blogs at iRevolution.net

Patrick Meier CDDRL Fellow 2010-2011 Speaker
Seminars

On the State's Choice of Oil Company: Risk Management and the Frontier of the Petroleum Industry

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Conventional wisdom holds that oil sector nationalizations are rooted in political motives of the petroleum states, which perceive value in the direct control of resource development though a state enterprise.  State motives are inarguably important.  At the same time, we argue in this paper that constraints of risk significantly affect a state's choice of which agent to employ to extract its hydrocarbons.  Implicit in much current debate is the idea that private, international oil companies (IOCs) and the state-controlled, national oil companies (NOCs) are direct competitors, and that the former may face threats to their very existence in an era of increased state control. 

In fact, IOCs and NOCs characteristically supply very different functions to governments when it comes to managing risk.  For reasons we discuss, IOCs excel at managing risk while NOCs typically do not.  IOCs, NOCs, and a third type of player, the oil service company, will all continue to exist because their distinct talents are needed by states seeking to realize the value of their petroleum resources.  However, the relative positions of these different players have changed substantially over time, and will continue to do so, in response to the shifting needs of oil-rich states.

In the first part of this paper, we explore the nature and sources of risk in the petroleum industry, how these risks change over time, the task of managing petroleum risks, and the variable capacity of state and private companies to manage them.  In the second part, we apply qualitative and quantitative approaches to test the idea that risk significantly affects the state's choice of which agent to use for petroleum extraction.  First, we review the events leading to the cluster of nationalizations that occurred in the early 1970s and assess whether they were significantly affected by considerations of risk.  Second, we explore how well variation in risk and state capacity for risk can explain changing ownership over time within a particular oil province - the UK and Norwegian zones of the North Sea.  Third, we use data from energy research and consulting firm Wood Mackenzie to quantitatively test our hypothesis about the key role of risk, looking in particular at the case of oil and gas company exploration behavior.  

In all three cases, our observations are broadly consistent with the hypothesis that risk significantly affects the state's choice of hydrocarbon agent, although, as expected, other factors emerge as important drivers of outcomes as well.

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Program on Energy and Sustainable Development
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Mark C. Thurber

Sanela Diana Jenkins HR Series : Reparations, Restitution, and Transitional Justice

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Larry May is a political philosopher who has written on conceptual issues in collective and shared responsibility, as well as normative issues in international criminal law. He has also written on professional ethics and on the Just War tradition.  

In addition to being W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University, he is also a Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Charles Sturt University in Canberra.  He has previously taught at Washington University, Purdue University, University of Wisconsin, and University of Connecticut. 

He has published 25 books and 100 articles. His five most recent authored books have been published by Cambridge University Press, including: "Genocide: A Normative Account" (2010) and "Global Justice and Due Process" (2011). 

His authored books have won awards from the American Philosophical Association, the North American Society for Social Philosophy, the International Association of Penal Law, the American Society of International Law, and the American Library Association. His writings have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Serbian, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.

Professor May has lectured extensively around the world, including, in the last two years, keynote or plenary addresses at conferences in: Oxford, St. Andrews, Oslo, Helsinki, Krakow, Belgrade, Bielefeld, The Hague, Delft, Leiden, Montreal, Victoria, Toronto, Canberra, Melbourne, and Sydney.  

He has served on the board of directors of the American Philosophical Association and is past president of AMINTAPHIL, the American section of the International Society for Philosophy of Law. In addition, he has occasionally taken a criminal appeals case, and has worked on several death penalty cases, in the United States.

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Landau Economics Building,
ECON 140

Larry May W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University Speaker
Seminars

Sanela Diana Jenkins HR Series : The Justification of Human Rights

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John Tasioulas joined the University of College London in January 2011 as the Quain Professor of Jurisprudence. He was previously a Reader in Moral and Legal Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He has also taught at the universities of Melbourne and Glasgow and has held visiting research posts at Melbourne and the Australian National University. His research grants include two Research Leave Awards from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2001 and 2004) and a British Academy Research Development Award (2008-2010) for a monograph-length project on the philosophy of human rights. He is currently a member of the AHRC Peer Review College and serves on the editorial boards of the American Society of International Law Studies in International Legal Theory and the Journal of Applied Philosophy. He is the author of numerous published articles on the legal and moral philosophy of international law and is co-editor of The Philosophy of International Law (Oxford University Press, 2010)

Professor Tasioulas' research interests revolve around Socrates' question, 'How should one live?', and the attempt to draw out the moral, political and legal implications of an acceptable answer to it. One strand of this inquiry focuses on the philosophy of human rights. Professor Tasioulas is currently engaged in writing a monograph that develops a pluralistic, interest-based account of human rights, one that - among other things - seeks to provide us with the intellectual resources to respond to the familiar objection that human rights reflect merely Western values.

