About this Event: There is no shortage of scholarship on the rise of strategic experts—campaign strategists, consultants, and the like—in Western politics. Some accounts treat the rise of the strategist as an effect of the functional demands of party competition, linked with technological change and the accumulation of political data; others see the rise of the strategist as a symptom of a larger process of party decline. In this seminar I'll present a different argument: the rise of the strategist was linked with a turn, especially on the left, toward prioritizing markets over constituents. This argument is built on an "inside-out" (or refraction) analysis that traces the rise and fall of dominant party experts, attending to the link between their social location and their conceptions of the economic world, democratic politics and experts' public roles.  I will conclude by outlining a new project that builds on this work, tentatively titled Strategy and Democracy.

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About this Event: In this book project, we walk in the footsteps of the pioneers of the nonviolent approach to provide a reinterpretation of the histories of the great movements of the twentieth century from a game theoretic perspective, bringing to bear a host of new quantitative analyses to understand the challenges they faced, when they were successful at overcoming them and why. We develop a simple conceptual framework for understanding the strategies available to both the leaders and the followers of political movements, the media and outside audiences, as well as the regimes that they seek to influence, and how these decisions interact. We use this framework to highlight the presence of three key tensions that exist in many political movements.

These tensions include: those between the allure of violence and the seeming pedestrianism of nonviolence, between the need for numbers and the need for focus, and between organizations that depend on grassroots mobilization versus hierarchies and leadership. 

In light of the framework and new quantitative evidence, we then retrace and re-examine the decisions of the participants of the Indian Independence Movement in each of their three great nonviolent drives for change---the Non-Cooperation Movement of the 1920s, the Civil Disobedience Movement of the 1930s and the Quit India Movement of the 1940s---and how they succeeded or failed in addressing these tensions. At each step, we also discuss both grand strategy and the effectiveness of local tactics. We next compare the Indian experience with the movements that came after, including the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, the Arab Spring and recent protests around the world. Finally, we draw on what we have learned to suggest ideas for better implement nonviolent protests today.

About the Speaker:

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About the Event:

Even in today’s more informal world, dress codes still determine what we wear, when we wear it—and what our clothing means. People lose their jobs for wearing braided hair, long fingernails, large earrings, beards and tattoos or refusing to wear a suit and tie or make-up and high heels. In some cities, wearing sagging pants is a crime. And even when there are no written rules, implicit dress codes still influence opportunities and social mobility. Silicon Valley CEOs wear t-shirts and flip flops, setting the tone for an entire industry: women wearing fashionable dresses or high heels face ridicule in the tech world and some venture capitalists refuse to invest in any company run by someone wearing a suit.

Dress codes are as old as clothing itself. For centuries, clothing has been a wearable status symbol; fashion, a weapon in struggles for social change; and dress codes, a way to maintain political control. Merchants who dressed like princes and butchers’ wives wearing gem-encrusted crowns were public enemies in medieval societies structured by social hierarchy and defined by spectacle. In Tudor England, silk, velvet and fur were reserved for the nobility and ballooning pants called “trunk hose” could be considered a menace to good order. The Renaissance era Florentine patriarch Cosimo de Medici captured the power of fashion and dress codes when he remarked, “One can make a gentleman from two yards of red cloth.” Dress codes evolved along with the social and political ideals of the day, but they always reflected struggles for power and status. In the 1700s, South Carolina’s “Negro Act” made it illegal for Black people to dress “above their condition.” In the 1920s, the bobbed hair and form-fitting dresses worn by free-spirited flappers were banned in workplaces throughout the United States and in the 1940s the baggy zoot suits favored by Black and Latino men caused riots in cities from coast to coast.

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* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Seminar Recording:  https://youtu.be/-hERfg-DCYw

About the Event: 

This presentation explores two topics at the nexus of technology and international security: interstate influence operations and technological revolutions.

After Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, influence operations have become a central focus among American policymakers, foreign policy pundits, and publics alike. Yet, Goldstein argues that they remain under-explored and under-theorized in international security studies, with disagreement over how to define the phenomenon implicit in the existing literature. Goldstein will introduce a conceptual framework for foreign influence operations and argue that security studies scholars should pay greater attention to the subject for two reasons. First, they are policy-relevant and likely to remain so; they are cost effective, propagandists are prone to inflate their impact, and they are difficult to deter. Second, studying influence operations can contribute to the academic discipline of security studies by helping to expand restrictive notions of state power and challenge dominant models of foreign policy decision-making.

How do emerging technologies affect the rise and fall of great powers? Scholars have long observed that rounds of technological revolution disrupt the economic balance of power, bringing about a power transition in the international system. However, there has been limited investigation of how this process occurs. The standard explanation emphasizes a country’s ability to dominate innovation in leading sectors, seizing monopoly profits in new, fast-growing industries centered around major technological breakthroughs. Investigating historical cases of industrial revolutions followed by economic power transitions, Ding will present an alternative mechanism based on the diffusion of general-purpose technologies. The findings have direct implications for how recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence could affect the U.S.-China power balance.

About the Speakers: 

Jeffrey Ding is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. Jeffrey’s current research is centered on how technological change affects the rise and fall of great powers. Through investigating historical cases of industrial revolutions, Jeffrey traces causal mechanisms that connect significant technical breakthroughs and economic power transitions — with an eye toward the implications of advances in AI for a possible U.S.-China power transition. Jeffrey’s previous research covered related topics, including China's development of AI, identifying strategic goods and technologies, and technical standards as a vehicle of AI governance.

