Stanford University

Youth Space Education and the Future of the GDR

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Historians of East Germany often see the state as future-looking, but questions remain about the kinds of futures that East Germans expected. Youth space education provides one example of how East Germans thought about the future. Across the country, spaceflight formed an important part of youth education through books, the Jugendweihe, and places like cosmonaut clubs. Although these activities show how East German adults taught children about space travel, they also illuminate expectations for the future of spaceflight and the future of East Germany's children. In a state that continually proclaimed the imminent future of everyday spaceflight, East German adults, even party members, adopted a particular vision of the future. They taught children that the ideas of space travel would be important for their lives on Earth, while simultaneously questioning the state's optimistic vision for everyday spaceflight.

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Central European History
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Colleen Anderson
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‘Just Say No’ Is Not a Strategy for Supply Chain Security

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Herbert Lin
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On Feb. 12, White House National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien announced that the U.S. government has “evidence that Huawei has the capability secretly to access sensitive and personal information in systems it maintains and sells around the world.” This represents the latest attempt by the Trump administration to support an argument that allied governments—and the businesses they oversee—should purge certain telecommunications networks of Huawei equipment. The position reflects the preferred approach in the United States, which is to issue outright bans against select companies (including Huawei) that meet an as-yet-unknown threshold of risk to national security.

 

Read the rest at Lawfare Blog

 

 

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Vanessa Molter

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Vanessa Molter is a Research Assistant at the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) and a Master in International Policy candidate at Stanford University, where she focuses on International Security in East Asia. At SIO, she monitors and writes on the Taiwanese social media environment and Chinese propaganda. Previously, she has studied Taiwanese security affairs at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taipei, Taiwan, a government-affiliated defense think-tank. Vanessa is fluent in Mandarin and holds a B.S. in International Business and East Asian studies from Tubingen University, Germany.

Graduate Research Assistant, Stanford Internet Observatory

Germany, Europe and Russia

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Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/BGjRsO0fKds

 

About this Event: Germany plays a key role in shaping European and Western policy toward Russia.  Berlin is a leading voice within the European Union on Russian issues, and Chancellor Angela Merkel co-chairs with the French president the "Normandy" effort that seeks to broker a setttlement between Ukraine and Russia to the conflict in Donbas.  Emily Haber, the German ambassador to the United States, will join us for a conversation on how Berlin sees the Russian challenge and how the West should respond.

 

About the Speaker: Emily Margarethe Haber has been German Ambassador to the United States since June 2018. 

Immediately prior to this, Haber, a career foreign service officer, was deployed to the Federal Ministry of the Interior, serving as State Secretary overseeing security and migration at the height of the refugee crisis in Europe. In this capacity, she worked closely with the US administration on topics ranging from the fight against international terrorism to global cyberattacks and cybersecurity. In 2009, she was appointed Political Director and, in 2011, State Secretary at the Foreign Office, the first woman to hold either post. 

Emily Haber is married to Hansjörg Haber. The couple has two sons. 

Emily Margarethe Haber German Ambassador to the United States
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European Security Initiative

Workshop Report: The Transatlantic Dialogue on Military Cyber Operations-Amsterdam

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In Aug. 2019, Bobby Chesney (from Strauss Center at the University of Texas at Austin) and Max Smeets (from ETH Zurich and also Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC)) convened a workshop in Amsterdam focusing on military operations in the cyber domain, from a transatlantic perspective. The “Transatlantic Dialogue on Military Cyber Operations—Amsterdam” gathered experts from military, civilian, and academic institutions hailing from a range of countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Estonia, and France.

 

Read the Rest at Lawfare Blog

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Russian Political Warfare: Past, Present, and Future

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Seminar recording: https://youtu.be/fYUK-ALGqAE

 

Abstract:  Russian influence operations during the 2016 US elections, and the investigations that followed, revealed the broad scope of Russian political warfare against Western democracies. Since then, Russian operations have targeted the UK, France, Germany, Ukraine, and others. Other state and non-state actors, motivated by politics or profit, have also learned and adapted the Kremlin’s tool-kit. With the 2020 elections a year away, what have we learned about foreign information operations? How has the transatlantic community responded and what are the threats we are likely to face?  Drawing on extensive research on transatlantic relations, disinformation, and Russian foreign policy, Dr. Polyakova will discuss the state of policy options to address disinformation, analyze Russian intentions, and highlight emerging threats.

 

Speaker’s Biography:

alina polyakova
Alina Polyakova is the founding director of the Project on Global Democracy and Emerging Technology and a fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, where she leads the Foreign Policy program’s Democracy Working Group. She is also adjunct professor of European studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. Her work examines Russian political warfare, European populism, digital authoritarianism, and the implications of emerging technologies to democracies. Polyakova's book, "The Dark Side of European Integration" (Ibidem-Verlag and Columbia University Press, 2015) analyzed the rise of far-right political parties in Europe.  She holds a master’s and doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, and a bachelor's in economics and sociology with highest honors from Emory University. 

