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Society

FSI researchers work to understand continuity and change in societies as they confront their problems and opportunities. This includes the implications of migration and human trafficking. What happens to a society when young girls exit the sex trade? How do groups moving between locations impact societies, economies, self-identity and citizenship? What are the ethnic challenges faced by an increasingly diverse European Union? From a policy perspective, scholars also work to investigate the consequences of security-related measures for society and its values.

The Europe Center reflects much of FSI’s agenda of investigating societies, serving as a forum for experts to research the cultures, religions and people of Europe. The Center sponsors several seminars and lectures, as well as visiting scholars.

Societal research also addresses issues of demography and aging, such as the social and economic challenges of providing health care for an aging population. How do older adults make decisions, and what societal tools need to be in place to ensure the resulting decisions are well-informed? FSI regularly brings in international scholars to look at these issues. They discuss how adults care for their older parents in rural China as well as the economic aspects of aging populations in China and India.

Geography, Uncertainty, and Polarization

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Using new data on roll-call voting of US state legislators and public opinion in their districts, we explain how ideological polarization of voters within districts can lead to legislative polarization. In so-called “moderate” districts that switch hands between parties, legislative behavior is shaped by the fact that voters are often quite heterogeneous: the ideological distance between Democrats and Republicans within these districts is often greater than the distance between liberal cities and conservative rural areas. We root this intuition in a formal model that associates intradistrict ideological heterogeneity with uncertainty about the ideological location of the median voter. We then demonstrate that among districts with similar median voter ideologies, the difference in legislative behavior between Democratic and Republican state legislators is greater in more ideologically heterogeneous districts. Our findings suggest that accounting for the subtleties of political geography can help explain the coexistence of polarized legislators and a mass public that appears to contain many moderates.

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Journal Articles
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Political Science Research and Methods
Authors
Jonathan Rodden
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From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia

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Michael McFaul, former US ambassador to Russia and director of Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, shares an inside account of U.S.-Russia relations. In 2008, when he was asked to step away from Stanford and join an unlikely presidential campaign, Professor McFaul had no idea that he would find himself at the beating heart of one of today’s most contentious and consequential international relationships. Marking the publication of his new book, From Cold War to Hot Peace, this talk combines history and memoir to tell the full story of U.S.-Russia relations from the fall of the Soviet Union to the new rise of Vladimir Putin.

 

 

Michael McFaul, MA '86, is a professor of political science, director and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has served the Obama administration as Special Assistant to the President, Senior Director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council at the White House, and most recently as the U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation. Professor McFaul has written and edited several books on international relations and foreign policy and his op-ed writings have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. His latest book is From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia. As a NBC News analyst, he provides expertise on foreign affairs and national security coverage.

 

This event is co-sponsored by The European Security Initiative & Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, Stanford University. It is free and open to the public.

 

CEMEX Auditorium

Stanford Graduate School of Business

Michael A. McFaul

Encina Hall
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies, Department of Political Science
Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
mcfaul_headshot_2025.jpg PhD

Michael McFaul is the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in Political Science, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, all at Stanford University. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1995 and served as FSI Director from 2015 to 2025. He is also an international affairs analyst for MSNOW.

McFaul served for five years in the Obama administration, first as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council at the White House (2009-2012), and then as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation (2012-2014).

McFaul has authored ten books and edited several others, including, most recently, Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder, as well as From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia, (a New York Times bestseller) Advancing Democracy Abroad: Why We Should, How We Can; and Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin.

He is a recipient of numerous awards, including an honorary PhD from Montana State University; the Order for Merits to Lithuania from President Gitanas Nausea of Lithuania; Order of Merit of Third Degree from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, and the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford University. In 2015, he was the Distinguished Mingde Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Center at Peking University.

McFaul was born and raised in Montana. He received his B.A. in International Relations and Slavic Languages and his M.A. in Soviet and East European Studies from Stanford University in 1986. As a Rhodes Scholar, he completed his D. Phil. in International Relations at Oxford University in 1991. 

International Working Group on Russian Sanctions

The International Working Group on Russian Sanctions aims to provide expertise and experience to governments and companies around the world by assisting with the formulation of sanctions proposals that will increase the cost to Russia of invading Ukraine, and support democratic Ukraine in the defense of its territorial integrity and national sovereignty.
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Global Populisms

A new project examining the global surge in populist movements and what it means for established democratic rules and institutions.
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Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University
Seminars

Digital transformation of democracy? Challenges and Opportunities

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In this talk we will discuss the challenges and opportunities of various digital initiatives and their potential to affect democracy. More concretely, we will discuss the status of Open Government Data, eID, and Online privacy in Austria and in an international context:
 
Open Government Data (OGD) is a global trend to enable transparency by making public data accessible to citizens, providing trustworthy and transparent information in machine readable form, not least promising to counter populism and "fake news". Austria's OGD initiative is a success story, but also faces many challenges. 
   
