Abstract:

While populism takes different forms in different countries, the success of populist parties and leaders comes from their ability to represent grievances. Current analyses emphasize the personality, background and rhetoric of populist leaders, but, often neglect the intermediary mechanisms that help populists not only address and represent but also generate “the people” from a diverse set of constituencies. By focusing on the authoritarian populist context of Turkey, this paper examines the role of pro- government and government-organized NGOs in helping the ruling Justice and Development Party connect with, represent, and shape the youth public in the aftermath of the uprisings across the wider Middle East. The paper argues that the making of authoritarian Turkey and the resilience of President Erdoğan should be traced as much to the mechanisms of consent-building as to the mechanisms of coercion.

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Abstract: The West has no peer competitors in conventional military power.  But its adversaries are increasingly turning to asymmetric methods for engaging in conflict.  Cyber-enabled information warfare (CEIW) leverages the features of modern information and communications technology to age-old techniques of propaganda, deception, and chaos production to confuse, mislead, and to influence the choices and decisions that the adversary makes—and a recent example of CEIW can be seen in the Russian hacks on the U.S. presidential election in 2016.  CEIW is a hostile activity, or at least an activity that is conducted between two parties whose interests are not well-aligned, but it does not constitute warfare in the sense that international law or domestic institutions construe it.  Nor is it cyber war or cyber conflict as we have come to understand those ideas.  Some approaches to counter CEIW show some promise of having some modest but valuable defensive effect.  If better solutions for countering CEIW waged against free and democratic societies are not forthcoming, societal discourse will no longer be grounded in reason and objective reality—an outcome that can fairly be called the end of the Enlightenment.

Speaker bios: Dr. Herb Lin is senior research scholar for cyber policy and security at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and Hank J. Holland Fellow in Cyber Policy and Security at the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford University.  His research interests relate broadly to policy-related dimensions of cybersecurity and cyberspace, and he is particularly interested in and knowledgeable about the use of offensive operations in cyberspace, especially as instruments of national policy.  In addition to his positions at Stanford University, he is Chief Scientist, Emeritus for the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies, where he served from 1990 through 2014 as study director of major projects on public policy and information technology, and Adjunct Senior Research Scholar and Senior Fellow in Cybersecurity (not in residence) at the Saltzman Institute for War and Peace Studies in the School for International and Public Affairs at Columbia University; and a member of the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. He recently served on President Obama’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity.  Prior to his NRC service, he was a professional staff member and staff scientist for the House Armed Services Committee (1986-1990), where his portfolio included defense policy and arms control issues. He received his doctorate in physics from MIT.

To read more about Herb Lin's interests, please read "An Evolving Research Agenda in Cyber Policy and Security."

Jackie Kerr is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Global Security Research (CGSR) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  Her research examines cybersecurity and information security strategy, Internet governance, and the Internet policies of non-democratic regimes.  She was a 2015-2016 Science, Technology, and Public Policy (STPP) Pre-Doctoral Fellow with the Cyber Security Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and Visiting Scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University and a Cybersecurity Predoctoral Fellow at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation in 2014-2015.  Jackie holds a PhD and MA in Government from Georgetown University, and an MA in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies and BAS in Mathematics and Slavic Languages and Literatures from Stanford University.  She has held research fellowships in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Qatar, and has previous professional experience as a software engineer.

Abstract: It has been more than a decade since the UN Security Council enacted Resolution 1540—the most far-reaching of international instruments to counter Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) terrorism. It requires states to adopt and enforce effective laws to keep WMD materials outside the reach of terrorists. Scholars and policy makers compliment 1540 for making WMD trafficking illegal, for raising awareness of threats and increasing states’ capacity to reduce them. In 2017, one hundred and seventy-six states reported to the UN on domestic measures they took to comply with 1540. These numbers may produce a false sense of confidence in universal implementation of 1540. The threat of WMD terrorism remains potent. Allegations of ISIS using mustard agents against the Kurds, North Korea shipping chemicals to Syria or middlemen trafficking nuclear materials via Moldova suggest that the international response to WMD smuggling has not achieved its desired results. It is, therefore, important to evaluate the UN’s role in preventing WMD terrorism, and explore ways to further strengthen it. Drawing on interviews, fieldwork and observation data, this talk will examine the 1540 regime’s setup and its performance. It will outline policy options to improve the international counter-proliferation and counter-terrorism regime.

Speaker  bio:  Sarah Shirazyan is a Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at CISAC. Her research is funded by the MacArthur Foundation. She received her Doctor of Juridical Sciences Degree from Stanford Law School. Her dissertation empirically analyzes the effectiveness of the UN Security Council Resolution 1540 in preventing terrorists from accessing Weapons of Mass Destruction. Sarah designed Interpol-Stanford policy lab and serves as a Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School. For her outstanding research, teaching and community service, Stanford named Ms. Shirazyan as one of the recipients of Gerald J. Lieberman Award.

In addition to her academic experience, Sarah has held multiple posts with leading tech companies and international organizations. Sarah worked at Facebook’s Global Policy Team, where she developed company’s engagement strategies with inter-governmental organizations. Ms. Shirazyan also designed the data protection and privacy curricula for legal professionals at the Council of Europe. Prior to that, Ms. Shirazyan was a Drafting Lawyer for the European Court of Human Rights; worked on nuclear security issues at the U.N. Office for Disarmament Affairs; and handled international drug cartel investigation cases at the INTERPOL Secretariat. 