Professor Tasioulas also has on-going research interests in a number of other topics, including the nature of moral wrong-doing and the responses appropriate to it, the components of human well-being, the plurality of ethical values, as well as meta-ethical questions about the reality of moral values and the possibility of moral knowledge.

Landau Economics Building,
ECON 140

John Tasioulas Quain Professor of Jurisprudence, University College London Speaker
Seminars

Sanela Diana Jenkins HR Series : Human Rights : Rhetoric or Reality?

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Madeleine Rees qualified as a lawyer in 1990 and became a partner in a large law firm in the UK in 1994 specializing in discrimination law, particularly in the area of employment, and public and administrative law and she did work on behalf of both the Commission for Racial Equality and the Equal Opportunities Commission mainly on developing strategies to establish rights under domestic law through the identification of test cases to be brought before the courts. Madeleine brought cases both to the European Court of Human Rights and The European Court in Luxembourg. She was cited as one of the leading lawyers in the field of discrimination in the Chambers directory of British lawyers. In 1998 she began working for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights as the gender expert and Head of Office in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In that capacity she worked extensively on the rule of law, gender and post conflict, transitional justice and the protection of social and economic rights.

The Office in Bosnia was the first to take a case of rendition to Guantanamo before a court. The OHCHR office dealt extensively with the issue of trafficking and Madeleine was a member of the expert coordination group of the trafficking task force of the Stability Pact, thence the Alliance against Trafficking. From September 2006 to April 2010 she was the head of the Women`s rights and gender unit. For the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, focusing on using law to describe the different experiences of men and women, particularly post conflict. The aim was to better understand and interpret the concept of Security using human rights law as complementary to humanitarian law and how to make the human rights machinery more responsive and therefore more effective from a gender perspective.

Landau Economics Building,
ECON 140

Madeleine Rees Former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Bosnia; Former head of the Women`s Rights and Gender Unit, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights; Secretary General, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom Speaker
Seminars

Sanela Diana Jenkins HR Series : The Evolving Transnational Legal Order

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Karen Alter's current research investigates how the proliferation of international legal mechanisms is changing international relations.  Her book in progress, The New Terrain of International Law: International Courts in International Politics provides a new framework for comparing and understanding the influence of the twenty-four existing international courts, and for thinking about how different domains of domestic and international politics are transformed through the creation of international courts.     

Alter is author of: The European Court's Political Power (Oxford University Press, 2009), andEstablishing the Supremacy of European Law: The Making of an International Rule of Law in Europe. (Oxford University Press, 2001) and more than forty articles and book  chapters on the politics of international law and courts.  Recent publications investigate the politics of international regime complexity,  how delegation of authority to international courts reshapes domestic and international relations, and politics in the Andean Community's legal system.

Professor Alter teaches courses on international law, international organizations, ethics in international affairs, and the international politics of human rights at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.

Alter has been a German Marshall Fund Fellow, a Howard Foundation research fellow and an Emile Noel scholar at Harvard Law School. Her research has also been supported by the DAAD and France's Chateaubriand fellowship. She has been a visiting scholar at the American Bar Foundation where she is an associate scholar of the Center on Law and Globalization, Northwestern University's School of Law, Harvard University's Center for European Studies, Institute d'Etudes Politiques, the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Auswartiges Politik, Universität Bremen, and Seikei University. Fluent in Italian, French and German, Alter serves on the editorial board of European Union Politics and Law and Social Inquiry and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Landau Economics Building,
ECON 140

Karen Alter Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University; Northwestern Law School (courtesy appointment) Speaker
Seminars

On demographic change in East Asia: An interview with Karen Eggleston

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Q&As
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Over the past year, the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) has engaged in leading-edge research on demographic change in East Asia. Karen Eggleston, director of the Asia Health Policy Program at Shorenstein APARC, discusses the recent book Aging Asia: The Economic and Social Implications of Rapid Demographic Change in China, Japan, and South Korea, and the workshop on the economic, social, and political/security implications of demographic change in East Asia, held January 20-21 at Shorenstein APARC.

Across Northeast Asia, countries are facing the issue of an aging population, which causes socio-economic challenges that have policy implications. You explore this phenomenon in your forthcoming book Aging Asia: The Economic and Social Implications of Rapid Demographic Change in China, Japan, and South Korea. When did aging begin to become an issue and what are some of the greatest factors that you address in the book?

Aging started at different times in the countries of East Asia. The country with the oldest life expectancy in the world and the oldest age structure of its population is Japan. It had a very short baby boom after the war and has had a steep decline in fertility. Mortality has also been falling around the world, and so this creates a change in the population. Japan is already at the fourth stage of demographic transition. South Korea is rapidly moving towards that and already has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. Of course, neither of them have policies to reduce fertility; in fact, they are trying to encourage it. China, on the other hand, has long been trying to control fertility and is not as extreme in terms of the population age structure, but it is rapidly changing. China will be older in median age than the United States soon—this is not a trivial factor when you think in terms of the absolute size of the Chinese population.

