Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
Excerpt from page 4 of John R. Bowen's "If Citizenship is Political Community, then Which Communities Count? Borders and boundaries in France and Indonesia":
But these acts of invoking citizenship as participatory membership in order to support citizenship as the territorial state can open the door to other, alternative claims about political community, claims that challenge the postulates of territorial boundedness and legal uniformity.
It is these challenges to the national model that I wish to address, doing so by looking at some current developments in the two places where I continue to work, France and Indonesia. In France efforts to strengthen territorial control and internal uniformity have the upper hand, but they have encountered claims that cities should run their own affairs and that long-term residents must be fully incorporated into the political community. In Indonesia it is rather arguments based on participatory membership that are on the rise, and they draw on pre-national institutions of local control and Islamic norms; in turn, however, they are challenged by those in the state and the army who privilege a logic of the territorial state. The objects of debate are in some sense, mirror images - in France, external borders; in Indonesia, internal boundaries - but both debates concern the legitimacy of alternative ideas of political community.
About the Author
John R. Bowen is the Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. His research explores broad social transformations now taking place in the worldwide Muslim community, including special emphasis on Muslim life in Indonesia. His research focuses on the role of cultural forms (religious practices, aesthetic genres, legal discourse) in processes of social change. In most of his work he has looked outward from a longterm research site in the Gayo highlands of Sumatra, Indonesia, to the broader transformations taking place in the Indonesian nation and elsewhere around the globe.
Sponsored by the Program on Global Justice and the Stanford Humanities Center
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
Abstract of Seema Jayachandran's "Applying the Odious Debts Doctrine while Preserving Legitimate Lending":
Odious debts are debts incurred by the government of a nation without either popular consent or a legitimate public purpose. While there is some debate within academic circles as to whether the successor government to a regime which incurred odious debts has the right to repudiate repayment, in the real world this is currently not an option granted legitimacy either by global capital markets or the legal systems of creditor states. There are compelling reasons to reform the law of odious debts to allow for such a repudiation in citizens of a tyrant to repay their oppressor's personal debts, but the burden of odious-debt servicing can perpetuate the cycle of state failure which has direct national security consequences. In addition, a properly designed odious debt reform could function as an alternative sanctions mechanism to trade sanctions with fewer harmful implications for the general population of the targeted state. Classical proponents of odious debt reform advocate for recognition of a legal rule under which successor governments could challenge the validity of debts incurred by prior regimes against the odious debt legal standard in a judicial-style forum. We make the case for an alternative "Due Diligence" model of reform which provides far greater ex ante certaining for lenders both as to which investments from subsequent invalidation. The Due Diligence Model also solves certain time-consistency problems inherent to the Classical model.
Seema Jayachandran is assistant professor of economics at Stanford University. She received her PhD in economics from Harvard University. She specializes in development economics, labor economics, and political economy.
Sponsored by the Program on Global Justice and the Stanford Humanities Center
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
Abstract
This paper presents a matched pair case study of two factories supplying Nike, the world's largest athletic footwear and apparel company. These two factories have many similarities - both are in Mexico, both are in the apparel industry, both produce more or less the same products for Nike (and other brands) and both are subject to the same code of conduct. On the surface, both factories appear to have similar employment (i.e., recruitment, training, remuneration) practices and they receive comparable scores when audited by Nike's compliance staff. However, actual labor conditions exist between these two factories. What drives these differences in working conditions? What does this imply for traditional systems of monitoring and codes of conduct? Field research conducted at these two factories reveals that beyond the code of conduct and various monitoring efforts aimed at enforcing it, workplace conditions and labor standards are shaped by very different patterns of work organization and human resource management policies.
Richard Locke is professor of political science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is also faculty director of the MIT Sloan Fellows program and co-director of the MIT Italy program. His research focuses on economic development, comparative labor relations, and political economy.
Sponsored by the Program on Global Justice and the Stanford Humanities Center
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
Fabrice Murtin will be a postdoctoral fellow with Stanford's Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality. He has a Ph.D. in Economics from Paris-Jourdan Sciences Économiques and, from 2005-2007, served as visiting researcher at the London School of Economics.
He will discuss his paper, written with Christian Morrisson, "Education Inequalities and the Kuznets Curves: A Global Perspective Since 1870."
