Stanford University

International Relations

FSI researchers strive to understand how countries relate to one another, and what policies are needed to achieve global stability and prosperity. International relations experts focus on the challenging U.S.-Russian relationship, the alliance between the U.S. and Japan and the limitations of America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.

Foreign aid is also examined by scholars trying to understand whether money earmarked for health improvements reaches those who need it most. And FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center has published on the need for strong South Korean leadership in dealing with its northern neighbor.

FSI researchers also look at the citizens who drive international relations, studying the effects of migration and how borders shape people’s lives. Meanwhile FSI students are very much involved in this area, working with the United Nations in Ethiopia to rethink refugee communities.

Trade is also a key component of international relations, with FSI approaching the topic from a slew of angles and states. The economy of trade is rife for study, with an APARC event on the implications of more open trade policies in Japan, and FSI researchers making sense of who would benefit from a free trade zone between the European Union and the United States.

Dueling U.S. Approaches to Ukraine Pose Risk

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CISAC’s Steven Pifer, former U.S. Ambassador to the Ukraine, looks at the dueling US foreign policies toward Ukraine – one aimed at U.S. national interests, the other at President Donald Trump’s reelection – and the risk that poses for Ukraine. “Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Kyiv should take care, lest their country become a political football in America’s domestic politics,” writes Pifer in a piece for Brookings. Read the rest at Brookings.edu.

 

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Xi's Dilemma and China's Challenges at 70: Q&A with Andrew Walder

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As the People’s Republic of China marks the 70th anniversary of its founding while Hong Kong prodemocracy protests intensify, Andrew Walder, the Denise O'Leary and Kent Thiry Professor and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, reflects on some of the changes in Chinese society and domestic policy, discusses his new book that offers a new interpretation of the Cultural Revolution, and shares details about his current research project.

Q: China is celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party’s rule, and of course the strategic shifts in Chinese foreign policy throughout the years are much more visible than the shifts in domestic policy. What have been some of the changes in that regard under Xi Jinping’s leadership?

Since Xi Jinping took office as president of the People’s Republic of China in 2013 he has changed the tone of the leadership, refocusing it on its survival. Now this is a regime that has seen nearly 30 years of 9 or 10 percent economic growth, has raised 400 million people out of poverty, and has generated significant upward mobility for very large swaths of the population, especially urban populations that have enjoyed a level of prosperity never experienced before. Yet Xi Jinping and the top Communist Party leadership seem to be driven by a strong concern for their survival.

So Xi has done three things. First, he has recentralized decision-making power and made himself a very powerful executive. Second, he has been cracking down ideologically on all talk about political reform – cracking down on universities, the media, human rights lawyers. That's actually led to significant alienation among educated populations. Third, he has launched a draconian anti-corruption campaign, arresting and imprisoning many people, including very high-ranking individuals.

Corruption in China isn’t as obvious as in a country like Russia and we, as foreigners, don't see it. But it’s likely that there are justified worries about the impact of corruption and the generation of wealth among the families of high-level officials, which seriously undermine the coherence and discipline of the Communist Party.

One interpretation of Xi’s actions is that he sees a lot of decay and observes the risks posed by the Chinese society’s openness to the outside world. He realizes that among the second generation – in his own family, in the families of other Party leaders, and among the best and brightest of China’s young, educated people – the Party really has no standing in terms of ideology. And he knows that most of the economic activity in China is generated in the private sector by people who are neither Party members nor under the subordination of the Party.

Xi’s actions could therefore be explained as a combination of conservatism and nationalism. But it could also be the case that Xi is perceptive and honest, observing cracks in the system that aren't yet visible to outsiders.

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Q: What is your assessment of China’s economic policy choices? How can China sustain robust economic growth over the coming years?

I believe Xi’s ultimate worry is about China’s economic growth. He recognizes that China is a variant of the East Asian “miracle economies” – South Korea, Taiwan, Japan – that all experienced much lower rates of economic growth after their huge takeoff periods. China has reached a certain level of GDP per capita, but to continue to raise that and truly be competitive with the other advanced economies they need to do things differently, including becoming more efficient in the use of capital and addressing their heavy debt burden.

I see China’s leadership as stuck in a dilemma similar to that of the Soviet Union in the 1970s. That is, they've had a model that worked well – China is now the world's second largest economy, a superpower – but there’s no agreement on how to continue from here. One school of thought resists change, while a more progressive school recognizes that this model isn’t going to work forever and that it’s necessary to be more efficient and creative – downsize the state-owned enterprise sector, give private enterprises a more level playing field, etc. The argument against such progressive economic liberalization, however, is that it will cause the Party to lose control over the leading sectors of the economy. So far, Xi appears to represent this view.