EU legislative politics have changed dramatically during the past decade, and the British government has been a vocal and influential voice in shaping EU policies and processes. Based on an original dataset covering all legislative decisions by the EU governments since the enlargement to Central- and Eastern Europe in 2004, this paper provides detailed analysis to explain and elaborate on the British votes in the EU Council. It shows that the UK has opposed legislation more than other countries, and that this opposition has increased in recent years. However, advanced text analysis of formal policy statements from the Council records shows that the UK government should not be considered a policy outlier: a group of small- and medium-sized countries frequently side with the UK position in the Council records. They will likely miss the British position and outspoken voice as the EU embarks on a new phase in European integration. The results extend our existing knowledge about negotiation dynamics and voting behaviour in the Council, and are relevant to studies of other intergovernmental negotiation forums too.

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Sara Hagemann is Associate Professor in European Politics at London School of Economics and Political Science, which she joined in September 2009. In her work, Sara draws on a mix of academic and policy experience as she has held research and policy positions in Brussels, Copenhagen and London. Sara has published extensively on European affairs, in particular on transparency and accountability in political systems, EU policy-making processes, EU treaty matters, the role of national parliaments, and the consequences of EU enlargements.

Before joining LSE, Sara worked as a Policy Analyst at the Brussels-based European Policy Centre (EPC), where she was responsible for its Political Europe programme. She has also held posts at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), and in the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She is the Co-Founder and General Editor of the LSE’s popular European Politics blog EUROPP, and Co-Founder and former Managing Director of VoteWatch.eu (www.votewatch.eu), an online initiative that monitors EU decision-makers’ voting records.

Sara has been awarded an ESRC Impact Accelerator Grant (from September 2016- April 2018) through the LSE’s Institute of Public Affairs. She was also an ESRC Senior Fellow as part of the UK in a Changing Europe programme in 2016, where she worked as an independent expert advisor to the UK government, parliament and public in the run-up to and aftermath of the UK’s referendum on EU membership.

Abstract:

What are the e ffects of mass media campaigns on the norms and behaviors of police officers as pertains to human tra fficking? Namely, can mass media campaigns be employed to induce shifts in knowledge, attitudes, beliefs and practices (KABP) of law enforcement officers, that might reduce the incidence of modern forms of slavery and assist victims of human traffi cking? Mass media, especially `entertainment education, (e.g. comic books, radio soap operas, and street theater) is frequently used as a tool for social change to convey messages around issues such as public health, gender rights, conflict resolution, or development strategies through stories that are both realistic and entertaining. Yet how can we know the e ffects of such campaigns? Specifically, do diff erences in message formats and content a ffect the impact of campaigns against human tra fficking? The research presented here shows that mass media entertainment campaigns can e ffectively convey messages around human traffi cking, influencing attitudes, norms and behaviors of law enforcement officers around the issue. It also demonstrates how messages whose content emphasizes victim empowerment appear to be more e ffective than negative, fear-inducing appeals.

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Abstract:

Throughout the world, voters lack access to information about politicians, government performance, and public services. Efforts to remedy these informational deficits are numerous. Yet do informational campaigns influence voter behavior and increase democratic accountability? Through the inaugural Metaketa Initiative, sponsored by the Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) research network, we aim to address this substantive question and at the same time introduce a new model for cumulative learning that increases coordination among otherwise independent researcher teams. We present the cumulative results (meta-analysis) from six independently conducted but coordinated field experimental studies, the findings from a related evaluation of whether practitioners utilize this information as expected, and discuss lessons learned from EGAP’s efforts to coordinate field experiments, increase replication of theoretically important questions across contexts, and increase the external validity of field experimental research.

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Please send an email to sj1874@stanford.edu if you would like to be added to the wait list.

Shaun Walker provides new insight into contemporary Russia and its search for a new identity, telling the story through the country's troubled relationship with its Soviet past. Walker not only explains Vladimir Putin's goals and the government's official manipulations of history, but also focuses on ordinary Russians and their motivations. He charts how Putin raised victory in World War II to the status of a national founding myth in the search for a unifying force to heal a divided country, and shows how dangerous the ramifications of this have been.

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Shaun Walker is Moscow Correspondent for The Guardian and has reported from Russia for more than a decade. He studied Russian and Soviet history at Oxford University, and has worked as a journalist in Moscow for more than a decade.

Abstract:

Election forensics adds distinctive value to current efforts to promote the integrity of elections around the world by developing special forensic tools and techniques designed to detect the presence of election fraud and to estimate its magnitude based on the reported results of elections. By utilizing electoral data, election forensics provides statistical evidence, which could refute or support various sorts of accusations related to the presence of election fraud. What methods and techniques are currently used by election forensics? Can election forensics measures be validated by the auxiliary data, such as election observation? What election forensics tells us about election fraud at the Russian elections? To address these questions I’ll discuss election forensics methodology, and present key findings from the analysis of the Russian presidential and parliamentary elections 2000-2016.

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Abstract:

At their best, decentralizing reforms make government more accountable to citizens and empower local governments to invest in their own development. Yet, successful decentralization requires that local governments raise at least some revenue to finance new service delivery responsibilities, and the capacity of local governments to generate tax revenue varies. This variation is evident in the Philippines, where capacity to tax varies greatly across cities despite uniform tax powers. I argue that business associations contribute to this variation by endorsing tax increases to enable cities to spend on infrastructure, but only if they can sustain distributional consensus and forestall local officials from diverting revenues away from business-friendly projects. I present a controlled comparison of two cities, Iloilo and Batangas, to show that business associations resolve distributional conflict by dispersing benefits across members, and monitor public spending by participating in legislative hearings and jointly managing public projects.

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