What are the signature features of the reactions of mass publics to terrorist attacks? We argue that the available empirical evidence suggests a general pattern of reactions: The peaks of mass reactions to terrorist attacks are limited in size and duration and their end states marked by a return to baselines values of tolerance. We label this perturbation effects. In this article, we review the available evidence for perturbation effects, build a heuristic model of such effects and provide an explanation of their characteristic pattern, combing theories of emotional arousal and opinion leadership. Finally, we relate the overlooked existence of perturbation effects to widespread fears about the frailty of democratic norms in the face of mass terrorism.
On January 27, true to his campaign promise to suspend Muslim immigration, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order restricting all immigration from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, and indefinitely barring Syrian refugees from entering the United States. By doing so, the Trump administration has taken a definite stance on what it holds as the threat posed by immigrants and refugees to U.S. security. As we argued in April 2016, however, democracies like the United States “are not opening their doors to terrorism when they let in Muslim immigrants.”
When a Tunisian-born man drove a 19-ton rented truck into a crowd of revelers celebrating France’s national holiday in the Mediterranean town of Nice last week, killing 84 people and injuring hundreds more, it was a deadly new example of an old terrorist tactic of turning vehicles into weapons, according to Stanford experts.
French authorities identified the man behind the wheel as Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a 31-year-old immigrant from Tunisia who had lived in France since around 2005 and had been working as a delivery driver. Police shot him dead on the scene.
“It was just unfortunate that he was somebody who already drove big trucks,” said Crenshaw.
“He did not have to go do something special, like train for a pilot’s license in the way that the 911 hijackers did, in order to acquire the means to kill people.”
Vehicles as tools of terror
Crenshaw said there had been around 30 incidents worldwide since 1994 where terrorists used vehicles as their primary weapon in attacks on civilians (not including car and truck bombs where explosives were used). Crenshaw noted that not all those vehicle attacks caused casualties.
If you include assaults on police and military targets, there have been more than 155 attacks where a vehicle has been used as a weapon in the way the truck was used in Nice, with over 75 of those attacks occurring in just the last three years, according to data from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START).
However, the exceptionally high number of casualties puts the attack in Nice in a league of its own. Most of the vehicle attacks on police and military only result in one or two casualties at a checkpoint or other hard target.
Stanford terrorism expert and former U.S. Special Forces Colonel Joe Felter said he was concerned that the attack in Nice “lowered the threshold” for aspiring terrorists who would be motivated to carry out copycat attacks.
“This was a disturbingly effective attack,” said Felter, a senior research scholar at CISAC.
“The message for would-be terrorists is that you don’t have to become a bomb maker to successfully execute a mass casualty attack. With a driver’s license and a credit card you can weaponize a rental truck.”
A challenge for law enforcement
Former CISAC fellow Terrence Peterson said it would be particularly difficult for law enforcement agencies to prevent terrorists from gaining access to vehicles.
“The types of people who would show up on other lists…like the no-fly list, are not going to show up when they rent a car,” said Peterson.
“A car is such a mundane object. How do you control using an everyday object for a terrorist attack? It’s nearly impossible.”
Al Qaeda had previously advocated using pickup trucks to target civilians, in the “Open Source Jihad” section of its propaganda magazine “Inspire.”
“The idea is to use a pickup truck as a mowing machine, not to mow grass but mow down the enemies of Allah,” according to a translation on the Web site MEMRI Cyber and Jihad Lab, which tracks jihadist postings online.
The article also advised would-be terrorists to, “pick your location and timing carefully. Go for the most crowded locations. Narrower spots are also better because it gives less chance for the people to run away…Therefore, it is important to study your path of operation before hand.”
French prosecutors said that Bouhlel carried out surveillance of the Promenade des Anglais prior to his attack there, and that he conducted online research into the mass shootings in Orlando and Dallas.
Murky motivations
It is still unclear what motivated Bouhlel. He had a history of domestic violence, psychological problems and money troubles, according to media reports. Acquaintances said the divorced father of three was not an outwardly religious Muslim. He reportedly drank alcohol, used drugs, ate pork and had sexual encounters with other men, all of which are forbidden under strict interpretations of Islam.
However, French authorities have suggested that he may have undergone a rapid conversion to radical Islam. And a Web site affiliated with the terror group ISIS has claimed Bouhlel as “a soldier of the Islamic State.”
