* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Seminar Recording:  https://youtu.be/t4xteN7N99U

About the Event: In The State from Below, we seek to understand democracy through ground-up knowledge of the state. We use a new technology and civic infrastructure, Portals, to initiate conversations about policing in communities where these forms of state action are concentrated.  Portals are virtual chambers where people in disparate communities can converse as if in the same room.  Based on over 850 recorded and transcribed conversations across fourteen neighborhoods in five cities – the most extensive collection of first-hand accounts of the police to date – we analyze patterns in political discourse.  We reveal four currents that challenge liberal-democratic framings of political life:  that an arrangement of distorted responsiveness characterizes the relationship between policed communities and the state; that the political desire of policed communities is not for greater engagement and responsiveness but for political recognition – to be known by the state; and that in contrast to prevailing wisdom about uninformed electorates, these citizens have too much knowledge of and too little power vis-à-vis state representatives.  Finally, we observe among policed communities an “ethics of aversion” in their political responses, a belief that power is best achieved by receding from state institutions in the short term and forging their own collective, community autonomy in the long term. At a broader level, we observe that it is not exclusion from democratic institutions that characterizes political inequality in our time, but inclusion in what we call racial authoritarianism, and the experience of misrecognition that results.

About the Speaker: Vesla Mae Weaver is the Bloomberg Distinguished Associate Professor of Political Science and Sociology at Johns Hopkins University and a 2016-17 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. 

She has contributed to scholarly debates around the persistence of racial inequality, colorism in the United States, the causes and consequences of the dramatic rise in prisons and police power for race-class subjugated communities. She is co-author with Amy Lerman of Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control, the first large-scale empirical study of what the tectonic shifts in incarceration and policing meant for political and civic life in communities where it was concentrated. Weaver is also the co-author of Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America (with J. Hochschild and T. Burch). She is at work on a new book, The State From Below, based on the largest archive of policing narratives using an innovative civic infrastructure called Portals (https://www.portalspolicingproject.com).

About this Event:  American political observers express increasing concern about affective polarization (i.e., partisans’ resentment toward political opponents). We advance debates about America’s partisan divisions by comparing affective polarization in the USA over the past twenty-five years with affective polarization in nineteen other Western publics. We conclude that American affective polarization is not extreme in comparative perspective, although Americans’ dislike of partisan opponents has increased more rapidly since the mid 1990s than in most other Western publics. We then show that affective polarization is more intense when unemployment and inequality are high; when political elites clash over cultural issues such as immigration and national identity; and in countries with majoritarian electoral institutions. Our findings situate American partisan resentment and hostility in comparative perspective and illuminate correlates of affective polarization that are difficult to detect when examining the American case in isolation.

About the Speaker: 

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About this Event: There is no shortage of scholarship on the rise of strategic experts—campaign strategists, consultants, and the like—in Western politics. Some accounts treat the rise of the strategist as an effect of the functional demands of party competition, linked with technological change and the accumulation of political data; others see the rise of the strategist as a symptom of a larger process of party decline. In this seminar I'll present a different argument: the rise of the strategist was linked with a turn, especially on the left, toward prioritizing markets over constituents. This argument is built on an "inside-out" (or refraction) analysis that traces the rise and fall of dominant party experts, attending to the link between their social location and their conceptions of the economic world, democratic politics and experts' public roles.  I will conclude by outlining a new project that builds on this work, tentatively titled Strategy and Democracy.

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About this Event: In this book project, we walk in the footsteps of the pioneers of the nonviolent approach to provide a reinterpretation of the histories of the great movements of the twentieth century from a game theoretic perspective, bringing to bear a host of new quantitative analyses to understand the challenges they faced, when they were successful at overcoming them and why. We develop a simple conceptual framework for understanding the strategies available to both the leaders and the followers of political movements, the media and outside audiences, as well as the regimes that they seek to influence, and how these decisions interact. We use this framework to highlight the presence of three key tensions that exist in many political movements.

These tensions include: those between the allure of violence and the seeming pedestrianism of nonviolence, between the need for numbers and the need for focus, and between organizations that depend on grassroots mobilization versus hierarchies and leadership. 

In light of the framework and new quantitative evidence, we then retrace and re-examine the decisions of the participants of the Indian Independence Movement in each of their three great nonviolent drives for change---the Non-Cooperation Movement of the 1920s, the Civil Disobedience Movement of the 1930s and the Quit India Movement of the 1940s---and how they succeeded or failed in addressing these tensions. At each step, we also discuss both grand strategy and the effectiveness of local tactics. We next compare the Indian experience with the movements that came after, including the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, the Arab Spring and recent protests around the world. Finally, we draw on what we have learned to suggest ideas for better implement nonviolent protests today.