One of the things that we wanted to study in this project is the premise that the demographic transition is a "problem." It is true that you need to think about and have policy responses to it. But it can also be seen as a sign of success, and as an opportunity. We wanted to reframe the issue and think about evidence on both sides. There is some research highlighted in the book, for example, that looks at the impact of population aging on economic growth, which is one of the first things that comes to many people's minds. For example, if you have a lot of elderly people, they are not in the work force and they need to be supported. It is true that this can be bad for economic growth, but there also are policy and individual responses that may moderate the effects. Our research is trying to highlight several different aspects of aging, including the question of opportunity. For example, there is more investment in individual children now and elderly persons' savings have actually contributed to economic growth. In some aspects, this has been a sign of resiliency for Japan where there are a lot of transfers to the working-age population.

Ronald Lee at the University of California, Berkeley and Andrew Mason at the East-West Center at the University of Hawai'i, who is participating in the January workshop, have been working on the concept of a "second demographic dividend." They find that as countries have an older age structure, there are more people that are saving. In the widely accepted "first demographic dividend," there are more people in the working-age part of the population—more people employed and more people contributing to the GDP. You get a boom contributing to growth. We know that this contributed to Japan and South Korea's earlier growth, and to China's in the 80s and part of the 90s, but only one or two percent of GDP. The question then is whether it is a problem that with aging you are losing that first demographic dividend. A second demographic dividend might arise because people who are preparing for a longer retirement life are saving more, and those savings are then invested in the economy and the investment drives economic growth.

Is there any correlation to demographic issues faced by the United States?

Interestingly, the aging issue is more pronounced in East Asia than in the United States for several reasons. We have a higher fertility rate than in Japan and South Korea, and many other countries in Europe as well. We also historically are much more open to immigration than most other countries, and this has led to a certain vitality in the population mix that has slowed the impact of demographic change. That said, of course, there are issues with having a lot of baby boomers. Sometimes, depending on the specific question or the specific area of policy, you find other factors that are much more important than aging. For example, the growth of healthcare spending has been in the news a lot lately. Although obviously there is an impact from having more elderly people, there are much bigger issues, such as what we are spending per person per age group and the growth of that spending. Just aging per se is not as big of an issue as people might think.

In late January, you will be holding the workshop Comparative Policy Responses to Demographic Change in East Asia: Defining a Research Agenda. What are the major issues you will explore in the conference? Who will be involved? Finally, what is the publication or research project that you will launch from this?

We had an Aging Asia conference in February 2009, co-sponsored with the Global Aging Program at the Stanford Center on Longevity. The outcome of this is the forthcoming volume, co-edited with Shripad Tuljapurkar of the Department of Biology at Stanford University. We started with a basic survey of the region and thought about the basic trends-demographic, social, and economic-and built upon that to figure out where the gaps are in the literature and where the interesting research questions are. That is where the January 2011 workshop comes in as the next step. We are bringing in some of the same and some different people to focus on three specific themes: economics, society, and politics/security. The upcoming event again focuses on East Asia and there will be a public component, but it is a smaller event and its main goal is to dig deeper into these themes to figure out an interesting research agenda on the policy responses to demographic transition.

We decided to focus again on East Asia, which is the research focus of a lot of our Shorenstein APARC faculty. Masahiko Aoki and Michael Armacost are going to chair sessions, and Gi-Wook Shin is going to kick it all off and talk about the social aspects of demographic change. Andrew Walder will be participating in that session as well. Thomas Fingar will be covering the political and security implications. All Shorenstein APARC faculty have been invited to participate and think about how this issue of demographic change—and particularly policy responses—might be related to their own areas of research. 

An illustration that I like to give when people ask about how demographic change is related to other things is from Andrew Walder when he was talking about China's transition in the 1980s. He received a question about whether or not there had been an impact from the One Child policy. He said that obviously there are many different impacts, but the one thing that he noted was that students in China now, especially if they are only children, are under a lot of career pressure. This has changed the space or the freedom for self-exploration. Why does this have broader implications? Young people see access to political power as one key for their careers and this changes their views about joining the Communist Party, which has big implications for China's political future. This is just one illustration of how we are trying to explore the broader implications of demographic change.

Finally, what is the outcome that you would most hope to achieve through Aging Asia and the upcoming demographic change workshop?

I think that the biggest hope would be to develop a much better understanding of what is going on with demographic change: what are the processes and how is society changing? What are the individual challenges that families are facing and what are they are doing about it? What is the broader social or even global perspective on how this is going to shape our future world? For me, I think about the world that my children are going to grow up in.

Through our research, I hope that we will impact not only the understanding of what has driven past developments, but create policy recommendations for each of the societies that were are examining—including our own—on the opportunities and the challenges related to changes in population. That hopefully will be useful as these different societies think about how to respond.

Our research on the economic, the social, and political/security aspects of demographic change is intended to be tangible for individuals and families as well as for broader national policy.

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