Stanford University

War Is Coming: Between Past and Future Violence in Lebanon

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ABSTRACT

From 1975 to 1990, Lebanon experienced a long war involving various national and international actors. The peace agreement that followed and officially propelled the country into a "postwar" era did not address many of the root causes of war, nor did it hold main actors accountable. Instead, a politics of "no victor, no vanquished" was promoted, in which the political elite agreed simply to consign the war to the past. However, since then, Lebanon has found itself still entangled in various forms of political violence, from car bombings and assassinations to additional outbreaks of armed combat.

In this talk, Sami Hermez discusses his newly released book War Is Coming. The book argues that the country's political leaders have enabled the continuation of violence and examines how people live between these periods of conflict. What do everyday conversations, practices, and experiences look like during these moments? How do people attempt to find a measure of certainty or stability in such times? Hermez's ethnographic study of everyday life in Lebanon between the volatile years of 2006 and 2009 tackles these questions and reveals how people engage in practices of recollecting past war while anticipating future turmoil. Hermez demonstrates just how social interactions and political relationships with the state unfold and critically engages our understanding of memory and violence, seeing in people's recollections living and spontaneous memories that refuse to forget the past. With an attention to the details of everyday life, War Is Coming shows how even a conversation over lunch, or among friends, may turn into a discussion about both past and future unrest.

Shedding light on the impact of protracted conflict on people's everyday experiences and the way people anticipate political violence, Hermez highlights an urgency for alternative paths to sustaining political and social life in Lebanon.

 

SPEAKER BIO

hermez sami
Sami Hermez, PhD, is assistant professor in residence of anthropology at Northwestern University in Qatar. He obtained his doctorate degree from the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. His recently published book with Penn Press, War is Coming: Between Past and Future Violence in Lebanon (2017), focuses on the everyday life of political violence in Lebanon and how people recollect and anticipate this violence.  His broader research concerns include the study of social movements, the state, memory, security, and human rights in the Arab World. He has held posts as Visiting Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, Visiting Professor of Contemporary International Issues at the University of Pittsburgh, Visiting Professor of Anthropology at Mt. Holyoke College, and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Lebanese Studies, St. Antony’s College, Oxford University. At Northwestern in Qatar he teaches classes in anthropology that include topics such as violence, gender, and anthropology in the Middle East.

CISAC Central Conference Room
Encina Hall, 2nd Floor
616 Serra St
Stanford, CA 94305

Sami Hermez Assistant Professor of Anthropology Northwestern University in Qatar
Seminars
Arab Reform and Democracy Speaker Series

Why Do the Japanese Work Long Hours?

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Reducing long working hours has been a high priority in the agenda to improve work conditions in Japan.  Towards this aim, the government has introduced legislation and policy measures, and corporations have modified their human resource policies to help employees strike better work-life balance.  Yet, working hours in Japan have remained virtually unchanged since the 1990s.  In this talk, I argue that the true causes of long working hours lie not in the “observable” barriers such as compensation schemes, public policy and law, but rather are embedded in “unobservable” or “unmeasurable” attributes such as social norms and work conventions.  Understanding this problem better requires an approach that accounts for both economic principles (which focus on monetary rewards and incentives) and sociological perspectives which pay closer attention to the social-institutional context.  I argue that long working hours in Japan stem from the institutional complementarities of the Japanese employment system and the cultural particularities underlying it.  I discuss the role of the input-driven society, work conventions that rely on signaling, internal labor market structure, group consciousness and hierarchy, ambiguous job functions, and the traditional gender division of labor.  I close by proposing measures to reduce working hours that follow from my analysis.

