About the Event:   In partnership with The Hoover Project on China's Global Sharp Power, Jonathan Hillman from the Center for Strategic & International Studies, Min Ye from Boston University, and Glenn Tiffert from Stanford's Hoover Institution discuss the current status of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which stands to be the largest bilateral infrastructure development program of the century. The event will discuss Hillman's new book, The Emperor's New Road: China and the Project of the Century and Ye’s new book, The Belt, Road and Beyond: State-Mobilized Globalization in China 1998-2018 and review the impacts of BRI on global trade and geopolitics.

About the Speakers:

Jonathan E. Hillman is a senior fellow with the CSIS Economics Program and director of the Reconnecting Asia Project, one of the most extensive open-source databases tracking China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Previously, Hillman served as a policy advisor and chief speechwriter at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. His first book is The Emperor's New Road: China and the Project of the Century.

 

Min Ye is the author of The Belt, Road and Beyond: State-Mobilized Globalization in China 1998-2018 (Cambridge University Press 2020), Diasporas and Foreign Direct Investment in China and India (Cambridge University Press 2014), and the Making of Northeast Asia (with Kent Calder, Stanford University Press, 2020). Her articles, “Fragmentation and Mobilization: Domestic Politics of China’s Belt and Road”, “Competing Cooperation in Asia Pacific: TPP, RCEP, and the New Silk Road”, and “Conditions and Utility of Diffusion by Diasporas” have appeared in Journal of Contemporary China, Journal of Asian Security, and Journal of East Asian Studies.

 

 

 

Glenn Tiffert is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he manages its project on China’s Global Sharp Power. A historian of modern China, his research focuses on the PRC’s political and legal systems. He also works closely with government and civil society partners in the United States and elsewhere around the world to document and build resilience against authoritarian interference with democratic institutions. He currently serves on the executive committee of the Academic Security and Counter-Exploitation Program, an association of US universities established to help heighten security awareness in academia.  

 

 

 

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

 

Seminar Recording:  https://youtu.be/zrDq0xRWnhk

 

About the Event: Determination and verification of the nuclear activities of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) are critical to ongoing disarmament and nonproliferation efforts. This study assesses the complete nuclear fuel cycle of the DPRK, from its capacity to produce fissile material precursors at mining and milling facilities in Pyongsan, to activity at the main Nuclear Scientific Research Center in Yongbyon. An interdisciplinary approach is used to analyze the different stages of the DRPK’s nuclear fuel cycle. In investigating the uranium ore grade and ore production capacity at the mining and milling facilities, we combine analysis of archival geological maps, geological field survey reports, and first-hand collection and geochemical analysis of comparable rock samples from the Korean Peninsula. In analyzing the ongoing activities at fissile material production facilities, we integrate satellite imagery analysis with machine learning algorithms, allowing for automated analysis of large image sets.

 

About the Speaker: Sulgiye Park is a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at CISAC, Stanford University, where she focuses primarily on investigating the front-end of uranium pathway in North Korea. She looks at the uranium mining and milling processes for disarmament and nonproliferation efforts. Prior to joining CISAC, Sulgiye was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford Geological Sciences and Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, where Sulgiye studied materials' behaviors at extreme environments.

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

About the Event: The paradox of analyzing politics in Myanmar is never knowing whether or not events should surprise us. What Myanmar’s traumatic political history tells us is likely to happen is often diametrically opposed to what comparative and theoretical perspectives tell us is likely to happen. This presentation will consider Myanmar’s past decade of experimenting with reversible political reforms – which at least for now seems to have culminated in the military coup of February 1^st – from both of these divergent perspectives. It will then draw upon those perspectives to offer several optimistic scenarios, before puzzling over how to assess the relative likelihood of the main optimistic and pessimistic scenarios coming to pass.

 

About the Speaker:  Dan Slater is the Ronald and Eileen Weiser Professor of Emerging Democracies in the Department of Political Science and Director of the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies (WCED) at the University of Michigan. He specializes in the politics and history of democracy and authoritarianism, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia. His most recent articles can be found in the Annual Review of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics, Democratization, Government and Opposition, Journal of East Asian Studies, Perspectives on Politics, and Social Science History.   