Electronic IDs can provide means to make eGovernment and interaction with public institutions more efficient, but depending on how they are implemented, also provide a potential threat to privacy and enable surveillance: this holds both IDs provided by international companies but also for national eIDs: against this background, we shall compare the Austrian eID system with other, alternative models. 
 
Lastly, we shall speak about transparency and accountability of processing of personal information by both private and public institutions. The new European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provides both an opportunity, but also imposes several challenges to the government economically and in terms of preserving the citizens' rights.
 
Axel's presentation slides are available at http://polleres.net/presentations/
 
Axel Polleres 
Axel Polleres is currently a visiting professor at Stanford under the Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair Professors program hosted by The Europe Center and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. At his home institution he heads the Institute of Information Business of Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Wien) which he joined in Sept 2013 as a full professor in the area of "Data and Knowledge Engineering."
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Axel Polleres

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Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair Professor (2017-2018)
Professor of Data and Knowledge Engineering, Vienna University of Economics and Business
axelpolleres.jpg

Axel Polleres heads the Institute of Information Business of Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Wien) which he joined in Sept 2013 as a full professor in the area of "Data and Knowledge Engineering". Since January 2017 he is also a member of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna Faculty. He obtained his Ph.D. and habilitation from Vienna University of Technology and worked at University of Innsbruck, Austria, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain, the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and for Siemens AG's Corporate Technology Research division before joining WU Wien. His research focuses on querying and reasoning about ontologies, rules languages, logic programming, Semantic Web technologies, Web services, knowledge management, Linked Open Data, configuration technologies and their applications. He has worked in several European and national research projects in these areas. Axel has published more than 100 articles in journals, books, and conference and workshop contributions and co-organised several international conferences and workshops in the areas of logic programming, Semantic Web, data management, Web services and related topics and acts/acted as editorial board member for JWS, SWJ and IJSWIS. Moreover, he actively contributed to international standardisation efforts within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) where he co-chaired the W3C SPARQL working group.

Head, Institute of Information Business, Vienna University of Economics and Business

Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair Professor: Axel Polleres

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Axel PolleresAxel Polleres is currently a visiting professor at Stanford under the Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair Professors program hosted by The Europe Center in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
 
During his stay at Stanford, Axel will work mainly with the Biomedical Informatics Research Center (BMIR). At his home institution he heads the Institute of Information Business of Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Wien) which he joined in September 2013 as a full professor in the area of Data and Knowledge Engineering. Since January 2017 he is also a member of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna Faculty. Apart from his research in the area of efficient and intelligent Data management, Semantic Web and Web standards, he recently co-founded a research lab on Privacy and Sustainable Computing at WU where he works on projects about privacy and lowering the entry barriers to Open Data on the Web. 
 
While visiting Stanford, he plans on transfer his work on Linked Data, which he so far applied mostly in the are of Open Government Data, to other domains such as biomedical research data or in the library domain, both areas where the integration of vast amounts of heterogeneous (meta-)data from different sources and lowering entry-barriers to access this data are likewise important.
 
Axel will be giving a talk on Digital transformation of democracy? Challenges and Opportunities at The Europe Center on May 17, 2018. He will discuss the challenges and opportunities of various digital initiatives and their potential to affect democracy. More concretely, he will discuss the status of Open Government Data, eID, and Online privacy in Austria and in an international context:
 
Open Government Data (OGD) is a global trend to enable transparency by making public data accessible to citizens, providing trustworthy and transparent information in machine readable form, not least promising to counter populism and "fake news". Austria's OGD initiative is a success story, but also faces many challenges. Electronic IDs can provide means to make eGovernment and interaction with public institutions more efficient, but depending on how hey are implemented, also provide a potential threat to privacy and enable surveillance: this holds both IDs provided by international companies but also for national eIDs: against this background, we shall compare the Austrian eID system with other, alternative models. Lastly, he will speak about transparency and accountability of processing of personal information by both private and public institutions. The new European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provides both an opportunity, but also imposes several challenges to the government economically and in terms of preserving the citizens' rights.

 

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Beyond Engaged Literature: Samir El-Youssef's The Illusion of Return

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A feature of contemporary politics is the tendency to focus primarily onnarratives , as if the story lines were more important than the events. One often finds, for example, that news reports themselves become the news, rather than the conflicts, interests, or power struggles that purportedly make up the content. This sort of self-referentiality of the narrative producers may serve the media well, even if it impoverishes the reporting provided to the public. This narrative turn would be worthy of close scrutiny: is it part of the postmodern condition or is it symptomatic of somedeeper problem?
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TELOS: Critical Theory of the Contemporary
Authors
Russell A. Berman
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Keynote | Communist Century: New Studies in Revolution, Resistance and Radicalism

Keynote: 