 

b 145sq
Hiroshi Ono (Ph.D. Sociology, University of Chicago) is Professor of Human Resource Management at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy, Hitotsubashi University and Affiliated Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University.  His research interests include economic sociology, work and labor markets, and happiness.  He has extensive international experience, having held professional and academic positions in the U.S., Japan and Sweden.  His work has won a number of awards such as the Best Paper Award from the Labor and Employment Relations Association, and Rosabeth Moss Kanter Top 20 Paper Award for Excellence in Work-Family Research.  He is the author of the book, Redistributing Happiness:  How Social Policies Shape Life Satisfaction (with Kristen Schultz Lee, 2016).  His papers have appeared in the American Sociological Review, Journal of Japanese and International Economies, Social Forces, Social Science Quarterly and Social Science Research, among others.

Hiroshi Ono Professor of Human Resource Management, Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy, Hitotsubashi University
Seminars
Japan Colloquium Series

Electronics Thermal Management At The Extremes

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Abstract: The heat generated by semiconductor devices and electronic components is a big problem for a variety of products and systems ranging from radar and satellites to vehicle electronics, smartphones, and servers. “Extreme” is a unifying theme, from nanometer features and 10+ kW chips to severe materials heterogeneity.  In this talk I’ll summarize these challenges and our research progress on breakthrough thermal solutions involving nanoscale heat conduction physics, advanced thermal conduction materials, as well as two phase microfluidic heat sinks.  This presentation will also highlight two decades of collaborations with the semiconductor industry, Silicon Valley startups, and defense companies.  In this talk, I’ll also spend some time introducing you to the Mechanical Engineering department at Stanford.

About the Speaker: Ken Goodson chairs the Mechanical Engineering Department at Stanford University, where he holds the Davies Family Provostial Professorship.  His lab has graduated 40 PhDs, nearly half of whom are professors at schools including MIT, Stanford, and UC Berkeley. Honors include the Kraus Medal, the Heat Transfer Memorial Award, the AIChE Kern Award, and recent named lectureships at MIT, Purdue, and UIUC. Goodson received BS (1989) and PhD (1993) from MIT and is a Fellow with ASME, IEEE, APS, and AAAS. He co-founded Cooligy, which built microfluidic cooling systems for the Apple G5. As Mechanical Engineering Department Vice Chair from 2008-2013, Goodson led faculty recruitment and hiring and continued these efforts from 2013 as ME Chair. These years have brought 15 new faculty into a roster of 40 total, dramatically increasing the scope and depth of the department’s research and teaching and transforming its demographics and diversity.

 

Encina Hall, 2nd floor

Kenneth Goodson Davies Family Provostial Professor Bosch Chairman, Mechanical Engineering Department Davies Family Provostial Professor Bosch Chairman, Mechanical Engineering Department Stanford University
Seminars

Empires and Occupations: Global Dynamics of the Illiberal Wartime State, 1914-18

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- This event is co-sponsored by Stanford Global Studies, The Europe Center, and the History Department - 

Abstract: By 1914, exploiting colonies was a well-established practice of even the most ‘liberal’ empires. Treating areas of Europe like colonies was not, except on the more remote peripheries. However, when the Central Powers occupied substantial parts of Europe during World War One, they applied harsh economic regimes while the British and French intensified the use of their empires. This paper will consider the comparisons – and the links - between these two forms of exploitation. It will suggest that both became ‘laboratories of autarky’ for kinds of economic regime (especially with regard to manpower) that were still not possible domestically for the nation-states fighting the war. The argument will be general but focus empirically on French North Africa and German-occupied France and Belgium. 

About the Speaker: John Horne is Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Oxford University (2016-17) and Emeritus Fellow and former Professor of Modern European History at Trinity College Dublin, where he founded the Centre for War Studies. He is a Fellow of the Royal Irish Academy and a board member of the Research Centre at the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne (France). He is the author and editor of a number of books and over ninety chapters and articles, many relating to the history of the Great War. Among his latest publications are (ed.) A Companion to World War One (Oxford, Blackwell-Wiley, 2010); (ed.) Vers la guerre totale: le tournant de 1914-1915 (Paris, Tallandier, 2010); and with Robert Gerwarth (ed.) War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War (Oxford University Press, 2012). He is currently working on a history of the French experiences of the First World War.

