CISAC's Nuclear Security Fellow, Gaurav Kampani, discusses the question of nuclear stability in South Asia.
An analysis of India's evolving approach to ballistic missile defense and the militarization of space.
The recent uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East represent one of the most dramatic global political developments since the fall of the Berlin Wall. What factors and forces led to the sudden collapse of well-entrenched regimes and the emergence of democratic reform movements across a region long accustomed to hereditary succession and autocratic rule? Does the current upheaval reflect unique circumstances in the Arab World? Or should it be viewed in the wider context of governance issues and challenges that have arisen in Asian and other settings beyond North Africa and the Middle East? As a governance specialist whose international career has spanned Arab and Asian societies, David Arnold will share his insights regarding these questions.
David D. Arnold became the president of The Asia Foundation on January 1, 2011, after serving as the president of the American University in Cairo (AUC) for seven years. At AUC he superintended the construction of a new, state-of-the-art $400 million campus, including the region's largest English-language library; spearheaded a $125 million fundraising campaign, the largest in the University's history; and oversaw academic innovations including AUC’s first-ever PhD program and master’s programs in education, biotechnology, gender studies, digital journalism, and refugee studies. Under his leadership, AUC also expanded its continuing education and community outreach activities and created new scholarship opportunities for its students. Mr. Arnold’s earlier career included six years as executive vice president of the Institute of International Education and more than ten years of service in the Ford Foundation including stints in India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. He earned his Master’s in Public Administration at Michigan State University following a BA from the University of Michigan.
Philippines Conference Room
India's high rates of economic growth in recent years raise the prospect that her developmental needs can be addressed. Evidence, however, requires a nuanced approach to resolving the development issues. The panelists will address these complexities, including factors behind improvement in economic indicators in the face of some continuing challenges.
Co-sponsored by Consulate General of India and the Stanford Center for South Asia
In addition to his Ministry of Finance work, Thomas Mathews is also a member of the Indian Administrative Service.
K.P. Nayar has nearly 40 years of experience as a journalist, and has served as a visiting scholar at Oxford University, the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington, DC, and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
Philippines Conference Room
Virtually all human societies were once organized tribally, yet over time most developed new political institutions which included a central state that could keep the peace and uniform laws that applied to all citizens. Some went on to create governments that were accountable to their citizens. We take these institutions for granted, but they are absent or are unable to perform in many of today's developing countries-with often disastrous consequences for the rest of the world.
In The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama, author of the bestselling The End of History and the Last Man, provides a sweeping account of how today's basic political institutions developed. The first of a major two-volume work begins with politics among our primate ancestors and follows the story through the emergence of tribal societies, the growth of the first modern state in China, the beginning of a rule of law in India and the Middle East, and the development of political accountability in Europe up until the eve of the French Revolution.
Drawing on a vast body of knowledge-history, evolutionary biology, archaeology, and economics-Fukuyama has produced a brilliant, provocative work that offers fresh insights on the origins of democratic societies and raises essential questions about the nature of politics.
Department of History
Building 200, Room 11
Stanford, CA 94305-2024
Steven J. Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University. He has also taught at universities in Russia, Poland, France, and Israel; for six years he taught Jewish history at Oxford University. From 1991-2007, he was Director of the Taube Center for Jewish Studies at Stanford. Zipperstein is the author and editor of nine books including The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History (1986, winner of the Smilen Prize for the Outstanding book in Jewish history); Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism (1993, winner of the National Jewish Book Award); Imagining Russian Jewry (1999); and Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing (2008, shortlisted for the National Jewish Book Award in Biography, Autobiography and Memoir). His work has been translated into Russian, Hebrew, and French. Zipperstein’s latest book, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History, published by Liveright/W. W. Norton in 2018, has been widely reviewed in newspapers and magazines in the United States and England including The New York Times, New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New Statesman, Literary Review, and the San Francisco Chronicle. The Economist, Ha-Aretz, San Francisco Chronicle and Mosaic Magazine have named it one of the best books of the year. It was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award (History) and Mark Lynton award for the best non-fiction book of 2018.