[[{"fid":"223450","view_mode":"crop_870xauto","fields":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"A reproduction of the picture on the residence permit of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the man who rammed his truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice on July 14.","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"A reproduction of the picture on the residence permit of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the man who rammed his truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice on July 14.","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"A reproduction of the picture on the residence permit of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the man who rammed his truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice on July 14.","field_credit[und][0][value]":"AFP/Getty Images","field_caption[und][0][value]":"A reproduction of the picture on the residence permit of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the man who rammed his truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice on July 14.","field_related_image_aspect[und][0][value]":"","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"A reproduction of the picture on the residence permit of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the man who rammed his truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice on July 14.","title":"A reproduction of the picture on the residence permit of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the man who rammed his truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice on July 14.","width":"870","style":"width: 250px; height: 362px; float: right; margin-left: 15px","class":"media-element file-crop-870xauto"}}]]“It's plausible that the message of ISIS resonated with him as a Muslim immigrant living on the fringes of society, which would be consistent with my research team’s finding that people who feel “culturally homeless” experience a lack of purpose in their lives, which, in turn, is associated with stronger support for fundamentalist groups and causes,” said Sarah Lyons-Padilla, a Stanford research scientist in the Department of Psychology’s Center for Social Psychological Answers to Real-World Questions who’s studying the marginalization of Muslim immigrants at risk for radicalization.
The apocalyptic ideology of jihadist groups like the Islamic State (also known as “Daesh”) could be particularly appealing to “petty criminals, psychologically deranged or otherwise lost souls” such as Bouhlel, said David Laitin, James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins professor of Political Science.
“Spurred by Salafist propaganda, these recruits can work privately, away from any institutional connection with Daesh, to cause horror,” Laitin said.
“And many police forces are out of touch with vulnerable populations and are slow to identify potential recruits.”
"Confrontation is unavoidable"
Regardless of Bouhlel’s motivation, his attack would likely bolster the anti-immigrant agenda of France’s far-right political parties such as the National Front, which advocate policies such as closing the borders, exiting the European Union and deporting bi-nationals with links to Islamist groups, said Cécile Alduy, associate professor of French and an affiliated faculty member with the Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
“The attacks will only strengthen the feeling that the political elites in power failed, and that the National Front “told us so” and are the only ones left to trust,” Alduy said.
Patrick Calvar, the head of France’s counter-terrorism intelligence agency DGSI, warned earlier this year that the recent series of terror attacks on French soil could trigger “inter-ethnic clashes” between far-right vigilante groups and Muslims living in France.
“One or two more terrorist attacks” and “the confrontation [between the two sides] is unavoidable,” said Calvar.
Alduy said she feared the shift in French public opinion could make Calvar’s prediction more likely.
“An opinion poll…in March 2015 put “sadness” as the primary feeling that respondents identified with following the Charlie Hebdo attacks,” Alduy said.
“After the November attacks, it was “anger”, with “hatred” following closely for over 60% of them. Now what will it be?”
The coordinated suicide bombings that killed more than 30 people and wounded 250 more at an international airport and downtown subway station in Brussels on Tuesday were “shocking but not surprising” and shared many of the hallmarks of previous European terror attacks, according to Stanford terrorism experts.
“My research shows that in general, terrorist plots in Europe involve larger numbers of conspirators than do plots in the United States,” said Martha Crenshaw, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).
Belgian authorities said that as many as five people may have been directly involved in the bombings, including two Belgian-born brothers with violent criminal records, and that several suspects were linked to the same terrorist network that carried out the deadly Paris attacks last November.
“It is common for terrorist conspiracies anywhere to be formed from prior social groupings – friends and relatives,” said Crenshaw.
“The bonds that link individuals are not entirely ideological by any means. Criminal backgrounds are also not surprising. Indeed prison radicalization is a well-known phenomenon.”
A Notorious Neighborhood
Many of the suspects in the Brussels bombings had ties to the inner-city neighborhood of Molenbeek, a majority Muslim enclave of mostly Moroccan descent with a long history as a logistical base for jihadists.
[[{"fid":"222520","view_mode":"crop_870xauto","fields":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"Belgian police stand guard in the Molenbeek district in Brussels during an operation to arrest Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam on March 18, 2016.","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Belgian police stand guard in the Molenbeek district in Brussels during an operation to arrest Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam on March 18, 2016.","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Belgian police stand guard in the Molenbeek district in Brussels during an operation to arrest Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam on March 18, 2016.","field_credit[und][0][value]":"John Thys/AFP/Getty Images","field_caption[und][0][value]":"Belgian police stand guard in the Molenbeek district in Brussels during an operation to arrest Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam on March 18, 2016.","field_related_image_aspect[und][0][value]":"","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Belgian police stand guard in the Molenbeek district in Brussels during an operation to arrest Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam on March 18, 2016.","title":"Belgian police stand guard in the Molenbeek district in Brussels during an operation to arrest Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam on March 18, 2016.","width":"870","style":"width: 550px; float: right; height: 366px; margin-left: 15px;","class":"media-element file-crop-870xauto"}}]]French and Belgian police arrested Salah Abdesalam, who had been identified as the last surviving member of the ten-man team responsible for the Paris attacks and an apparent associate of the Brussels bombers, near his family home in Molenbeek just four days before the Brussels attacks.