Encina Hall, 2nd floor

John Horne Leverhulme Visiting Professor Oxford University Oxford University and Trinity College Dublin
Seminars

Financial Protection in Health: Alternative Framework and Evidence from Vietnam

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The venue of this event has been moved to the Okimoto Conference room.

Dr. Ruger, a leading scholar of global and domestic health policy and public health, will speak about global and national health inequities, drawing from her research in Asia --including India, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, Vietnam -- and Africa. With training in political economy, health policy, international relations, comparative social research and law, Dr. Ruger crosses disciplines to reexamine the principles and values that underlie health policy and public health and apply these principles empirically.  She created the health capability paradigm, challenging existing approaches and illuminating optimal health policies and she has developed an empirical approach to evaluate public health programs and health policies as they measure up to that paradigm.  Dr. Ruger’s scholarship has critically scrutinized the existing global health architecture in order to identify more effective global health policy responses linking public policy and law to global health theory at the global and national levels.  Dr. Ruger studies critical health policy and public health problems such as the equity and efficiency of health system access, financing, resource allocation, policy reform and the social determinants of health.  Her forthcoming book, Global Health Justice and Governance (OUP, in press), advances a theory of global health justice and governance called provincial globalism.

jennifer prah ruger
Dr. Ruger received a bachelor’s degree in the honors program in political economy from the University of California-Berkeley, master’s degrees from Oxford University, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and Yale University, a doctoral degree from Harvard University, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard's Center for Population and Development. Dr. Ruger has authored over 100 publications and is internationally recognized for her leadership and work, which has been cited by the United Nations, World Bank, World Health Organization and United States Government.  She has been Principal Investigator and Co-Investigator on awards from the National Institutes of Health, Fogarty International Center, Hewlett Foundation, Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete Global Health Justice and Governance (OUP, in press).

Other papers:

1. Coping with Health Care Expenses Among Poor Households: Evidence from a Rural Commune in Vietnam: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1435832

2. Impact of Health Insurance on Health Care Treatment and Cost in Vietnam: A Health Capability Approach to Financial Protection: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1515733

3. Effect of Health Expenses on Household Capabilities and Resource Allocation in a Rural Commune in Vietnam: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1435820

4. The Changing Donor Landscape in Health Sector Aid to Vietnam: A Qualitative Case Study: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953615001719

5. An Alternative Framework for Analyzing Financial Protection in Health: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2139693

Download pdf
Download pdf
Jennifer Prah Ruger Amartya Sen Professor of Health Equity, Economics, and Policy, School of Social Policy and Practice, University of Pennsylvania
Seminars

Economic Transformation and Government Reforms in Georgia 2004-2012

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Abstract:

Nika Gilauri, has recently published a book Practical Economics: Economic Transformation and Government Reform in Georgia 2004-2012. Former Prime Minister discusses why the Georgian case is exemplary and relevant for countries in transition. He describes how Georgia managed a breakthrough in the fight against corruption, rightsizing of government, creation of business-friendly environment, tax and customs reform, privatization of state-owned companies, etc. During the seminar, Mr. Gilauri will try to answer a question: how do you manage a transformation to bring about fast and sustainable growth? And he will approach this question from two angles: What is the right size for a government, both in terms of its regulatory footprint and in terms of its budget in relation to the size of the economy? How do you ensure a government’s efficiency in terms of its decision making, its interaction with the private sector, financial flows, and the services it provides?

 

Speaker Bio:

nika gilauri
Mr. Gilauri has been a managing partner of Reformatics since 2012 and a senior advisor to McKinsey & Company since 2014. Earlier, he spent 8 years in the Georgian government, where he served as Minister of Energy (2004-2007), Minister of Finance (2007-2009) and Prime Minister (2009-2012). Mr. Gilauri’s term as Prime Minister was notably marked by rapid economic recovery and growth in the aftermath of the 2008-2009 global economic crisis: Georgia’s GDP rose from - 9.0% when Mr. Gilauri was appointed (Q2 2009) to +8.1% when his term came to an end (Q2 2012). Georgia’s budgetary deficit also decreased during his term as prime minister, dropping from 9% in 2009 to 3% in 2012.

