Join Scholars at Risk at Stanford University on Wednesday, April 28 at 12:00 PM for a behind the scenes look at struggles for freedom of speech around the world and the courageous individuals who challenge attempts to control what people think. The goal of this event is to increase awareness and interest in institutionalizing a Scholars at Risk program at Stanford and to encourage faculty and administration to begin thinking about hosting at-risk scholars.This event is cosponsored by the Scholars at Risk Network, the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (CREEES), and the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies.

Robert Quinn is the founding Executive Director of the Scholars at Risk Network, a collaboration of more than 220 universities and colleges in 29 countries dedicated to protecting threatened intellectuals and promoting respect for freedom of inquiry, expression and university values. 

The Scholars at Risk Network seeks to bridge the gap between the human rights and higher education communities, building local, regional and global capacity to defend the intellectual space. The Network provides direct assistance to gravely threatened intellectuals, and conducts education and advocacy to target root causes of intellectual repression and to promote systemic change.

Mr. Quinn currently serves on the Steering Committee of the Network for Education and Academic Rights (NEAR), based in London, UK; the governing Council of the Magna Charta Observatory, based in Bologna, Italy; and is a fellow with the Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellows Program in Washington, DC.  He previously served as a member of the Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; a member of the Human Rights Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York; and an adjunct professor of law at Fordham Law School.  He received his A.B. cum laude from Princeton in 1988, and his J.D. cum laude from Fordham in 1994. 

Fatemeh Haghighatjoo is an expert on Iran's internal affairs and a prominent advocate of political reform, human rights and women's rights. She was a member of the Iranian Parliament from 2000-2004 and chaired the Student Movement Caucus. She was a deputy of the Mosharekat Caucus in the 6th Parliament as well as a member of the political bureau of the Mosharekat party in Iran.  Dr. Haghighatjoo was one of the most courageous in standing up publicly to the hard-line Iranian leadership. She resigned in 2004 after a crackdown on reformers, and left Iran in 2005. More recently, Dr. Haghighatjoo has held several academic posts in the United States: Assistant Professor In-Residence at the University of Connecticut, Fellow in the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, and Visiting Scholar at the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Haghighatjoo earned her Ph.D. in Counseling from Tarbiat Moalem University, served as a Professor at the National University of Iran, and authored Search for Truth (2002). She has served as Vice President of the Psychology and Counseling Organization in Iran and has been honored as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Dr. Haghighatjoo has been extensively interviewed and quoted in the U.S. and international media on Iran's domestic politics.

Mohsen Sazegara is an Iranian dissident, writer and political activist. His PhD thesis at the University of London, Royal Holloway focused on religious intellectuals in Iran. He has been a visiting professor at several universities in Iran, and has held visiting scholar positions at Yale University and Harvard University. A founding member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, he served as political deputy in the prime minister's office and held several other political offices. He became disillusioned with the revolutionary government and left it in 1989. He later served as publisher of several reformist newspapers closed by regime hardliners and was also managing director of Iran's press cooperative company. Dr. Sazegara was recently appointed as the second Visiting Fellow in Human Freedom at the George W. Bush Institute at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He is the president of Research Institute on Contemporary Iran (RICI).

Natalia Koulinka joins CREEES as a Visiting Scholar from January - December 2010. She is the recipient of a Scholar Rescue Fund fellowship grant from the Institute of International Education, and supported by more than a dozen Centers, Departments, and Programs in the School of Humanities and Sciences and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford.

Koulinka was born and raised in Oshmiany in the Republic of Belarus. She graduated from the Belarusian State University in Minsk with both undergraduate and graduate degrees. From 1992-1996, she helped create and run the "Women's Newspaper," the only independent women's paper in Belarus which soon became popular in Russia too. As the paper's editor-in-chief, she focused on women in business and politics. Since 2006, she has been the news editor for the radio station Unistar in Minsk. In addition to her work as a journalist, Koulinka was an associate professor at Belarusian State University 2001-08. She is also the co-editor of the book, Krasnim po Belomy ("Red on White"), which is a collection of texts by murdered Belarus journalist, Veronika Cherkasova. In 2008-09, Koulinka was the Lyle and Corinne Nelson International Fellow, John S. Knight Fellowship for Professional Journalists at Stanford University. During her fellowship year at CREEES she will work on the research project topic "A Social History of the Soviet School of Journalism."

Introduction by Michael McGriff, Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing, Stanford University.

The workshop is premised on the view that we are now entering a new phase in the development of post-Soviet Europe. Clearly, further NATO enlargement and EU expansion are unlikely to take place in the next few years, creating a zone of insecurity and potential instability dividing those countries which succeeded in winning integration into the EU and into NATO in recent years from those countries that have sought membership without any immediate prospects of achieving it.  Moreover, even among countries that have been successful in achieving membership in recent years there remains continuing anxiety about the degree to which their new European partners are prepared to support their economic viability and guarantee their security, particularly in light of increased assertiveness from Moscow.

The central purpose of this workshop series is to analyze the new dynamics emerging within this region, focusing on the external influences exerted by Moscow and Brussels and how they interact with the internal dynamics of the “corridor” countries, and to explore possible scenarios for future stabilization and development.

This workshop will be held November 5 and 6, 2009 at Stanford.  The primary focus will be the “corridor” of countries consisting of the Baltic and Central European members of the EU and NATO, together with Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova. Moscow and Brussels will enter as driving outside influences. The participants will include analysts and policymakers from the region itself as well as scholars from the relevant scholarly communities.

Jakob Tolstrup is a CDDRL visiting scholar from August-December 2009 and will be doing research on his dissertation External Actors and Democratization: Russia and the EU Competing for Influence in Moldova, Ukraine, and Belarus. He expects to obtain his PhD from Aarhus University, Denmark, in 2011.

Prior to coming to CDDRL, he worked as an interpreter (Russian-Danish) and interned in the office of Anne E. Jensen, Danish Member of the European Parliament (on EU-Russia and EU-Belarus relations).

Tolstrup received a B.A. in Russian language and a B.A. in Social Science, both from Aarhus University.