ABSTRACT 

This talk is based on the speakers’ recently published edited volume The Unfinished Arab Spring: Micro-Dynamics of Revolts between Change and Continuity. Adopting an original analytical approach in explaining various dynamics at work behind the Arab revolts and giving voice to local dynamics and legacies rather than concentrating on debates about paradigms, we highlight micro-perspectives of change and resistance as well as of contentious politics that are often marginalized and left unexplored in favor of macro-analyses. First, we re-examine the stories of the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Morocco and Algeria through diverse and novel perspectives, looking at factors that have not yet been sufficiently underlined but carry explanatory power for what has occurred. Second, rather than focusing on macro-comparative regional trends – however useful they might be – we focus on the particularities of each country, highlighting distinctive micro-dynamics of change and continuity. ​

SPEAKERS BIO

Fatima el Issawi is a Reader in Journalism and Media Studies at the University of Essex. Her research focuses on the intersection between media, politics and conflicts in transitional contexts to democracy in North Africa. She is the Principal Investigator for the research project “Media and Transitions to Democracy: Journalistic Practices in Communicating Conflicts- the Arab Spring” funded by the British Academy Sustainable Development Programme, looking at media’s impact on communicating political conflicts in post uprisings in North Africa. Since 2012, el Issawi has been leading empirical comparative research projects on the interplay between media and political change, funded by Open Society Foundation and the Middle East Centre/LSE, covering Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Libya and Algeria. El Issawi’s expertise crosses journalism, public communication, policy and academia. She has over fifteen years of experience as international correspondent in conflict zones in the MENA region. She is the author of “Arab National Media and Political Change” investigating the complex intersections between traditional journalists and politics in uncertain times of transitions to democracy.

Francesco Cavatorta is full professor of political science and director of the Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherche sur l’Afrique et le Moyen Orient (CIRAM) at Laval University, Quebec, Canada. His research focuses on the dynamics of authoritarianism and democratization in the Middle East and North Africa. His current research projects deal with party politics and the role of political parties in the region. He has published numerous journal articles and books.

About the Event:  Increasing access to higher education is often seen as a threat to authoritarian regimes. Accordingly, authoritarian rulers would limit access to avoid the spread of anti-regime sentiments. Turkey suggests an interesting case. The consolidation of single party-rule overlapped with an impressive expansion of higher education, by 170 percent, from 76 in 2002 to 206 in 2020. This paper examines these two trends in connection with each other by focusing on universities' role as infrastructural mechanisms for both democratic culture and state coercion.  

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

 

Seminar Recording:  https://youtu.be/ISsBNJEKP70

 

About the Event: This chapter builds on my earlier writing during the West African Ebola outbreak, in which I argue that health security paradigms and militarized health interventions engender “defensiveness” in landscapes of care, while they also intensify already securitized landscapes and relationships of development and humanitarian aid. In this chapter, I include insights about the US-authored Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA), to suggest that the Government of Sierra Leone’s 2014 adoption of the agenda has helped to strengthen containment and control paradigms at the expense of care, and to prioritize the collection and management of disease event data over other pressing concerns related to health care delivery (cf. Benton 2015). Specifically, I analyze global health security policy discourse and practice outlined in the GHSA and militarized health interventions as they travel and settle in four disparate sites: a rural clinic in eastern Sierra Leone (see Kardas-Nelson and Frankfurter 2018); abandoned and repurposed treatment centers; the Imperial War Museum’s temporary exhibit “Fighting Extremes: From Ebola to Isis;” and US and Sierra Leonean political rhetoric explicitly linking Ebola virus disease and terrorism (whether by metaphor, analogy, or literal means). Reading across these sites, I show how projects of counter-terrorism and humanitarianism subtend global health policy, and become institutionalized in and through the everyday management of public health provision.

 

About the Speaker: Adia Benton is an associate professor of Anthropology and African Studies at Northwestern University, where she is affiliated with the Science in Human Culture Program. She is the author of the award-winning book, HIV Exceptionalism: Development through Disease in Sierra Leone, and is currently writing a book about the West African Ebola outbreak.