During his time in government, Mr. Gilauri also guided reforms in the energy sector, fiscal policy, healthcare, customs, education and other spheres of economic development, and contributed to efforts to improve Georgia’s overall business environment. His greatest achievement as Minister of Energy was to transform Georgia from being a country of semi- permanent blackouts into a net exporter of electricity to all its neighbors.

In his more recent capacity as managing partner of Reformatics, Mr. Gilauri has been involved in over 20 advisory assignments on three continents for various high-ranking government officials and politicians including presidents and prime ministers. Mr Gilauri holds a BA in Economics and Finance from the University of Limerick (Ireland) and an MA in International Business Management from Temple University (USA).

Nika Gilauri Founder & Managing Partner of Reformatics, Senior Advisor to McKinsey and Company Former Prime-Minister of Georgia (’09-’12)
Seminars

Silicon Valley Does it Repeatedly: From Fairchild to Uber and Beyond

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Martin Kenney is a Distinguished Professor of Community and Regional Development at the University of California, Davis; a Senior Project Director at the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy; and Senior Fellow at the Research Institute for the Finnish Economy.  He has been a visiting scholar at the Copenhagen Business School, Cambridge, Hitotsubashi, Kobe, Stanford, Tokyo Universities, and UC San Diego. His scholarly interests are in entrepreneurial high-technology regions, technology transfer, the venture capital industry, and the impacts of online platforms on corporate strategy, industrial structures and labor relations. He co-authored or edited seven books and 150 scholarly articles. His first book Biotechnology: The University-Industrial Complex was published by Yale University Press. His most recent edited books Public Universities and Regional Growth, Understanding Silicon Valley, and Locating Global Advantage were published by Stanford University Press where he edits the book series Innovation and Technological Change in the Global Economy.  His co-edited book Building Innovation Capacity in China was published by Cambridge University Press in 2016 and has been translated into Chinese. He is a receiving editor at the world’s premier innovation research journal, Research Policy and edits a Stanford University book series.  In 2015, he was awarded University of California Office of the President’s Award for Outstanding Faculty Leadership in Presidential Initiatives.  His research has been funded by the NSF, the Kauffman, Sloan, and Matsushita Foundations, among others.  He has given over 500 talks at universities, government agencies, and corporations in Europe, Asia, and North and South America.

Agenda

4:15pm: Doors open
4:30pm-5:30pm: Talk and Discussion
5:30pm-6:00pm: Networking

 

 

Martin Kenney, Professor of Community and Regional Development, University of California, Davis and Senior Project Director, Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy
Seminars
Stanford Silicon Valley-New Japan Project

The Dynamics of Extortion in Mexico’s War on Drugs

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Abstract:

This paper provides an account of the strategies of extortion and co-optation used by drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) toward civil society in Mexico. Our theoretical approach focuses on levels of territorial contestation among armed actors, as well as state capture by DTOs, to explain variation in co-opting or coercing civil society. Through the use of list experiments in a nationally representative survey, the paper measures extortion and assistance by DTOs in Mexico. We find that territorial contestation among rival DTOs increases predation on civil society while reducing DTOs assistance, which is found to occur in uncontested municipalities. Additionally, we find that extortion is higher in municipalities where DTOs have captured the state. These results suggest that territorial contestation and state capture are important in determining the strategy toward civil society during drug wars.

 

Speaker Bio:

gustavo
Gustavo Robles is a Research Scholar for the Program on Poverty and Governance (POVGOV) at CDDRL. He finished his PhD in Political Science at Stanford University in 2017 with specialization in Political Methodology and Comparative Politics. His PhD dissertation focused on the dynamics and consequences of drug-related violence in Mexico. His research interests include the economics of crime and violence in Latin America, political economy of development, and legislative studies. He is involved in POVGOV’s projects on police accountability and use of force, crime and security, and violence prevention in Brazil and Mexico. He holds a M.A. in Economics from Stanford University and a BA in Economics and Political Science from ITAM.

