The Stanford Humanities Center and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) are pleased to announce that four international scholars have been chosen to come to Stanford in 2010-11 as part of a jointly sponsored international program entering its second year. Nominated by Stanford departments and research centers, the international scholars will be on campus for four-week residencies. They will have offices at the Humanities Center and will be affiliated with their nominating unit, the Humanities Center, and FSI.

A major purpose of the residencies is to bring high-profile international scholars into the intellectual life of the university, targeting scholars whose research and writing engage with the missions of both the Humanities Center and FSI.

The following four scholars have been selected for the upcoming academic year.

• Anies Baswedan, currently President of Paramadina University in Jakarta, is a leading intellectual figure in Indonesia. In 2008, the editors of Foreign Policy named him one of the world's "top 100 public intellectuals." As an advisor to the Indonesian government, he is a leading proponent of democracy and transparency in Indonesia, a creative thinker about Islam and democracy, as well as a charismatic leader in the educational field. He was nominated by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.
• Stephane Dudoignon is a political scientist/senior research fellow at the EHESS in Paris. He is one of the world's leading scholars of Muslim politics and societies from the Caucasus to Central Asia. He is the author of pioneering work on Muslim movements, including the historical study of Sufi networks from the Volga River to China, Muslim intellectuals' debates about gender, and modern Sunni revivalist movements in Eastern Iran. While on campus, he will give lectures on Islam in Eurasia and Iran, among other things. He was nominated by CREEES, the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.
• Monica Quijada is a high-profile public intellectual and historian of Spain and Latin America at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC) in Madrid. Her engagement with the UN in Argentina (working with refugees) and her directorship of the investigation carried out in the late 1990s regarding Nazi activities during the Second World War and in post-war Argentina shows her commitment to the public space. She has written extensively on dictatorship, populism, and war and their effect on the public sphere in Argentina and Spain as well as on the relationship between nineteenth-century Latin American states and their indigenous populations. She was nominated by the History Department and the Center for Latin American Studies.
• Patrick Wolfe is a historian at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. He is a premier historian of settler colonialism, currently working on a comparative transnational history of settler-colonial discourses of race in Australia, Brazil, the United States, and Israel/Palestine. While at Stanford, he will give lectures based on his core work on Australia and also on his forthcoming book Settler Colonialism and the American West, 1865-1904 (Princeton University Press). He was nominated by the Bill Lane Center for the American West.

While at Stanford, the scholars will offer informal seminars and public lectures and will also be available for consultations with interested faculty and students. For additional information, please contact Marie-Pierre Ulloa, mpulloa@stanford.edu.

Hendrik Hertzberg writes that the end of the Cold War and the coming of global warming have brought about increased support for nuclear power, even among some environmentalists (The Talk of the Town, March 22nd). But many of us who work on nuclear-proliferation issues are dismayed by the growth of nuclear energy. Expanded nuclear power in industrial countries will inevitably mean expanded nuclear exports to less developed countries as manufacturers try to recoup their investments in a limited domestic market by selling abroad. It can be shown statistically that countries that receive nuclear assistance are more likely to build nuclear weapons, especially when they perceive threats to their security. India, Pakistan, and Israel started their nuclear programs with the importation of research reactors carrying peaceful-use requirements; with help from other countries, they were able to then realize their desire for weapons. Iran appears to be heading in the same direction. Given the documented interest in nuclear materials of terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda, and given the questionable assumptions that nuclear-energy economics is fraught with, it makes little sense to push nuclear power at a time when protections against proliferation are still so problematic. Improved energy efficiency is a safer, greener, and cheaper alternative.

On March 30, 2010, Prof. Samer Shehata from Georgetown University gave a research seminar for the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at CDDRL titled The Regional Dimensions of Authoritarianism in the Arab World.  Prof. Shehata’s talk was in response to the research puzzle, as he called it, of the persistence of authoritarian politics at the regional level in the Arab world. He argued that the subject that has received most attention in political science is the question of authoritarianism and absence of democracy. The question of why there are no democracies has offered a number of possible reasons including: the qualities and consequences of oil and rentier politics; absent or weak civil societies in the Arab world; social class-based explanations; the issue of political liberalization instead of democratization; external factors such as US support for authoritarian regimes, which he argued has not decreased since the end of the Cold War; regional conflicts like Palestine/Israel and the Gulf wars; institutions of authoritarianism including how elections, parliaments and single parties work; Islamist politics creating deep divisions among opposition groups; and patronage, clientelism and the (absence of) social contract.

Prof. Shehata then proceeded to say that there has been some positive development in the approach to democracy in the Arab world, but that there remains insufficient attention to the regional dimensions of authoritarianism. He argued that the Arab world is authoritarian not just on the state level, but also on the regional level. As International Relations specialists have spoken about the existence of an Arab regional system, the institutional dimension of this system, such as the Arab League, needs to be studied.

He stated that there are three mechanisms of the reproduction of authoritarianism on the regional level: authoritarian learning, authoritarian cooperation, and regional organizations. Cases of authoritarian learning take both direct and indirect forms where certain regimes “learn” from one another. He gave the example of constitutional amendments that allow elections but that give the illusion of competition, where electoral outcomes are similar. In Tunisia, for example, Ben Ali “learned” from the Algerian experience by not allowing Islamists an electoral opening.

Authoritarian cooperation, he went to argue, occurs mainly regarding security matters. He gave the example of certain activists not being to allowed certain countries in the Arab world (like the Tunisian Moncif Marzouki, who was not allowed into Lebanon). Such “cooperation” widens the scope of authoritarianism beyond the borders of individual states.

Prof. Shehata’s ended with a discussion of the third mechanism, regional organizations. He talked about institutionalized cooperation within the Arab League and the GCC, calling the Arab League a “club for authoritarian regimes” that is not committed to democracy. An example of this in action is the Arab League accords on security and anti-terrorism which have ended up extending authoritarian rules across the Arab world. Another example is the Arab media charter that was put in place in February 2008, and which limits internet and media freedom. Prof. Shehata acknowledged that further research needs to be done on those three mechanisms and the floor was then opened to questions from the audience.

The Europe Center (TEC) at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) has launched a multi-year collaborative project with research institutes in Europe and the Greater Middle East.  First partners include the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.  The multi-year collaborative project is titled “Debating History, Democracy, Development, and Education in Conflicted Societies" within The Europe Center's long-term program on the theme of Reconciliation. 

The aim of this collaboration is to study how divided societies—viewed in international context, with a focus on the Middle East, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority—reconcile diverging notions of the past, and of democracy, development, and education. Participants are investigating how societies debate internally and attempt to reconcile differences of opinion and political positions regarding these issues.  International workshops, along with seminars, and visits by exchange scholars and policy experts,  are planned to  address such issues as historical conflict and its impact on contemporary politics, as well as democratic reform, the establishment of the rule of law, majority-minority relations, the role of religion and ethnicity, educational institutions, and the position of civil society, scientific cooperation, and culture in efforts towards the promotion of peaceful coexistence.

The international collaborative program has begun with planning for two international workshops on aspects of democracy, and on memory, history, and reconciliation.  A joint publication series is also being planned.