Q: Last year, Xi enshrined his ideology, “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” in China’s constitution. Can this system promote the supremacy of the Communist Party to today’s Chinese, who are fundamentally different from the workers who were the soul of the Communist Revolution?

No. It's very hard to get the toothpaste back in the tube, if you will. I spend a lot of time in China, teaching and giving talks in Beijing and elsewhere, and I can say that Chinese students are far more savvy and critical than we might think, asking tough questions about issues such as state ownership of assets, the banking system, the rule of law. Obviously they react negatively when they hear foreigners criticizing their country and preaching to them about China’s lack of democracy or human rights abuses. I think Americans might similarly react to criticisms about our homelessness crisis or the Southern border crisis, though we know these are real problems.

Many young Chinese are much more critical of the leadership than portrayed by Western news media. This is a dynamic situation, and Xi seems to be trying to ward off something that he sees as real danger. Whether he's right or whether he's simply holding back progress in China I couldn’t say. However, as I do always tell people in China, Xi is certainly creating the conditions for strong support of the next leader who might want to take China to a more liberal direction.

Q: China is celebrating 70 years of Chinese Communist Party rule amid uncertainty that is testing its authority like never before. In particular, the relentless prodemocracy demonstrations in Hong Kong appear to have caught the Xi administration off guard. What are China’s options in dealing with the unrest in Hong Kong?

It’s hard to assess the situation in Hong Kong. I understand why it’s happening – over the last five or six years, most of the people I know in Hong Kong (students, academics, professionals) have been very worried about the erosion of rights and independence. But I'm surprised at how widespread the dissatisfaction is, how militant the protesters are, how there's no real connection between them and the elite Legislative Council prodemocracy camp, and how the unrest is not dissipating. The disagreement between China and the United States about what's happening and China’s accusations that the US is behind it all are very worrisome.

The Chinese leadership practically ruled out most of the effective response options. They clearly don't want to be seen as giving in and are worried about contagion to other cities in mainland China. But China’s political system isn’t good at responding to popular mobilized dissent and the leadership doesn’t truly understand free societies. They don't understand the concerns of people in Taiwan or Hong Kong, who have a way of life and freedoms that will be taken away by integration with the mainland under its current political system. Beijing cannot get away with applying in Hong Kong the type of intimidation and bullying it applies to its own society. I don't think the current leadership is imaginative or flexible enough to think creatively about how to get out of this situation.

Q: As the Chinse Community Party trumpets China’s stunning economic and military success, it aims to keep its history of catastrophic, often cruel policies and tragic events from its people. You have long studied the Cultural Revolution, a period rife in persecution, violence, and death, and have a new book about that, coming out next week. Tell us about it.

The book, Agents of Disorder: Inside China’s Cultural Revolution (Harvard University Press), charts the violence in China from 1966 to 1969. By May 1966, just seventeen years after its founding, the People’s Republic of China had become one of the most powerfully centralized states in modern history. But that summer everything changed. Mao Zedong called for students to attack intellectuals and officials who allegedly lacked commitment to revolutionary principles, and rebels responded by toppling local governments across the country. The book, which is the outcome of a long research project, Political Movements in an Authoritarian Hierarchy, aims to answer the question: Why did the Chinese party state collapse so quickly after the onset of the Cultural Revolution?

My answer to this question is based on analysis of a data set collated from over 2,000 local annals chronicling some 34,000 revolutionary episodes across China from 1966 to 1971. That research unveils two major findings.

The first is a new interpretation of what happened during that period. Standard accounts depict a revolution instigated from the top down and escalated from the bottom up through power seizures by rebel groups. But if you read the local histories and look at the scope of rebel activity and protest in the last half of 1966 through the beginning of 1967, it turns out there really wasn’t that much going on outside of a few major cities. Yet within that short period counties all over China had their governments overthrown. What happened was that low-ranking government officials overthrew their superiors, setting off a chain reaction of violence. Then army units sent to quell the disorders gave arms to those rebels that they supported, ushering in nearly two years of conflict that in various places came close to civil war.

The second finding is what I believe to be a fairly accurate estimate of the casualties during this entire period: how many people died, when, and how. My estimate is that 1.6 million people died, mostly when they tried to rebuild the government. Only a small percentage was killed by student Red Guards, which is what everyone thinks of in relation to the Cultural Revolution. In fact, every organization eventually had a campaign looking for class enemies and, ultimately, the repression that ended the disorder was worse than the violence it was meant to contain.

