IMPORTANT EVENT UPDATE:

In keeping with Stanford University's March 3 message to the campus community on COVID-19 and current recommendations of the CDC, the Asia-Pacific Research Center is electing to postpone this event until further notice. We appreciate your understanding and cooperation as we do our best to keep our community healthy and well. 

Co-sponsored by Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) and Center for South Asia (CSA).

When does mass nonviolent mobilization for political change occur, what prevents it from degenerating into violence, and when does it succeed in extracting concessions? We examine these questions in the context of India's movement for independence from Britain, and point to the key roles played by economic shocks and organization in the success of nonviolence.

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Rikhil R. Bhavnani is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and a faculty affiliate at the La Follette School of Public Affairs, the Elections Research Center and the Center for South Asia.

Professor Bhavnani’s research and teaching focus on inequalities in political representation, the political economy of migration, and the political economy of development. His research is particularly concerned with causal identification, and is focused on South Asia. Bhavnani is the co-author, with Bethany Lacina, of a book on the backlash against within-country migration across the developing world, published by Cambridge University Press. His articles have been published or are forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, World Politics, the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, and other outlets. 

Prior to starting at UW–Madison, Professor Bhavnani was a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University. He has worked at the Center for Global Development and the International Monetary Fund, and received a PhD in political science and an MA in economics from Stanford University, and a BA in political science and economics from Yale University.

On January 11, 2020 Taiwan held its presidential and legislative elections. Many observers expected the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to run an online disinformation campaign during the lead-up to the election in support of their preferred candidate, Han Kuo-yu, who was challenging incumbent Tsai Ing-wen. Such concerns were increased by demonstrated PRC online disinformation targeting the Hong Kong protests, and claims by an alleged PRC spy saying he led disinformation efforts targeting Taiwan during the 2018 elections. 

In this talk, we delve into case studies that highlight the role social media plays in disinformation at large in the Taiwanese information environment. We examine that while the fears of disinformation were generally not realized, we did find evidence of coordinated inauthentic behavior on Facebook, in particular on fan Pages and Groups for the two candidates. Our findings hold implications for researchers trying to distinguish authentic hyper-partisan domestic activism from coordinated disinformation. 

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Carly Miller is a social science researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory. In addition to covering the Taiwanese election, she assists the team in other digital forensic research and thinking about how researchers external to social media platforms think about disinformation campaign and concepts such as attribution. Before coming to Stanford, Carly was a Team Lead at the Human Rights Investigations Lab at Berkeley Law School where she worked to unearth patterns of various bad actors’ media campaigns. Carly received her BA with honors in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in May 2019.

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Vanessa Molter is a Research Assistant at SIO and a Master in International Policy candidate at Stanford University, where she focuses on International Security in East Asia. At SIO, she monitors and writes on the Taiwanese social media environment. Previously, she has studied Taiwanese security affairs at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taipei, Taiwan, a government-affiliated defense think-tank. Vanessa is fluent in Mandarin and holds a B.S. in International Business and East Asian studies from Tubingen University, Germany.

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/c1RKnxPEk54

About this Event: U.S.-Russian relations are at perhaps their lowest point since the end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union.  What are the principal points of contention between Washington and Moscow, and what are the prospects for managing these differences as well as for making progress where U.S. and Russian interests align?

Speaker's Biography: Christopher Robinson is a career Foreign Service Officer with over 23 years of experience as a diplomat. He currently serves as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs.

Chris most recently was Minister Counselor for Political Affairs at U.S. Embassy Moscow, Russia. He also has served as Deputy Director for Russian Affairs at the State Department, as Political Counselor at the U.S. Mission to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Vienna, Austria, and as Political Counselor in Managua, Nicaragua. His previous assignments have included Iraq, Belarus, Canada, Russia, and assignments in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs and the Bureau of European Affairs. He holds multiple State Department Superior and Meritorious Honor Awards. He speaks Russian and Spanish.

Chris received an M.S. in strategic studies from the National War College and a B.A. in international affairs from the George Washington University.