Alina Polyakova Director, Project on Global Democracy and Emerging Technology The Brookings Institution
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European Security Initiative

Thurber launches book, talks coal in Germany

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Mark C. Thurber
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News
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In no other developed country is the role of coal in the energy mix more hotly debated than in Germany. The country has been a leader in renewable energy development, but it also continues to mine and burn substantial quantities of coal, which has thus far blunted its efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Germany hopes to phase out all coal use by 2038, though this target is made more challenging by its concurrent effort to phase out nuclear energy.


Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) Associate Director Mark Thurber marked the European launch of his new book COAL with talks at two German universities. On April 8, Dr. Thurber joined a panel of distinguished experts in a public seminar at EWI (Institute of Energy Economics) at the University of Cologne, where the topic was the possibility of phasing out coal in Germany and elsewhere. On April 9, at the University of Mannheim, Thurber was the speaker for the first joint seminar hosted by ZEW and the Mannheim Institute for Sustainable Energy Studies. Before we can move beyond coal, Thurber told these audiences, we first need to understand and address the enduring sources of coal's appeal, including its low cost (at least when full environmental costs are not taken into account) and perceived value for energy security and reliability (whether this perception is accurate or not). 

thurber mannheim coal talk Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) Associate Director Mark Thurber introduces his new book "Coal" and participates in a seminar hosted by ZEW and the Mannheim Institute fo Sustainable Energy Studies on April 9, 2019.

PESD Associate Director Mark Thurber introduces his new book "Coal" and participates in a seminar hosted by ZEW and the Mannheim Institute for Sustainable Energy Studies on April 9, 2019.
Photo credit: Julia Glashauser, ZEW

 

 

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Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) Associate Director Mark Thurber speaks at a public seminar at EWI (Institute of Energy Economics) at the University of Cologne on April 8, 2019.
Hanna Decker, Institute of Energy Economics (EWI), University of Cologne
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Colleen Anderson

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Lecturer of German Studies
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Colleen Anderson studies the culture, history, and technology of Cold War Germany. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2017 and has received funding from the American Historical Association & NASA, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, DAAD, the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, and the Central European History Society. Her current project, “‘Two Kinds of Infinity’: East Germany, West Germany, and the Cold War Cosmos, 1945-1995,” studies Germans’ participation in and imaginations about outer space exploration during the Cold War. Her manuscript traces the changing ways in which East and West Germans both saw their own futures as connected to space travel and used outer space to confront the past and envision the world around them.

 

Affiliated lecturer of The Europe Center
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow

Laura Jakli

Encina Hall, C147 616 Jane Stanford Way Stanford, CA 94305-6055
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CDDRL Predoctoral Fellow, 2018-20
Fellow, Program on Democracy and the Internet, 2018-20
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​I am a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Starting in 2023, I will be an Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School's Business, Government and the International Economy (BGIE) unit.

My research examines political extremism, destigmatization, and radicalization, focusing on the role of popularity cues in online media. My related research examines a broad range of threats to democratic governance, including authoritarian encroachment, ethnic prejudice in public goods allocation, and misinformation. 

​My dissertation won APSA's Ernst B. Haas Award for the best dissertation on European Politics. I am currently working on my book project, Engineering Extremism, with generous funding from the William F. Milton Fund at Harvard.

My published work has appeared in the American Political Science Review,  Governance,  International Studies Quarterly, Public Administration Review, and the Virginia Journal of International Law, along with an edited volume in Democratization (Oxford University Press). My research has been featured in KQED/NPR, The Washington Post, and VICE News.
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I received my Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley in 2020. I was a Predoctoral Research Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University and the Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet. I hold a B.A. (Magna Cum Laude; Phi Beta Kappa) from Cornell University and an M.A. (with Distinction) from the University of California, Berkeley.

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Inequality and redistribution behavior in a give-or-take game

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Why has economic inequality risen dramatically over the past few decades even in democracies where individuals could vote for more redistribution? We experimentally study how individuals respond to inequality and find that subjects generally take from richer and give to poorer individuals. However, this behavior removes only a fraction of inequality. Moreover, individuals who give to those who are poorer are generally not the same individuals who also take from others who are richer. These results offer an explanation for the absence of policy interventions that could effectively counter rising differences in wealth: Voters are divided on how to react to inequality in ways that make it difficult to build majority coalitions willing to back political redistribution.

Listen to a podcast with Ken Scheve on themes addressed in this article, on FSI's WorldClass.

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