The other thing I do in the book is compare this period in China’s history to other infamous periods of state violence – Bosnia in the 1990s, the Soviet Great Terror of the late 1930s, the Indonesian massacres of suspected leftists in 1965, El Salvador's civil war, the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, and Rwanda in 1994. I show that, in terms of total numbers of casualties, the Cultural Revolution comes second on the list, topped by Cambodia, which has almost the same number of killings. However, if you consider the rate of killing as a percentage of the population, then the Cultural Revolution ranks at the bottom of all the comparison cases and the worst case by far is Cambodia. If the intensity of the violence in China had been the same as in Cambodia then 150 million people would have been killed.

Beyond the story of the violence and bloodshed in the Cultural Revolution, there’s a big story here about how many people were persecuted yet survived. The Cultural Revolution put many, many people through hell, but many survived and regained positions of authority and power, leading the country in the 1980s, which is why they wrote about what happened in their localities.

Q: Could you share some details about your current research project?

My current project, Political Violence and State Repression, analyzes unusually detailed internal investigation reports compiled by the government of a Chinese province that experienced some of the most severe level of violence and highest death tolls during the Cultural Revolution. There were 90,000 casualties in that province that had a population of about 24 million – a death rate much higher than the average we talked about before. The question is why this happened in that particular province.

The available investigation reports contain close to 5,000 political events and associated casualties, for all 86 cities and counties in the province. For the last three years I've been working with research assistants to code this massive body of information into a data set, which is now almost ready for analysis. The quality, level of detail, and comprehensive coverage of the materials makes it possible to analyze state collapse and political violence with an unusual degree of precision and depth.

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Interpreting U.S.-China Trade War: Background, Negotiations and Consequences

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Interpreting U.S.-China Trade War: Background, Negotiations and Consequences

Since March 2018, the US–China trade conflict has escalated from a tariff war to a technology war, and a strategic competition between the two giants. The direction of the trade war and China–US relations will reshape the world order of the future. In this talk, Professor Wang Yong will explore questions like: What major goals does the US have in the trade war against China? How should one evaluate the influence of domestic structural changes in the two countries on the trade conflict? Will a possible deal stop the spiraling of strategic competition between the two major powers? By answering these questions, Professor Wang will analyze the political and economic forces driving this current US–China trade war and the factors affecting the negotiations. Major arguments include that trade frictions have deep roots in the restructuring of domestic politics taking place in the two countries; while extreme thoughts define US–China relationship from the perspectives of ideology and strategic rivalry, economic interdependence and shared stakes set the ground for negotiation and possible compromise between the two countries. Rebuilding political trust will be the key to dealing with strategic rivalry and avoiding a new cold war between China and the US.

 

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Professor Wang Yong is director of the Center for International Political Economy and professor at the School of International Studies, both at Peking University. He is also professor at the Party School of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China and president-appointed professor for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Senior Civil Servants Training Program on Chinese Affairs at Peking University and a member of the Ministry of Commerce Economic Diplomacy Expert Working Group. Professor Wang was formerly a consultant of the Asia Development Bank, Visiting Chevalier Chair Professor at the Institute of Asian Research at the University of British Columbia and a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Global Trade and Foreign Direct Investment.

Professor Wang received his B.A. and M.A. in law and international politics and Ph.D. in law from Peking University. He joined the faculty of the School of International Studies at Peking University in 1990. He studied at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center (an educational collaboration between the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University and Nanjing University) and was also a visiting scholar at the University of California San Diego and a joint visiting fellow at the Pacific Council on International Policy and the University of Southern California.

His major authored books include International Political Economy in China: The Global Conversation (co-edited with Greg Chin and Margaret Pearson, Routledge, 2015), Political Economy of International Trade (China Market Press, 2008) and Political Economy of China-U.S. Trade Relations (China Market Press, 2007), which was awarded the first prize for Excellent Social Sciences Works by the Beijing Municipal Government and the Beijing Confederation of Social Scientists in 2008.