Josh A. Goldstein is a PhD Candidate and Clarendon Scholar in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. For the 2020-2021 year, he is a pre-doctoral fellow with the Stanford Internet Observatory and part of the inaugural class of non-resident Hans J. Morgenthau Fellows at the Notre Dame International Security Center. Josh’s 3-paper doctoral dissertation takes a multi-method approach to studying the challenges that democracies face from influence operations. His broader research interests lie in international security, political psychology, and foreign policy-decision making.

About the Event: 

Political violence is rising in the United States, alarming citizens and leaders alike. How many Americans endorse partisan violence and other forms of extreme hostility? What are its deep social, political, historical, and psychological roots? What can be done about it? And what does it mean for democracy? 

In this talk, Drs. Mason and Kalmoe make sense of our contentious politics with a groundbreaking study of radicalism among ordinary American partisans. Their individual-level studies utilize more than a dozen new nationally representative surveys and experiments to trace recent trends since 2017, reactions to elections and violent events, broader conditions that spur support for violence, links from violence attitudes to aggressive behavior, and the role of leaders in enflaming or pacifying their followers.

The results reshape the study of modern American political behavior by showing that ordinary partisanship is far more volatile than scholars have recognized in the past century of study.  

About the Speaker(s)

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About the Speaker:

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From February 2005 to April 2007 he served as the Director of Policy Planning at the US State Department. While at the State Department, Krasner was a driving force behind foreign assistance reform designed to more effectively target American foreign aid. He was also involved in activities related to the promotion of good governance and democratic institutions around the world.

At CDDRL, Krasner was the coordinator of the Program on Sovereignty. His work has dealt primarily with sovereignty, American foreign policy, and the political determinants of international economic relations. Before coming to Stanford in 1981 he taught at Harvard University and UCLA. At Stanford, he was chair of the political science department from 1984 to 1991, and he served as the editor of International Organization from 1986 to 1992.

He has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (1987-88) and at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2000-2001). In 2002 he served as director for governance and development at the National Security Council. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

About the Event:  Decentralization and community-driven development programs have become increasingly common policies to attempt to improve the distribution of public goods across low- and middle-income countries. We study a series of reforms in the city of Delhi that decentralized the administration of discretionary school-level budgets to elected bodies of parents. We find that parents have preferences for representatives that are substantially more educated than them and discriminate against Muslims. Parents act on these preferences when given the opportunity to elect SMC members. They elect parents that are wealthier and more educated and are also of higher status. The paper provides empirical evidence to the question of under what conditions decentralization leads to elite capture. When bureaucrats have a stronger say in the selection of representatives, budgets are captured to reflect the preferences of state representatives, rather than constituents.

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* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Seminar Recording:  https://youtu.be/Mwjn39S48rE

About the Event: NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg will speak about how the transatlantic alliance is adapting to change in this turbulent period.  President Biden has clearly signaled that he is resolved to reach out to the NATO allies, working to repair the trans-Atlantic bond. To strengthen the bond between America and Europe and prepare the alliance for the future, the Secretary General has launched the NATO 2030 initiative.  This includes proposals on how NATO can better harness technology and innovation, tackle the security implications of climate change, and help make our societies more resilient. While NATO must continue to deter and defend against Russia, it is also keeping channels open to Moscow. The rise of China presents both challenges and opportunities that NATO has started to address. And missions in Afghanistan and Iraq are on the cusp of change, with decisions underway about what role NATO will play in the future. All in all, an exciting time to hear from NATO’s Secretary General.

This event is co-sponsored with The Europe Center.

About the Speaker: 

Jens Stoltenberg became NATO Secretary General in October 2014, following a distinguished international and domestic career. As a former Prime Minister of Norway and UN Special Envoy, Mr. Stoltenberg has been a strong supporter of greater global and transatlantic cooperation. Mr. Stoltenberg’s mandate as NATO Secretary General has been extended until the end of September 2022.

Under Mr. Stoltenberg’s leadership, NATO has responded to a more challenging security environment by implementing the biggest reinforcement of its collective defence since the Cold War, increasing the readiness of its forces and deploying combat troops in the eastern part of the Alliance. He believes in credible deterrence and defence while maintaining dialogue with Russia. He has also advocated for increased defence spending and better burden sharing within the Alliance, and a greater focus on innovation. NATO has also stepped up its efforts in the fight against terrorism. He strongly supports a partnership approach, with cooperation between NATO and the European Union reaching unprecedented levels.

Before coming to NATO, he was the UN Special Envoy on Climate Change from 2013 to 2014. He has also chaired UN High-level Panels on climate financing and the coherence between development, humanitarian assistance and environmental policies.

As Prime Minister of Norway, Mr. Stoltenberg increased the defence spending and transformed the Norwegian armed forces with new high-end capabilities and investments. He also signed an agreement with Russia on establishing maritime borders in the Barents and Polar Sea, ending a 30-years dispute.

Mr. Stoltenberg was also Prime Minister during the deadly terrorist attacks, which killed 77 people in Oslo and Utøya on 22 July 2011, urging in response, “more democracy, more openness, and more humanity, but never naïvete”.

Mr Stoltenberg holds a postgraduate degree in Economics from the University of Oslo. After graduating in 1987, he held a research post at the National Statistical Institute of Norway, before embarking on a career in Norwegian politics.

• 2005-2013: Prime Minister of Norway
• 2002-2014: Leader of the Norwegian Labor Party
• 2000-2001: Prime Minister of Norway
• 1996-1997: Minister of Finance
• 1993-1996: Minister of Industry and Energy
• 1991-2014: Member of Parliament
• 1990-1991: State Secretary at the Ministry of the Environment
• 1985-1989: Leader of the Norwegian Labour Youth

Jens Stoltenberg was born in Oslo on 16 March 1959. He is married to Ingrid Schulerud. They have two grown-up children.