About the Event: Do programmatic policies always yield electoral rewards? A growing body of research attributes the adoption of programmatic policies in African states to increased electoral competition. However, these works seldom explore how the specifics of policy implementation condition voters’ electoral responses to programmatic policies over time, or changes in electoral effects throughout policy cycles. We analyze the electoral effects of both the promise and implementation of a programmatic policy designed to increase secondary school enrollment in Tanzania over three election cycles. We find that the incumbent party benefited from a campaign promise to increase access to secondary schooling, but incurred an electoral penalty following implementation of the policy. We do not find any significant electoral effects by the third electoral cycle. Our findings illuminate temporal dynamics of policy feedback, the conditional electoral effects of programmatic policies, and the need for more studies of entire policy cycles over multiple electoral periods.

 

About the Speaker:  Dr. Ken Opalo is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. His research interests include the political economy of development, legislative politics, and electoral accountability in African states. Ken’s current research projects include studies of political reform in Ethiopia, the politics of education sector reform in Tanzania, and electoral accountability under devolved government in Kenya. His works have been published in Governance, the British Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Democracy, and the Journal of Eastern African Studies. His first book, titled Legislative Development in Africa: Politics and Post-Colonial Legacies (Cambridge University Press, 2019) explores the historical roots of contemporary variation in legislative institutionalization and strength in Africa. Ken earned his BA from Yale University and PhD from Stanford University.

 

About the Event:  In the wake of the racial unrest of 1968, the federal government  embarked on a series of social programs designed to  respond to the cries of Black communities demanding an end to police brutality, access to quality housing, and economic investment in schools and jobs.  Often, these cries were not fully heeded, and the marketplace became a terrain on which corporate America and the state argued that Black lives could be improved.  In this presentation on her most recent book, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, historian Marcia Chatelain links the rise of black capitalism with the fracturing of the mid-century civil rights struggle and eclipsing of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of economic justice.  In lieu of policies that could enhance the quality of life in America’s cities, many Black neighborhoods were offered fast food outlets, low-wage work, and an enmeshed relationship with corporate benevolence.

Webinar recording: https://youtu.be/8oDHKdyhZO0

 

In recognition of Human Rights Day on December 10, SPICE is honored to feature Dr. Kiyoteru Tsutsui, Professor of Sociology at Stanford University. Tsutsui’s research and scholarship on the globalization of human rights and its impact on local policy and politics—particularly with regards to minority groups in Japan—has helped to shape student awareness and understanding of the multitude of issues surrounding the protection of human rights.

In this webinar, Tsutsui will address the following:

• How did “human rights” emerge as a universal norm and become institutionalized into various international treaties, organs, and instruments?
• What impact have all the international institutions had on actual local human rights practices?
• How do the case studies of the three most salient minority groups in Japan—the Ainu, Koreans, and Burakumin—help us to understand the transformative effect of global human rights ideas and institutions on minority activists?

Tsutsui’s in-depth historical comparative analysis in his book, Rights Make Might: Global Human Rights and Minority Social Movements in Japan, offers rare windows into local, micro-level impact of global human rights and contributes to our understanding of international norms and institutions, social movements, human rights, ethnoracial politics, and Japanese society.

This webinar is a joint collaboration between the Japan Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Center for East Asian Studies, and SPICE at Stanford University.

 

Featured Speaker:

Kiyoteru Tsutsui, PhD 

Kiyoteru Tsutsui is the Henri H. and Tomoye Takahashi Professor and Senior Fellow in Japanese Studies at Shorenstein APARC, the Director of the Japan Program at APARC, a Senior Fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Professor of Sociology at Stanford University. Prior to his appointment at Stanford in July 2020, Tsutsui was Professor of Sociology, Director of the Center for Japanese Studies, and Director of the Donia Human Rights Center at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Tsutsui’s research interests lie in political/comparative sociology, social movements, globalization, human rights, and Japanese society. More specifically, he has conducted (1) cross-national quantitative analyses on how human rights ideas and instruments have expanded globally and impacted local politics and (2) qualitative case studies of the impact of global human rights on Japanese politics. 

His research on the globalization of human rights and its impact on local politics has appeared in numerous academic publications and social science journals. His recent book publications include Rights Make Might: Global Human Rights and Minority Social Movements in Japan (Oxford University Press 2018), and the co-edited volume Corporate Social Responsibility in a Globalizing World (with Alwyn Lim, Cambridge University Press 2015). He has been a recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, National Science Foundation grants, and the SSRC/CGP Abe Fellowship, among numerous other grants and awards. Tsutsui received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Kyoto University and earned an additional master’s degree and PhD from Stanford’s sociology department in 2002.