Philippines Conference Room
616 Jane Stanford Way
Encina Hall, Central, 3rd Floor
Stanford, CA 94305

WANG Yong <br><i>Director, Center for International Political Economy; Professor of International Studies, Peking University</i><br><br>
Lectures

The Education of an Idealist: A Conversation with Samantha Power

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The Education of an Idealist traces Power’s distinctly American journey, from Irish immigrant to human rights activist to United States Ambassador to the United Nations. Power began her career as a war correspondent and as a vocal critic of US foreign policy, and then put her ideals into practice while working with Obama in the Senate, on the campaign trail, and throughout his presidency. Power’s perspective on government is unique, as she takes us from the streets of war-torn Bosnia to the Situation Room and out into the world of high-stakes diplomacy. In her characteristically gripping prose, Power illuminates the messy and complex worlds of politics and geopolitics while laying bare the searing battles and defining moments of her life. She also reveals what it’s like to juggle the demands of a 24/7 national security job with raising two young children. And, in the face of great challenges, she shows us not just how the United States can lead, but why there is always something each of us can do to advance the cause of human dignity. The Education of an Idealist is a humorous, stirring, and ultimately unforgettable account of the world-changing power of idealism -- and of one person’s fierce determination to make a difference.

Samantha Power is a Professor of Practice at the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Law School. From 2013-2017, Power served as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and a member of President Obama's cabinet. From 2009-2013, Power served on the National Security Council as Special Assistant to the President for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights. Power began her career as a journalist, reporting from places such as Bosnia, East Timor, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan, and Zimbabwe, and she was the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School.  Power's book, "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. She is also the author of the New York Times bestseller Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World. Her most recent book, The Education of an Idealist, was published by Harper Collins in September 2019. Power earned a B.A. from Yale University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Click here to register by October 9, 2019

Books will be available for sale. Ambassador Power has graciously agreed to sign books

Dinkelspiel Auditorium

471 Lagunita Drive

Stanford, CA 94305

Ambassador Samantha Power Professor of Practice at the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Law School
Seminars

A.I., Semiconductors and Beyond: A U.S. Strategy for Winning the Tech Race with China

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Stanford University's Hoover Institution in Washington is pleased to invite you to attend the next National Security and Technology Congressional Briefing. The briefing, centered on the U.S. race with China for technological superiority, will feature various experts outlining actionable policy proposals to meet this rising challenge.

With the 2020 presidential campaign in full swing, the time is ripe to develop new nonpartisan policy ideas to inform the national security and technology policy priorities of whomever will occupy the White House in 2021. The Technology and Public Policy Project housed within the Freeman Spogli Institute's Cyber Policy Center, and in partnership with the Hoover Institution, seeks to address these policy challenges and questions by developing implementation-ready proposals that meet the needs of current and future policymakers.

Hosted by Hoover Research Fellow Andrew Grotto, the briefing will focus on opportunities for action, featuring proposals by: 

  • Anja Manuel, on developing an affirmative strategy for competing, contesting, and cooperating with China in response to its efforts to systematically extract advanced technology from the West.
  • Anthony Vinci, on harnessing a new joint venture model for public-private technology innovation to meet national security technology challenges. 

 

Schedule:

  • 9:00a.m. - Registration and Coffee
  • 9:30a.m. - 11:00a.m. - Panel Discussion
  • Hoover Institution DC
  • 1399 New York Avenue NW, Suite 500
  • Washington, DC 20005
Panel Discussions

Consigned to Hedge: Southeast Asia and America’s “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” Strategy

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Prof. Tan will assess how Southeast Asian countries and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have responded to the various Indo-Pacific strategies promoted by the US and the other “Quad” countries (Australia, India, and Japan).  The Southeast Asians’ nuanced ripostes imply a persistent commitment to limited and contingent alignments in the face of growing great-power rivalry and the lack of a clear Indo-Pacific vision among the Quad states.  This hedging strategy is likely to continue in the face of American and Chinese pressure to take sides, as the ASEAN states cooperate selectively with Washington and Beijing.  Given the US’s desire to balance China and Trump’s disregard for multilateralism, ASEAN’s ability to maintain its centrality in the evolving regional architecture is in doubt. The success of Washington’s strategy depends on its ability to build and sustain a requisite coalition to balance Beijing.  Also at stake is the ability of ASEAN to redefine its regional centrality in an era of great-power discord that is undermining multilateralism in Asia.

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See Seng Tan, in addition to his NTU professorship, is President/CEO-elect of International Students Inc. (ISI), a nonprofit based in Colorado Springs, CO. His latest book is The Legal Authority of ASEAN as a Security Institution (2019). Forthcoming work includes another book, The Responsibility to Provide in Southeast Asia: Towards an Ethical Explanation, and a chapter on Singapore-China relations in The Deer and the Dragon: Southeast Asia and China in the 21st Century. His degrees are from Arizona State University (PhD) and the University of Manitoba (MA and BA with Honors).

See Seng Tan Professor of International Relations, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU)
Seminars

Iraq: Past, Present, Future

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*Due to space constraints, space is limited. If you have RSVP'd for this event and can no longer attend, please notify Emilie Silva (emilieds@stanford.edu).

