Elias Muhanna is a PhD candidate in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations at Harvard University and the author of QifaNabki.com, a blog devoted to Lebanese political affairs. He has written extensively on contemporary cultural and political affairs in the Middle East for several general-interest publications, including The Nation, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, The National, Mideast Monitor, World Politics Review, Bidoun, and Transition, and is regularly quoted in media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, The Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio, The Christian Science Monitor, Slate, and Al-Jazeera International.

From 2007 to 2010, a financial and economic crisis gripped the United States, Europe and the world. 7 million Americans lost their jobs, 10 million were pushed below the poverty line, thousands of families lost their homes, and many lost their savings. Somewhat lower numbers were reported from Europe, although the structural mechanisms behind the crisis were seemingly similar, eventually affecting not only the West, but the whole world. It is foreseen that the effects of the crisis will last for years, and it is still uncertain if a full recovery will be possible.

Given that a variety of highly speculative practices put into place by the banking and finance sector during the "neoliberal“ decades between the early 1990s and 2007 allegedly played a role in triggering the crisis, the request for more down-to-earth and sustainable ways of dealing with money and finance has surfaced to international attention. Particularly in Europe, social banks were among the most successful financial institutions during the crisis years, with annual growth rates of up to 30%, factually doubling their assets between 2007-10. This unprecedented success was supposedly due to the fact that many European savers shifted their assets from mainstream banks to social banks, driven by the hope that the latter would handle their money in less abstract and egoistic, and more realistic and community oriented ways. In recent years, social banks have forged influential global networks such as the Global Alliance of Banking on Values and the International Association of Investors in the Social Economy, which pursue the ambitious strategy of reaching out to 1 billion people by 2020.

Given that, not least as a result of the crisis, increasing numbers of people are improving their financial literacy and are taking a growingly critical stance towards the mainstream international banking and finance sector as we knew it before the crisis, the seminar poses the questions of whether (and how) social banking and social finance may concretely contribute to improving the current financial system, and how they might help to restore confidence in capitalism by providing “best practice” examples in selected fields.

The seminar will try to provide some answers to these questions by examining the pros and cons of contemporary social finance and by outlining perspectives of structural complimentarity and cooperation between speculative and sustainable finance.

Audio Synopsis:

In his seminar, Professor Roland Benedikter argues that too little has been done to reform the banking and financial sectors in the wake of the recent crisis, then presents social banking and social finance as an alternative system. First, he argues that the widespread bank bailouts of the past few years have "saved the wrong system" and points out that many of the largest US banks, for example, have actually grown since the crisis despite calls by the Obama administration for these banks to downsize or break in to smaller pieces. He acknowledges that new measures initiated by both the Obama administration (establishing a consumer protection bureau; imposing limits on fees by financial intermediaries) and by European countries (banning high-risk transactions in Germany; reducing public liability for private bank bailouts) are steps in the right direction. He adds his own suggestions, including increased regulation, better international agreements on regulating capital flows, a fee on high-risk speculative transactions, and a preventative tax on banks to protect against future crises. Many of these reforms, however, have faced enormous opposition from the major players in the banking and finance sectors in Britain, the United States, and China.  Progress seems to have stalled, with popular figures like Niall Ferguson, who once led calls for dramatic reform, now insisting that the system is too resistant to change, and that simpler goals such as a new hippocratic oath for the financial sector will suffice.

Benedikter then presents social banking and social finance as an answer to the seemingly intractable problems of the traditional system.  He first describes the industry in terms of what it is not. Traditional banks, he argues, made three major mistakes leading up to the crisis: irresponsibility (loans that were too high, too much derivative investment); lack of transparency; and unsustainability (by participating in speculation and contributing to market bubbles). The current economy, he explains, is based on a tripolar system: a "real" economy of manufacturing and tangible goods; and two "side economies" of real estate and financial derivatives, which have steadily drawn capital away from the real economy since 1989. A breakdown of this unsustainable system was predicted by multiple think tanks before 2007, based partly on the frantic growth of the derivatives market (from  $100 trillion to $516 trillion annually between 2001 and 2006 - for perspective, Benedikter cites the annual world GDP figure of approximately $50 trillion).

Social banks, on the other hand, invest 100% of their capital toward responsible, transparent, and sustainable ventures such as green technology and social initiatives. Banks emphasize knowing their customers, which requires them to operate on a smaller scale than traditional banks, and conversely customers know where their money is invested and can even participate in making investment decisions. These decisions  are meant to take the potential social as well as financial return on an investment into account. Benedikter describes this as a "Triple Bottom Line" approach, emphasizing profit, people, and the planet.

A discussion period following the presentation addressed questions including:  What are the mechanisms available to enforcing the triple bottom line approach in social banking and social finance? Are social banks guided by a common charter? What are the details of the proposed high-risk transaction fee? Why have some US social banks been successful while others have struggled?

This meeting is the third in a series of consultations between agricultural scientists (in particular those interested in the conservation and use of crop diversity in plant improvement) and climate scientists on how to adapt agriculture to climate change. The first meeting, also held at Bellagio (3-7 September 2007), looked at the Conservation and Use of Global Crop Genetic Resources in the Face of Climate Change. It identified three major challenges facing the adaptation process: collecting crop diversity before it disappears, using it to breed better adapted crops, and informing key players of the increased need for the conservation and effective use of crop genetic resources in the face of climate change.