He has been awarded the Leviant Prize of the Modern Language Association, the Judah Magnes Gold Medal of the American Friends of the Hebrew University, and the Koret Prize for Outstanding Contributions to the American Jewish community. He has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Yitzhak Rabin Institute in Tel Aviv, and has twice been a Visiting Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Sciences Sociales. In spring 2014, he was the first Jacob Kronhill Scholar at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, in New York. At Stanford, and earlier at Oxford and UCLA, he has supervised the dissertation work of more than thirty students now teaching at universities and colleges in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere. He has delivered keynote addresses and endowed lectures at several dozen universities in the United States and abroad including the Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Central European University, Budapest; Emory; UCLA; University of Wisconsin, Madison; Vanderbilt, and the National Yiddish Book Center.
Zipperstein’s articles have appeared in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, the Washington Post, The New Republic, the Jewish Review of Books, Chronicle of Higher Education and in many scholarly journals. He was an editor of Jewish Social Studies for twenty years, and the book series Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture for a quarter of a century. He is immediate past Chair of the Academic Council of the Center for Jewish History, in New York. Together with Anita Shapira, he is series editor of the Yale University Press/Leon Black Foundation Jewish Lives volumes that were named in 2015 the best books of the year by the National Jewish Book Council -- the first time a book series has won this prize. Some forty-five Jewish Lives books have already appeared, and Zipperstein is currently at work on a biography of Philip Roth for the series. He and his wife Susan Berrin live in Berkeley.
Platts Coal Trader International
Vol. 11, Issue 67, Pages 5-6
Australia faces serious challenges over the next 20 years in maintaining its hard-won place as a leading coal exporting country and capturing new market share, according to a research paper published by Stanford University's Program on Energy and Sustainable Development April 5.
Following earlier papers on China, Indonesia and South Africa's coal industries, the latest PESD paper, entitled Australia's Black Coal Industry: Past Achievements and Future Challenges, has been written by coal industry expert Bart Lucarelli.
The paper sketches the development of Australia's export coal industry, from its shaky start in the aftermath of the Second World War amid a glut of cheap oil, to the "phenomenal success story" of today. The renaissance of Australia's coal industry was assisted by the discovery of vast deposits of high-quality coking coal and thermal coal in Queensland's Bowen Basin and the
Hunter Valley of New South Wales respectively, along with new mining technologies and the economic expansions of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, Lucarelli said.
During the Australian coal industry's competitive phase - 1987 to 2003 - export coal prices were relatively stable, but the growth rate of Australia's coal industry slowed as Indonesia became a significant coal exporter. Since 2003, Australia's coal industry has been in a "volatile price phase," as export coking and thermal coal prices have soared to record highs with the entry of China and latterly India into the international seaborne market, while weather events have affected supplies from coal exporting countries.
Looking to the next 20 years, Lucarelli forecasts serious challenges to the preeminence of Australia's export coal industry in the shape of infrastructure constraints, regulatory risks and under-investment in railways and ports by government-owned companies. "The most pressing and immediate technical challenge to the black coal industry of Australia is the shortage of rail and port infrastructure to support its further growth," said Lucarelli in the research paper.
‘Chronic infrastructure shortages' Governments in Queensland and New South Wales have proposed projects for expanding their rail and port networks to support a significant increase in Australian coal exports, which are forecast to grow to 540 million mt by 2020 from 240 million mt in 2010. "Part of the reason that chronic infrastructure shortages are likely to persist has to do with the type of technology being implemented - large rail and fixed land port systems," Lucarelli explained. Large port and rail projects are required for economies of scale, but involve long lead times, high upfront costs and complex regulatory clearances.
"A second reason for the chronic shortage of infrastructure has been the reliance on state-owned entities to make the necessary investments in the rail and port systems," Lucarelli said. Government-owned rail and port companies tend to be less nimble and entrepreneurial in their decision-making than the private sector, though some port and rail companies have been privatized recently - most notably Queenslandbased rail company QR National and the port of Brisbane. Regulatory uncertainty stemming from the Australian government's stop-start policy on curbing carbon emissions and its proposed Mineral Resource Rent Tax on coal-mining profits are additional factors clouding the expansion of Australia's coal industry. "Potential coal mining projects most at risk due to regulatory uncertainty are the massive new steam coal projects planned for the Galilee, Gunnedah and Surat basins," Lucarelli said. Illustrating the potential for expansion within Australia's coal industry, Lucarelli said that if only two of the advancedstage projects in the Surat Basin in Queensland started production on schedule, they could add 110 million mt/year of thermal coal exports by 2015. This is almost as much thermal coal as Australia exported for the whole of 2008, at 115 million mt.