 

Agenda

8:30 a.m. - 9:00 a.m.      Light pastries 

 

9:00 a.m. - 9:15 a.m.        Introductions

 

9:15 a.m. - 10:45 a.m.       The Historical Evolution of the Iraqi State

Moderator: David Patel, Brandeis University Crown Center

Panelists: Lisa Blaydes, Stanford University; Michael Brill, Princeton University; Alissa Walter, Seattle Pacific University

 

10:45 a.m.  - 11:00 a.m.     Break

 

11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.     Iraqi Politics and the State

Video recording: https://youtu.be/LyXS3nbeJqM

Moderator: Marc Lynch, George Washington University

Panelists: Maria Fantappie, International Crisis Group; Samuel Helfont, Naval Postgraduate School; David Patel, Brandeis University Crown Center

 

 

 

Speaker Biographies

Lisa Blaydes is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Stanford University.  She is the author of Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2011).  Professor Blaydes received the 2009 Gabriel Almond Award for best dissertation in the field of comparative politics from the American Political Science Association for this project.  Her articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, International Studies Quarterly, International Organization, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Middle East Journal, and World Politics. During the 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 academic years, Professor Blaydes was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies.  She holds degrees in Political Science (PhD) from the University of California, Los Angeles and International Relations (BA, MA) from Johns Hopkins University.

 

Michael Brill a doctoral student in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, where he focuses his research on modern Iraq, investigating the Sunni Islamist opposition to the Baʿth regime and the history of Iraq’s Salafi movement. 

He previously obtained his MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University and BA at Westfield State University. He previously obtained his MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University and BA in History and Political Science at Westfield State University. He received two summer Critical Language Scholarships (CLS), studying Arabic in Muscat, Oman and Amman, Jordan, followed by a full-year fellowship in the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) program in Amman, Jordan.

 

Maria Fantappie is Senior Adviser at the International Crisis Group. Maria first joined Crisis Group in 2012.  In 2018, she was seconded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the EU mission in Iraq where she advised the Office of the National Security Advisor (ONSA) on the implementation of the security sector reform program with special focus on Iraq’s national security legislation.

Before joining Crisis Group, Maria was a Visiting Scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut and associate researcher at the Institut français du Proche-Orient (IFPO). She has taught at American University of Iraq in Suleimani and Sciences Po Paris. Maria completed her PhD at King’s College London, Department of War Studies, and earned an MA and MPhil with distinction from Sciences Po Paris, Department of Middle Eastern Studies.

 

Samuel Helfont is an Assistant Professor of Strategy and Policy in the Naval War College program at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He is also an Affiliate Scholar in the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. His research focuses on international history and politics in the Middle East, especially Iraq and the Iraq Wars. He is the author of Compulsion in Religion: Saddam Hussein, Islam, and the Roots of Insurgencies in Iraq (Oxford University Press, 2018). His work has been published by Foreign Affairs, The International History Review, The Middle East Journal, Orbis, The New Republic, The American Interest, War on the Rocks,  and the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University among several other outlets.

Helfont holds a PhD and MA in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University. Prior to moving to Monterey, he completed a three year post-doctoral lectureship at the University of Pennsylvania. He has served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Haverford College, and was the recipient of US Scholar Research Support Fellowship from the Hoover Library and Archives at Stanford University. He is a veteran of the Iraq War.

 

Colin H. Kahl is co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation, the inaugural Steven C. Házy Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and a Professor, by courtesy, in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. He is also a Strategic Consultant to the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.

From October 2014 to January 2017, he was Deputy Assistant to the President and National Security Advisor to the Vice President. In that position, he served as a senior advisor to President Obama and Vice President Biden on all matters related to U.S. foreign policy and national security affairs, and represented the Office of the Vice President as a standing member of the National Security Council Deputies’ Committee. From February 2009 to December 2011, Dr. Kahl was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East at the Pentagon. In this capacity, he served as the senior policy advisor to the Secretary of Defense for Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel and the Palestinian territories, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen, and six other countries in the Levant and Persian Gulf region. In June 2011, he was awarded the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service by Secretary Robert Gates.

From 2007 to 2017 (when not serving in the U.S. government), Dr. Kahl was an assistant and associate professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. From 2007 to 2009 and 2012 to 2014, he was also a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a nonpartisan Washington, DC-based think tank. From 2000 to 2007, he was an assistant professor of political science at the University of Minnesota. In 2005-2006, Dr. Kahl took leave from the University of Minnesota to serve as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where he worked on issues related to counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and responses to failed states. In 1997-1998, he was a National Security Fellow at the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University.