The second meeting, held at Stanford University on 16-18 June 2009, looked more specifically at breeding, and in particular at Climate Extremes and Crop Adaptation. Among other things, it recommended that efforts to develop heat tolerant varieties of the major cereals be intensified, and that greater investments be made in genotyping and phenotyping the variation already held in genebanks, and in collecting remaining diversity.

This third meeting in the series, and second at Bellagio, focused on a specific area of intersection between the ground covered by the previous consultations: the role of plants that are closely related to crops but are not themselves cultivated (crop wild relatives, or CWRs for short) in breeding varieties better adapted to future climates. The following questions were asked:

1) What is the evidence for the value of wild relatives in breeding for tolerance to abiotic and biotic stresses in general, and heat and drought tolerance in particular? Are there specific crops where we can anticipate that the collecting and or use of crop wild relatives will be of particular importance in the context of climate change?

2) What are the most useful techniques for identifying gaps in collections of crop wild relatives, what are the areas and populations most threatened by climate change, and areas and populations most likely to yield materials with traits of interest to breeders (especially drought and heat resistance)? And what R&D is needed to improve these techniques or create new, more effective ones?

3) In what form would breeders ideally want genebanks to provide them with crop wild relatives material? What specific changes in the current way genebanks and breeders do business and interact will be necessary to make this happen? What options exist to sustainably finance efforts to collect, conserve and use crop wild relatives, and to expand pre-breeding efforts?

Three specific goals for the proposed meeting. The first is to inform a strategic plan being developed by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the Millennium Genebank, Bioversity International and the CGIAR Centres to ensure the ex situ conservation of priority crop wild relatives and their long-term availability and use in climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts. The second will be broader set of policy briefs for the crop development community, and the third will be a series of publications that summarize the work leading up to and resulting from the meeting.

Music videos are ubiquitous in contemporary Arab public life. As captivating audio-visual blurbs, music videos attract attention; they are interesting not only because of their provocative aesthetics, but because they spotlight controversial issues and elicit impassioned reactions from public figures and ordinary people alike. Discussing religious videos that elaborate an Islamic vision of globalization, pop videos that subvert dominant social norms, play with Christian imagery, and create a fantasy world, in addition to focusing the discussion on videos about the US occupation of Iraq, Kraidy considers music videos as instruments of visibility in a saturated media economy suffering from attention scarcity.

Marwan M. Kraidy is Associate Professor of Global Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. His publications include Reality Television and Arab Politics: Contention in Public Life (Cambridge, 2009), which won the 2010 Best Book Award in Global Communication and Social Change, from the International Communication Association, Arab Television Industries (BFI/Palgrave, 2009, with J. Khalil), Hybridity, or, The Cultural Logic of Globalization (Temple, 2005), and the edited volumes Global Media Studies: Ethnographic Perspectives (Routledge, 2003), and The Politics of Reality Television: Global Perspectives (Routledge, 2010).

Sponsored by:

• Program on Good Governance and Political Reform in the Arab World, CDDRL
• Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies
• Humanities Center
• African and Middle Eastern Languages and Literatures Program
• Bowen H. McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society

As human rights education (HRE) becomes a more common feature of international policy discussions, national textbook reforms, and grassroots educational strategies worldwide, greater clarity about what HRE is, does, and means is needed. This presentation reviews existing definitions and models of HRE and offers a case study of one non-governmental organization's (NGO) approach to school-based instruction in India.  Specifically, findings are presented on how household-, school-, and community-level factors mediated students' understandings of HRE.  Data suggest that a variety of factors at the three levels contribute to the HRE program's successful implementation in government schools serving marginalized students (where most NGO programs are in operation in India today).

Professor Monisha Bajaj has been a faculty member in the Department of International and Transcultural Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University since 2005. She teaches in the Programs in International and Comparative Education and advises students in the concentrations of peace education, international humanitarian issues in education, and African education. Her interests are in the areas of comparative and international education, peace and human rights education, the politics of education, social inequalities, critical pedagogy, and curriculum development in the U.S. and abroad. She has focused on research and programmatic work in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Latin America & the Caribbean, and the United States.

Prof. Bajaj received her Ed.D. at Teachers College, Columbia University in International Educational Development, and her M.A. in Latin American Studies and B.A. in Sociology at Stanford University. She has previously worked in the field of human rights and developed a teacher training manual on human rights education for UNESCO while studying as a Fulbright scholar in the Dominican Republic.  She has also consulted on curriculum development issues, particularly related to the incorporation of peace education, human rights, and sustainable development, for non-profit educational service providers in New York City and inter-governmental organizations, such as UNICEF.  Her professional work focuses on examining possibilities for formal and non-formal education to influence social change.

Support for Prof. Bajaj's visit comes from the Charles F. Riddell Fund, administered by the Office of Residential Education, Stanford University.

Co-sponsors for this event are the Bechtel International Center; the Center for Ethics in Society; the Center for South Asia; the Education and Society Theme (EAST) House; the International Comparative Education Program of the Stanford University School of Education; and the Program on Human Rights at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.