Research Scholar for the Program on Poverty and Governance (POVGOV) at CDDRL
Seminars

Elena Lucchese, "Ambulance response time: why should we care?"

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Please note: All research in progress seminars are off-the-record by default. Any information about methodology and/or results are embargoed until publication.

Over the last several decades, Emergency Medical Service (EMS) has become an important component of health care service. The main performance indicator in the EMS setting is the response time, i.e. the time to reach the patient once an ambulance is requested. Policy makers adopt a response time criteria to set the standards of this service, and the push to reduce it is justified by the assumed link between longer response time and worse health outcomes. However, current literature finds weak to no relation and this knowledge gap has been recently attributed to the endogeneity of response time. Indeed, the ambulance driver may take actions that result in shorter responses for most critical cases, and this unobserved behavior creates a downward bias in the results up to the point of finding zero effect. In line with previous literature, my analysis is performed on patients affected by cardiovascular disease, i.e. the time sensitive pathology adopted by policy makers to set the EMS standards in terms of response times and the main cause of death in developed countries. In my work I exploit changes in the amount of hourly rainfall and rationalization of emergency personnel during night shifts (i.e. 8pm to 7am) as instruments for response time. I document that a minute increase in response time results in a 2% increase in the probability of highly severe health conditions at the ambulance arrival on the scene and by 0.4% rise in the probability of death by the arrival at the hospital. Finally, I discuss and rank alternative solutions that may be implemented by policy makers to improve EMS performances.

Elena Lucchese

117 Encina Commons, Room 116
Stanford, CA 94305-6006

(650) 725-8634
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Visiting Scholar at the Center for Health Policy and the Department of Health Policy
dsc_0143.jpg PhDc, MS, BBA

Elena Lucchese is a Ph.D. student in Economics at the University of Bologna (Italy). She is currently doing research at Stanford University in the Center for Health Policy and the Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research (CHP/PCOR). Her research interests are applied micro-economics, health economics and economics of education. In 2016, she was awarded a "Young Researcher Best Paper Award" by the Italian Health Economics Association for her work on the Effect of Ambulance Response Time on Cardiovascular Severity. In 2014, she also received a 14,000 euros grant from Eurizon Capital SGR as a Principal Investigator for her research project on the Efficiency of Public Spending in Europe. She is the president of the association "L'Osteria Volante", funded by the University of Padova, which promotes debates on economics, politics, and environmental issues (www.losteriavolante.it).

CV
Elena Lucchese
Seminars

Shameful Preferences and the Legitimization of Europe’s Far Right

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Abstract:

As the number of migrants in Europe has risen in recent years, far right parties have fuelled voters’ fears concerning what the influx will mean for their nations. This project utilizes paired pre-election polls and actual vote shares across state and regional elections pre- and postmigrant crisis to provide evidence that far right sympathists often practiced preference falsification prior to this legitimizing shock, but that the crisis reshaped the political conversation such that far right identification is no longer deemed politically shameful. Although the theoretical framework surrounding preference falsification is well developed in the social movement literature as well as in American politics, Laura Jakli argues that it has untapped parallels in the study of Europe's far right. She also embeds priming and list experiments in a Facebook survey to determine whether there is a significant difference between subjects' willingness to identify with the far right using explicit versus implicit measurement approaches.

 

Speaker Bio:

headshot jakli
Laura Jakli is a PhD student and FLAS fellow at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on the intersection of modern European politics and political behavior. She has designed and implemented field experiments, internet-based survey experiments, and interview-based research in the US, Greece, and Hungary. Her dissertation examines the relationship between digital media polarization and individual-level attitude strength as well as aggregate-level electoral mobilization. The overall goal of her dissertation is to explain why recent far right voter turnout has been remarkably high relative to the underlying distribution of ideological adherents across the West. She holds a BA from Cornell University and an MA from UC Berkeley.

Laura Jakli PhD student and FLAS fellow at UC Berkeley
Seminars
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