Current research projects include a book analyzing American grand strategy in the Middle East in the post-9/11 era. A second research project focuses on the implications of emerging technologies on strategic stability.

He has published numerous articles on international security and U.S. foreign and defense policy in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, International Security, the Los Angeles Times, Middle East Policy, the National Interest, the New Republic, the New York Times, Politico, the Washington Post, and the Washington Quarterly, as well as several reports for CNAS.

His previous research analyzed the causes and consequences of violent civil and ethnic conflict in developing countries, focusing particular attention on the demographic and natural resource dimensions of these conflicts. His book on the subject, States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the Developing World, was published by Princeton University Press in 2006, and related articles and chapters have appeared in International Security, the Journal of International Affairs, and various edited volumes.

Dr. Kahl received his B.A. in political science from the University of Michigan (1993) and his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University (2000).

 

Marc Lynch is a professor of political science and international affairs at the George Washington University and director of the Project on Middle East Political Science. He served as the director of the Institute for Middle East Studies at GW from 2009-2015. Lynch is also a nonresident senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a contributing editor at The Monkey Cage blog for the Washington Post. He is the co-director of the Blogs and Bullets project at the United States Institute of Peace. In 2016, he was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow.

He is the author of The New Arab Wars: Anarchy and Uprising in the Middle East, (2016), The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the New Middle East (2012), Voices of the New Arab Public: Al Jazeera, Iraq, and Middle East Politics Today (2006), and State Interests and Public Spheres: The International Politics of Jordan’s Identity (1999) and edited The Arab Uprisings Explained: The New Contentious Politics of the Middle East, (2014).

Lynch blogged as Abu Aardvark for seven years before joining Foreign Policy as a blogger and columnist. In 2010 Lynch, launched the Middle East Channel on Foreign Policy, which he edited until March 2014. He can now be found online at The Monkey Cage.

 

Brett McGurk is the Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Distinguished Lecturer at the Freeman Spogli Institute and Center for Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.

McGurk’s research interests center on national security strategy, diplomacy, and decision-making in wartime.  He is particularly interested in the lessons learned over the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump regarding the importance of process in informing presidential decisions and the alignment of ends and means in national security doctrine and strategy.  At Stanford, he will be working on a book project incorporating these themes and teaching a graduate level seminar on presidential decision-making beginning in the fall of 2019.  He is also a frequent commentator on national security events in leading publications and as an NBC News Senior Foreign Affairs Analyst.

Before coming to Stanford, McGurk served as Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS at the U.S. Department of State, helping to build and then lead the coalition of seventy-five countries and four international organizations in the global campaign against the ISIS terrorist network.  McGurk was also responsible for coordinating all aspects of U.S. policy in the campaign against ISIS in Iraq, Syria, and globally.

McGurk previously served in senior positions in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, including as Special Assistant to President Bush and Senior Director for Iraq and Afghanistan, and then as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Iraq and Iran and Special Presidential Envoy for the U.S. campaign against the Islamic State under Obama.

McGurk has led some of the most sensitive diplomatic missions in the Middle East over the last decade. His most recent assignment established one of the largest coalitions in history to prosecute the counter-ISIS campaign. He was a frequent visitor to the battlefields in both Iraq and Syria to help integrate military and civilian components of the war plan. He also led talks with Russia over the Syria conflict under both the Trump and Obama administrations, initiated back-channel diplomacy to reopen ties between Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and facilitated the formation of the last two Iraqi governments following contested elections in 2014 and 2018.

In 2015 and 2016, McGurk led fourteen months of secret negotiations with Iran to secure the release of Washington Post reporter Jason Rezain, U.S. Marine Amir Hekmati, and Pastor Saad Abadini, as well as three other American citizens.

During his time at the State Department, McGurk received multiple awards, including the Distinguished Honor Award and the Distinguished Service Award, the highest department awards for exceptional service in Washington and overseas assignments.

McGurk is also a nonresident senior fellow in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

McGurk received his JD from Columbia University and his BA from the University of Connecticut Honors Program.  He served as a law clerk to Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist on the U.S. Supreme Court, Judge Denis Jacobs on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2d Circuit, and Judge Gerard E. Lynch on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

 

David Siddhartha Patel is the Associate Director for Research at the Brandeis University Crown Center for Middle East Studies. Patel’s research focuses on religious authority, social order, and identity in the contemporary Arab world. He conducted independent field research in Iraq on the role of mosques and clerical networks in generating order after state collapse, and his book, Order Out of Chaos: Islam, Information, and Social Order in Iraq, is being prepared for publication by Cornell University Press. Patel has also recently written about the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood; ISIS in Iraq; and dead states in the Middle East. He teaches courses on Middle Eastern politics, research design, and GIS and spatial aspects of politics. Before joining the Crown Center, Patel was an assistant professor of government at Cornell University. Patel received his BA from Duke University in economics and political science and his PhD from Stanford University in political science. He studied Arabic in Lebanon, Yemen, Morocco, and Jordan.