India’s Muslims account for 13.4 percent of the country’s 1.2 billion population and constitute its largest minority group. Since the country’s independence in 1947 and right up to the present decade, the Muslim community in various parts of the country has suffered hundreds of violent, sectarian attacks. A recent peak involved the Gujarat riots of 2002, when 2,000 Muslims were killed in a state-sponsored pogrom. When the ruling party in Gujarat state, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was subsequently re-elected to power in the province with a larger electoral margin than before, it raised fears that the discrimination and violence were acquiesced to by the majority Hindu community.
These fears dissipated in 2004 when the BJP lost power in national elections, apparently in part because of its sectarian policies. However, the loss of life and assets in the Gujarat riots has raised the question of how the weakened Muslim community could recover.
In response, and in fulfillment of an electoral promise to Muslims, in 2005, the new national government in India, led by the Congress party, created a committee, termed the “Prime Ministers’ High-Level Committee on the Social, Economic and Educational Status of the Muslim Community in India,” to study the status of the Muslim community to enable the state to identify areas of intervention. Informally known as the Sachar Committee, named after its Chairperson, Rajendra Sachar, the Committee submitted a report in 2006.
Four years after the report has been written, far from acting on its findings, not a single area of intervention has been mooted by the state, even as the report remains largely ignored by the media and other organs of civil society. Why is this and what does it tell us about the future of India’s Muslims?
Encina Hall
Office C149
I joined the Liberation Technology Program as the Manager in February 2011 after completing my Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. Prior to this, I worked with campaigns on various socio-economic rights in India, including the right to food, education and the right to information. Based on these experiences I have written (and co-authored) extensively on issues surrounding the right to food, including Notes from the right to food campaign: people's movement for the right to food (2003), Rights based approach and human development: An introduction (2008), Gender and the right to food: A critical re-examination (2006), Food Policy and Social Movements: Reflections on the Right to Food Campaign in India (2007).
In working with these campaigns, I realised the widespread disparities in the provision of basic public services in India. This led me examine how Tamil Nadu, a southern Indian state, developed extensive commitment to providing such services to all its residents in my doctoral dissertation. Oxford University Press published my book based on the dissertation entitled, "Delivering services effectively: Tamil Nadu and Beyond" in 2014.
As a full-time activist, I also experimented with various IT platforms to make the campaigns effective. This interest brought me to the Liberation Technology Program at Stanford. I am currently leading a research project entitled "Combating corruption with mobile phones".
This talk reviews three decades of Indian nuclear decision-making. It argues that India’s slow pace of weaponization in the face of Pakistani nuclearization and Sino- Pakistani nuclear cooperation in the 1980s, the slack in building an institutional capacity to wield nuclear weapons after they came into existence in the 1990s, and the reluctant attempts at developing an operational arsenal even after formally claiming nuclear power status and almost going to war with a nuclear Pakistan in the last decade, constitute puzzling behavior. Existing proliferation models explain facets of Indian nuclear behavior. However, they don’t explain it in its totality. The different facets of Indian nuclear decision making in the last three decades can be collapsed into a single dependent variable: the lag in strategic decision-making. This talk operationalizes the concept of ‘lag’, critically reviews existing explanations of Indian nuclear behavior, and offers an alternative framework for understanding Indian nuclear decision-making.
Gaurav Kampani is a sixth year doctoral student at Cornell University's Department of Government. His major and minor fields are International Relations and Comparative Politics. Kampani's research interests cover international security and focus on the relationship between domestic institutions and strategic policy, military strategy, operations planning, and weapons development.
Kampani's dissertation project studies Indian civil-military institutions and nuclear weapons-related operational practices in the decade prior 1998 and the decade since.
Between 1998-2005, Kampani worked on South Asia-related nuclear and missile proliferation issues at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey CA.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room