Abstract
This paper presents a new dataset on educational attainment (primary, secondary and tertiary schooling) at the world level since 1870. Inequality in years of schooling is found to be rapidly decreasing, but we show that this result is completely driven by the decline in illiteracy. Then, we turn to inequality in human capital and focus on Mincerian production function that accounts for diminishing returns to schooling. It explains the negative cross-country correlation between Mincerian returns to schooling and average schooling contrary to other functional forms. As a result, we show that world human capital inequality has increased since 1870, but does not exceed 10% of world income inequality. Next, we analyse the relationships between the national distributions of income and schooling. We show that human capital within countries exhibits the inverted U-shaped curve with respect to average schooling, namely a "Kuznets curve of education." We find that the usual Kuznets curve of income inequality is significant both in pooled and fixed-effects regressions over the period 1870-2000, and is robust to the inclusion of other variables in the regression such as schooling and human capital inequality. However, the "Kuznets effect" associated to GDP per capita is 4 times smaller in magnitude than the externality of average schooling favouring the decrease of income inequality within countries since 1870.
Cosponsored by the Political Theory Workshop.
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
Session I: What are Deliberation and Clumsiness?
Loren King, MIT
"Democracy and Deliberation: A Review of Recent Theories and Proposals"
Michael Thompson, University of Bergen
"Clumsiness: It's as Easy as Falling off a Log"
Session II: UN & International Environmental Regimes
Tom Heller, Stanford University
"Clumsy Institutions against Global Warming"
Session III: EMU & WTO
Susanne Lohmann, UCLA
"Sollbruchstelle: Mass Democracy, Deep Uncertainty and Institutional Design"
Rob Howse, University of Michigan
"Democracy, Science, and Free Trade: Risk Regulation on Trial at the WTO"
Session IV: World Bank, IMF & International Labor Standards
Archon Fung, Harvard University
"Globalizing with a Human Face: How Deliberation, Transparency, and Competition Can Improve International Labor Standards"
Marco Verweij, Max Planck Institute in Bonn
"The Need to Make the World Bank & IMF Clumsier"
Session V: General Discussion
Introduced and chaired by Joseph Steiglitz, Stanford University
Bechtel Conference Center
Homeland security remains a house divided. Within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which incorporated 22 disparate agencies four years ago, major challenges persist in building cohesion and cooperation across Department boundaries. Difficulties also exist for strengthening interagency cooperation between DHS and the other federal Departments (ranging from Defense to Health and Human Services) with homeland security responsibilities. Still greater challenges lie in building cooperation beyond the federal government. States, localities and the private sector are critical to homeland security, but do not ordinarily fall under the president's command, and have their own priorities related to infrastructure protection, disaster preparedness, and other key functions. The profoundly non-hierarchical structure of the homeland security system requires unprecedented efforts to create unity of effort: that is, coordination and cooperation to accomplish mutually agreed objectives, by components of the government and private sector that typically cannot order each other what to do.
The CISAC Forum on Homeland Security will enable approximately 25 private sector leaders, senior government officials and scholars to share insights on homeland security beyond their usual realms of interaction. We would like to launch a dialogue between participants on the problems that exist in creating coordination and collaboration in homeland security, how unity of effort might be defined (and ultimately measured in terms of effectiveness) as a means to overcome those problems, and how different approaches in industry and government might be adapted to fill specific gaps in homeland security cooperation. The conference will conclude with an effort to reach consensus on initiatives that seem most promising to pursue, both for action by policymakers and industry leaders and for analysis in follow-on discussions and academic research.
Bechtel Conference Center
The NOC study will be a two year effort, starting with six case studies to test the methods of research. Eventually the research will include 15 cases and a concluding report of general findings. At the midpoint of the effort, PESD hosted a meeting of interim findings on the study April 19th and 20th, 2007 to take stock of the progress to date and the direction of further research.
Bechtel Conference Center
Adam is a predoctoral fellow at the Program on Global Justice. He works mainly in ethics and political theory. His current project focuses on the morality of cooperation and its implications for issues of justice in the global sphere, such as what division of the costs of preventing climate change would be fair. He has studied at Merton College, Oxford, and at MIT.
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
Program on Global Justice
Encina Hall, E112
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
Adam is a predoctoral fellow at the Program on Global Justice. He works mainly in ethics and political theory. His current project focuses on the morality of cooperation and its implications for issues of justice in the global sphere, such as what division of the costs of preventing climate change would be fair. He has studied at Merton College, Oxford, and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.