 

 

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Authoritarian Legitimation and Insecure Collective Identity: Lessons From Putin’s Russia

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Livestream: This event will not be live-streamed or recorded.

 

Abstract: This study brings together social identity theory and the literature on ontological security in international relations to highlight the role of leadership processes for group formation and authoritarian legitimation. Together, these theories allow for exploring the conditions that increase the potency of identity-based politics and the specific ways political entrepreneurs can mobilize this political tool. Ontological insecurity, as I argue and show, is a condition that political entrepreneurs use and manipulate to gain political support and legitimate their rule. I illustrate this argument by looking into ‘late Putinism’ as an example of collective identity-driven politics. This study relies on an original nationwide survey experiment conducted in November 2017 in Russia to demonstrate the extent of the Russian society’s vulnerability and receptivity to insecure identity narratives. The data also allows us to start a discussion on the potential factors responsible for societal differentiation on this issue.

 

Speaker's Biography:

Gulnaz Sharafutdinova Gulnaz Sharafutdinova
Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, a Reader in Russian Politics at King’s College London, is the author of Political Consequences of Crony Capitalism Inside Russia (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011) and the forthcoming monograph Through The Looking Glass: Putin’s Leadership and Russia’s Insecure Identity (Oxford University Press, 2020). Gulnaz has written numerous articles on Russian regional political economy, state-business relations, and corruption in Russia. She has published an edited volume, Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964-1985 (2012) and has been working on bringing social psychological approaches to understanding collective identity issues and the nature of Putinism in Russia.

 

Gulnaz Sharafutdinova Reader in Russian Politics King’s College London
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Russian Power and Purpose in the 21st Century Seminars

Meet the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy Class of 2021

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Representing 14 different countries, the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy (MIP) first-year class is a diverse group. Of the 8 men and 21 women, some have worked in government, some have served in the military, and others just completed their undergraduate degrees. Their academic interests range from migration; to clean energy; to women’s, children’s and LGBTQIA rights; and they spend their free time woodworking, practicing Kung Fu, and listening to true-crime podcasts.

The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies spoke to five of the incoming first-year students about their backgrounds, passions, and dreams for the future. These are their stories.

Serage Amatory, 22. (Chouf, Lebanon) 

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“I’ve been living in Egypt for the last four years and attending American University in Cairo, where I double-majored in political science and multimedia journalism. My background is in human rights, and I plan to keep working in human rights after school. I worked as a journalist at one of the few nonpartisan TV stations in Lebanon, and I also worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Lebanon.

I’ve also made two documentary films — one is about the transgender community in Cairo, and the second film tells the stories of five male victims of rape and sexual assault in Cairo. I enjoy talking about issues that other people don’t want to talk about. I get a lot of disapproval from people all the time, but that's what motivates me — I want to be speaking about people who don’t have someone speaking about them. Someone has to bring attention to things that aren't in the mainstream, and that's what I like to do.

The Master’s in International Policy program here is amazing, and I love that you have the option to specialize in a topic — I’d like to study something concrete and know exactly what I'm going to be doing with it after I graduate. I studied really general topics in undergrad, and now I feel like it's time to augment my general education with something that's more specific. I came in with the expectation that I'm going to be specializing in governance and development, and while I still want to do that, I also really think I might want to take some cyber classes now. So we’ll see — I’m just really happy to be here.”

Maha Al Fahim, 21. (Vancouver, Canada and Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates) 

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“My interest in public policy started when I was 14. I wrote a nonfiction book about child abuse and gender discrimination, and it was based on my mother's story — she grew up in an abusive family. And in publishing that book, I really saw the power of writing to expose policy issues. When I went to Princeton for my undergraduate education, I wanted to hone my communication skills, because I saw communication as a really powerful tool. I wrote for the Daily Princetonian newspaper and Business Today magazine, and I was also chair of Princeton Writes, a program to promote writing among the community and celebrate the power of words.

Now I'm working on a novel. It's called "Shaolina", and it's set in China. The novel explores gender dynamics and financial and physical power. I traveled to China last summer to do research for the book, and I got to train with a Shaolin monk for 8 hours a day — we would wake up at 5 a.m. and run through the mountains, it was crazy. It was so cool to immerse myself in the experience like that. For me, Kung Fu is not just a sport, it’s a way of life. I've learned so many life lessons from Kung Fu: patience, perseverance, and balance, to name a few.