Thursday, February 8, 2018
6:00pm
Stanford Alumni Center, Fisher Conference Center, 326 Galvez St. (please note venue change)

From Lenin to Putin: Biography as Window on Soviet/Russian Politics
with Professor William Taubman, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian

 

The conference, "Communist Century: New Studies in Revolution, Resistance and Radicalism" begins on February 9, 2018 at 9am.  For the agenda, please visit:
http://tec.fsi.stanford.edu/events/communist-century-new-studies-revolu…

 

More Information:
https://creees.stanford.edu/events/communist-century-new-studies-revolution-resistance-and-radicalism


Sponsorships:
The Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, The Europe Center, Department of History, School of Humanities and Sciences, and the Taube Center for Jewish Studies

 

Fisher Conference Center
Stanford Alumni Center
326 Galvez Street

Conference | The Communist Century: New Studies in Revolution, Resistance and Radicalism

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Conference Agenda:

Friday, February 9, 2018
9:00am - 5:30pm
Stanford Alumni Center, Fisher Conference Center, 326 Galvez St.

  • 9:00-9:30 am: Breakfast
  • 9:30-9:45 am: Introductory Remarks
  • 9:45-10:45 am: Steven Zipperstein (Stanford University): Engineering the Human Soul:  Reflections on Jews and Communism
  • 10:45-11:45 am: Norman Naimark (Stanford University): Stalin, Europe, and the Struggle for Sovereignty, 1944-1949
  • 11:45 am-1:00 pm: Lunch
  • 1:00-2:00 pm: David Holloway (Stanford University): Science, Technology, and Soviet Modernity
  • 2:00-3:00 pm: Benjamin Nathans (University of Pennsylvania): Formations of Dissent in the Late Soviet Era: Circle, Square, Network, Movement
  • 3:00-3:30 pm:  Coffee Break
  • 3:30-4:30 pm: Amir Weiner (Stanford University): The KGB: An Autobiography
  • 4:30-5:30 pm: Anna Grzymala-Busse (Stanford University): Post-Communist Populism
  • 5:30 pm:  Concluding Remarks

 

More Information:
https://creees.stanford.edu/events/communist-century-new-studies-revolution-resistance-and-radicalism


Sponsorships:
The Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, The Europe Center, Department of History, School of Humanities and Sciences, and the Taube Center for Jewish Studies

 

Fisher Conference Center
Stanford Alumni Center
326 Galvez Street

Conferences

Red Leviathan: Authority and Violence in Revolutionary Political Culture

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As Mao euphemistically remarked, revolutions are not dinner parties. Violence is to be expected when political regimes are overturned. But the violence that accompanied modern revolutions is remarkable for the fact that it targeted fellow revolutionaries almost as often as declared opponents. Why is this? In this essay, I suggest that the reason has to do with a specific feature of revolutions that abandon constitutional forms of political legitimacy. These revolutions, following the precedent of the French “revolutionary government” (1793–94) and Marx's model of a “revolution in permanence,” tend to base the authority of their governments on the fulfillment of revolutionary expectations. This creates a political culture in which authority derives from the power to define what these expectations are, and what “revolution” means (much like Hobbes's sovereign had the power to set the meaning of words). But revolutionary culture does not leave room for Rawlsian pluralism. “There can be no solution to the social problem but mine,” proclaims the revolutionary ideologue in Dostoyevsky's The Possessed, expressing the law of the Red Leviathan. Such a system does not allow for loyal opposition. Accordingly, the specter of counterrevolution always hovers above disagreements between fellow revolutionaries. The purge thus becomes the necessary method for settling ideological differences.

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Publication Type
Journal Articles
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
History & Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History
Authors
Dan Edelstein
Number
56:4
External URL

Partnering & Parricide: Establishment reactions to new political parties, and their electoral effects

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For a democracy, a necessary condition is openness to new political ideas. New ideas are often carried by new political parties. New parties are confronted with all kinds of reactions by established actors. What electoral effects do political, legal and media reactions have? Joost will present empirical evidence from experimental and non-experimental studies (in 15 countries since 1944) on reactions to various new parties, including anti-immigration parties.

joost van spanje

Joost van Spanje is associate professor in the University of Amsterdam communication science department. This department ranks second worldwide (2017 QS Rankings by subject). Joost previously conducted research at the University of Oxford, the EUI in Florence, and New York University. His current research team investigates legal action against anti-immigration parties in 21 European countries since 1965, and its effects on citizens. Joost currently also studies how news media in established democracies cover new political parties. He has published 27 ISI-ranked journal articles as well as the monograph "Controlling the Electoral Marketplace: How Established Parties Ward Off Competition" (2017).

William J. Perry Conference Room
Encina Hall, 2nd floor
616 Serra Street

Joost van Spanje Associate Professor Guest speaker Communication Science Department, University of Amsterdam
Lectures
European Governance
European Governance Seminar Series
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