Abstract: State interventions against drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) sometimes work to improve security, but often exacerbate violence. To understand why, this paper offers a theory about different social order dynamics among five types of criminal regimes – Insurgent, Bandit, Symbiotic, Predatory, and Anarchic. These differ according to whether criminal groups confront or collude with state actors; predate or cooperate with the community; and hold a monopoly or contest territory with rival DTOs. Police interventions in these criminal orders pose different challenges and are associated with markedly different local security outcomes. Evidence for the theory is provided by the use a multi-method research design combining quasiexperimental statistical analyses, extensive qualitative research and a large N survey in the context of Rio de Janeiro’s “Pacifying Police Units” (UPPs), which sought to reclaim control of the slums from organized criminal groups.

Bio: Beatriz Magaloni is a Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. She is also an affiliated faculty at the Stanford Center on Global Poverty and Development.

Her research focuses on the political economy of development. Beatriz’s work falls into four themes:  the study of authoritarian regimes; distributive politics; “traditional” forms of governance and how these compare to “modern” democratic institutions; and drug-trafficking violence and citizen security. Much of my research has been on Latin America.  

Beatriz is the founding director of the Poverty, Violence + Governance Lab, a place for action–oriented research that establishes partnerships with government agencies, police departments, and civil society organizations to conduct research that aims to generate knowledge as to what works and doesn’t to control violence, improve the functioning and accountability of security institutions, restrain human rights abuses, and increase opportunities for at-risk youth. The Lab engages researchers and students — undergraduates, M.A. and Ph.D. candidates — from the fields of political science, education, economics, international policy studies, and engineering.

She is the author of Voting for Autocracy (2006, Cambridge University Press –winner of the Leon D. Epstein Outstanding Book Award for the best book written in the previous two years on parties and elections and the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section). Beatriz is also the author of The Political Logic of Poverty Relief: Electoral Strategies and Social Policy in Mexico(2016, Cambridge University Press, co-authored with Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estévez).

Beatriz’s articles have appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Conflict Resolution, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Latin American Research Review, International Journal of Educational Development, Latin American Politics and Society, International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Journal of Theoretical Politics, and Política y Gobierno.

Beatriz received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University. She also holds a Law Degree from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM). 

Abstract: In the fifty years following World War II, Argentina and Brazil constructed advanced nuclear energy programs that far outpaced those of other countries in Latin America. However, their more memorable and lasting contribution to nuclear energy history may well be diplomatic, rather than technical. Beginning in 1974 with an Argentine delegation’s tour of carefully selected Brazilian nuclear facilities, and vice versa, the two countries – under military rule and in a centuries-long competition for regional influence and dominance – began a rapprochement around nuclear energy as gradual as it was unlikely. A watershed presidential summit in 1980 pledged the neighbors to cooperation in specific areas of nuclear energy. It took until 1991, however, for a growing system of informal inspections to coalesce into the world’s only bilateral nuclear safeguards organization, known as ABACC. This talk will focus primarily on the contributions of the scientific and technical communities, and their close work with the two foreign ministries, within this delicate seventeen-year process.

Speaker bio: Chris Dunlap is a Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at CISAC. His research is funded by the MacArthur Foundation. His book project, developed from his dissertation, focuses on the fundamental role of nuclear energy technology and diplomacy in shaping modern Brazil and Argentina and their bilateral relationship. The paths taken to develop nuclear energy in the South American neighbor countries also illustrate the impact that these nations and their key actors, often left out of global energy history, made upon the physical, legal, and diplomatic structures of the Atomic Age. By 1995, both nations had ceased early-stage efforts toward a nuclear explosion, accepted full safeguards and international verification of all fuel cycle activities, and transformed the "imported magic" of nuclear technology into their own. How this happened, and why, is the history at the heart of the parallel power play that defined Brazil and Argentina's engagement with Atomic Age diplomacy and technology.