I love how Stanford is focusing on the future of policy, because as issues get more complex, you need not just qualitative skills, but also quantitative skills. And you need to be able to think creatively and innovatively. Our cohort is small — around 30 students — and I really like it. There are people here from very diverse backgrounds, and it has been really cool to hear so many different international perspectives.” 

Angela Ortega Pastor, 25. (Madrid, Spain) 

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“I studied economics at NYU Abu Dhabi, and then I worked for three years in Paris for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as an energy data manager in oil and gas topics. I worked a lot with the different countries within the OECD as well as with other organizations to help collect data, and we put all of that data into comprehensive reports so that other people and companies can use it for analysis. I really liked working there. I liked the international dynamic - everybody came from very different backgrounds and different places, so it was very congenial to learn from other people.

I'm an economist by training, and that impacts the way I like to look at the problems within the energy field. Such as, 'How can we get consumers and companies to want to transition to clean energy? Does it mean that we need to put policies in place, or regulate the market? Or are pure economic incentives going to do the trick?' There are a lot of professors at Stanford who have done research in that sphere, so that was also a big push for me to come here.

I really like Stanford so far. I've found that people here are very welcoming and happy to help. I was a bit worried about that - when you move somewhere new, you sometimes worry about cliques and how focused people will be on their own lives. But everyone that I've encountered has been really nice and helpful. It's made feel like, 'OK - I can figure out how this place works and eventually feel at home.'”

Craig Nelson, 37. (Minneapolis, Minnesota) 

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“I'm an infantry officer in the U.S. Army. I graduated from West Point in 2006, and I'm in my 14th year of service. I've done eight deployments across both Iraq and Afghanistan, and I've also spent a good amount of time stationed in Europe. My wife, Michelle, and I just moved to Palo Alto from Vicenza, Italy, with our 2-year-old son, Max. Michelle and I love to travel, we love being stationed abroad, and we think that the best way to complete a 20-year career in the Army is to be abroad as much as possible and see parts of the world that we would not otherwise be exposed to.

Overall what I hope to learn here is a better way for the American Army to help to implement the policy that I was a part of as the U.S. Army's forward-deployed unit in Europe. I was able to see where policy derived by our elected officials is actually implemented at a tactical level. I’d like to go back to the Army and implement that policy with a refined understanding of where it comes from and how it's generated.

Before social media became as ubiquitous as it is now, I think people were in groups based largely on where they're from - a certain area code, or a neighborhood, or a school. Now it's possible to identify with a group completely without respect to geographic location, and I think that's because of social media. I'm interested in how that drives security policy - how does that change cyber security policy, and how does that change the way that my country interfaces with its allies and its partners?

When I go back to the Army, I hope to be in a position of greater responsibility and leadership. And I think that this experience will broaden me in a way that I would not have achieved if I had stayed in the operational Army and done a more traditional job following what I just did in Italy.”

Sievlan Len, 23. (Toul Roveang Village, Cambodia) 

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“I earned my bachelor’s degree in global affairs from the American University of Phnom Penh in Cambodia. I did two internships before coming to Stanford: one was with a consulting firm, where I was working mainly on migration research and youth participation initiatives at the sub-national level. I also worked for a foundation that works on strengthening political parties in Cambodia. It was a really interesting experience, and it gave me the idea of doing my bachelor's thesis on migration.

My interests right now are in migration, development, and education. And I’m interested to learn about how the three interact, and how we can make the most out of migration. I'm so excited to explore the interdisciplinary aspects of the Master’s in International Policy program, because I've always felt that you can't separate these issues one from another — migration itself is very interdisciplinary, there is both a political and an economic side to it.

I come from a village in Cambodia, and I'm one of the luckiest in that I had the opportunity to pursue higher education. One of my dreams and goals is that everyone in Cambodia — including girls — have equal access to education, and at least to finish high school, and have the opportunity to pursue their dreams in universities if they’d like to. Where I grew up, I saw a lot of potential not being fulfilled because of people’s circumstances — poverty, or elders not valuing education. I really want to see that change. I want everyone to be able to reach their full potential.”

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Vienna Exchange student Mourad Chouaki and Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy (MIP) first-year students Corie Wieland, Rehana Mohammed and Maria Fernanda Porras Jacobo on the grass of the Stanford Oval in September 2019. Photo: Maria Fernanda Porras Jacobo.
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