About the Speaker:

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The United States has arguably seen more significant antitrust developments in the last few months than over the past twenty years. Last December the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and 46 states, the District of Columbia, and Guam filed parallel antitrust suits against Facebook, in part related to the acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram. In October, the Department of Justice and 11 states filed a complaint against Google for the alleged monopolization of mobile search and search advertising. Then in December, two multistate coalitions (one led by Texas, the other by Colorado) filed their own antitrust lawsuits against Google. Meanwhile in November, European Union officials also accused Amazon of breaking EU competition rules, and this January a class-action antitrust lawsuit was filed against Amazon here in the U.S. What are the bases of these suits, how have the platforms responded, and what can we expect to see next?

Join Kelly Born, affiliate at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and Director of the Cyber Initiative at the Hewlett Foundation in conversation with Dina Srinivasan from Yale Law School, Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director at the Open Markets Institute and former Regulations Counsel at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and Mark Lemley of Stanford Law School on March 25 at 11 am Pacific Time.

The REDI Task Force invites you to the next event in our "Critical Conversations: Race in Global Affairs" series, featuring a panel moderated by Professor Gabrielle Hecht on inequality in nuclear regimes. This event will be recorded and uploaded to the REDI website.

The nuclear order is rife with inequalities. This panel will contextualize the state of the nuclear order as it stands today  with our ongoing conversation about race, diversity, and inclusion. The panelists will explore how non-proliferation, arms control, and disarmament, intersect and the exclusion that was/remains written into the system. The panel will discuss who in the nuclear world speaks about what, and more importantly, who in the nuclear world can speak about certain things and who cannot. By discussing debates about ‘haves and ‘have nots’ among nuclear states, the role of African-Americans in the disarmament movement, the disproportionate humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons, and inequal effect of the presence of nuclear weapons on marginalized communities, this panel will discuss whether it is even possible to have an equitable framework in a nuclear order that was built to structurally discriminate. There will be time for a Q&A following the discussion.

About the Speakers:

Gabrielle Hecht is the Frank Stanton Foundation Professor of Nuclear Security at CISAC, Senior Fellow at FSI, Professor of History, and REDI Task Force Chair. She is Vice-President/President-Elect of the Society for the History of Technology. Her current research explores radioactive residues, mine waste, air pollution, and the Anthropocene in Africa. Essays based on this research have appeared in Cultural Anthropology, Aeon, Somatosphere, the LA Review of Books, and e-fluxArchitecture. Hecht's graduate courses include colloquia on "Infrastructure and Power in the Global South," "Technopolitics," and "Materiality and Power." She teaches a community-engaged undergraduate research seminar on "Racial Justice in the Nuclear Age," in partnership with the Bayview Hunters Point Community Advocates (BVHPCA). She is currently working with BVHPCA and other partners to develop knowledge infrastructures to underpin community-driven public history that supports racial equity and environmental justice.

* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Seminar Recording:  https://youtu.be/-hERfg-DCYw

About the Event: 

This presentation explores two topics at the nexus of technology and international security: interstate influence operations and technological revolutions.

After Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, influence operations have become a central focus among American policymakers, foreign policy pundits, and publics alike. Yet, Goldstein argues that they remain under-explored and under-theorized in international security studies, with disagreement over how to define the phenomenon implicit in the existing literature. Goldstein will introduce a conceptual framework for foreign influence operations and argue that security studies scholars should pay greater attention to the subject for two reasons. First, they are policy-relevant and likely to remain so; they are cost effective, propagandists are prone to inflate their impact, and they are difficult to deter. Second, studying influence operations can contribute to the academic discipline of security studies by helping to expand restrictive notions of state power and challenge dominant models of foreign policy decision-making.

How do emerging technologies affect the rise and fall of great powers? Scholars have long observed that rounds of technological revolution disrupt the economic balance of power, bringing about a power transition in the international system. However, there has been limited investigation of how this process occurs. The standard explanation emphasizes a country’s ability to dominate innovation in leading sectors, seizing monopoly profits in new, fast-growing industries centered around major technological breakthroughs. Investigating historical cases of industrial revolutions followed by economic power transitions, Ding will present an alternative mechanism based on the diffusion of general-purpose technologies. The findings have direct implications for how recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence could affect the U.S.-China power balance.

About the Speakers: 

Jeffrey Ding is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. Jeffrey’s current research is centered on how technological change affects the rise and fall of great powers. Through investigating historical cases of industrial revolutions, Jeffrey traces causal mechanisms that connect significant technical breakthroughs and economic power transitions — with an eye toward the implications of advances in AI for a possible U.S.-China power transition. Jeffrey’s previous research covered related topics, including China's development of AI, identifying strategic goods and technologies, and technical standards as a vehicle of AI governance.

Josh A. Goldstein is a PhD Candidate and Clarendon Scholar in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. For the 2020-2021 year, he is a pre-doctoral fellow with the Stanford Internet Observatory and part of the inaugural class of non-resident Hans J. Morgenthau Fellows at the Notre Dame International Security Center. Josh’s 3-paper doctoral dissertation takes a multi-method approach to studying the challenges that democracies face from influence operations. His broader research interests lie in international security, political psychology, and foreign policy-decision making.