“Brussels and particularly Molenbeek is one of those places that comes up a lot when you’re talking about counter terrorism,” said Terrence Peterson, a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC.
“You do have terrorism networks that use these areas, in the same way that organized crime does, to thrive…It seems to be the place where all the networks are locating in part because Belgian security hasn’t been very effective in fighting terrorism.”
Foreign Fighters Bring the War Home
Belgium is a small nation, with a population of around 11 million people, but it has the highest per capita percentage of any Western country of foreign fighters who have joined the battle in Iraq and Syria, according to a recent report, which estimated the total number at 440.
“People were even saying it was not a matter of if, but when Belgium was attacked,” said Joe Felter, a CISAC senior research scholar and former Colonel in the U.S. Army Special Forces.
“You’ve got a high concentration of radicalized individuals in that neighborhood of Brussels, so logistically it was easier for them to recruit, plan and coordinate the execution of these attacks. Local residents loading up explosive packed suitcases in a cab and driving across town to the airport exposes them to much less risk of compromise than would a plot requiring cross border preparation and movement by foreign citizens.”
Felter said he was concerned that the Brussels bombings, for which the Islamic State group has claimed responsibility, would inspire copycat attacks in other countries.
“The real risk now is these home-grown, self-directed terrorist attacks,” he said.
“A successful attack like this, with all its media attention and publicity, is only going to inspire and motivate more attempts going forward.”
Former U.S. Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton delivers a foreign policy address at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies on March 23, 2016.
Former U.S. Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said European nations needed to do a better job of sharing intelligence to track foreign fighters as they returned home, during a foreign policy speech at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies on Wednesday.
“The most urgent task is stopping the flow of foreign fighters to and from the Middle East,” Clinton said.
“Thousands of young recruits have flocked to Syria from France, Germany, Belgium and the United Kingdom. Their European passports make it easier for them to cross borders and eventually return home, radicalized and battle-hardened. We need to know the identities of every fighter who makes that trip and start revoking their passports and visas.”
Turkey’s president announced at a press conference on Wednesday that his country had deported one of the suspected Brussels bombers back to the Netherlands last year with a clear warning that he was a jihadi.
Identifying Hot Spots
Clinton said authorities also needed to work to improve social conditions in problem areas such as Molenbeek.
“There…has to be a special emphasis on identifying and investing in the hot spots, the specific neighborhoods, prisons and schools where recruitment happens in clusters as we’ve seen in Brussels,” Clinton said.
Other European countries such as Denmark, which has also been struggling to deal with a high percentage of foreign fighters, are trying to proactively to discourage citizens from travelling to Syria to fight, said Anja Dalgaard-Nielsen, former executive director of the Danish Security and Intelligence Service and a CISAC affiliate.
“Politicians are likely to talk about tougher legislation, but there are also measured voices, calling for a strong, long term preventive effort against radicalization to prevent problems from growing out of hand,” said Dalgaard-Nielsen.
Cover of the book "Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies" co-authored by Stanford Political Science professor David Laitin.
“Police need to prioritize community outreach and long term trust building to try to ensure the collaboration of minority groups and socioeconomically disadvantaged communities in the effort against terrorism.”
Stanford political science professor David Laitin, who recently published the book “Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies,” in collaboration with Claire Adida and Marie-Anne Valfort, said his research found that Muslims faced higher discrimination in the economy, in society and in the political process compared to Christians from similar immigrant backgrounds.
“But there is no evidence that higher degrees of discrimination lead Muslims into the unspeakable acts that members of an inhuman cult are performing in the name of Islam,” said Laitin, who is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences.
“From what we have tragically seen, the attractiveness of the present murderous cult does not derive from everyday discrimination," he said. "Research has shown that it is not the poor and downtrodden who are radicalized in this way; but rather reasonably educated second-generation immigrants from largely secular backgrounds.”
Europe Divided
Laitin said he expected to see many European countries tighten their border controls in response to the Brussels attacks, as well as greater support in the United Kingdom for the movement to leave the European Union in the upcoming referendum.
“The biggest short-term effect, in my judgment, will be the erosion of one of the great achievements of European integration, namely Schengen, which promised open borders throughout the continent,” Laitin said.
“I foresee greater security walls that will come to divide European countries.”
Fighting a Hostile Ideology
Felter said that while it was undoubtedly important to improve intelligence sharing and invest in greater security measures as part of concerted efforts to target ISIS and interdict future terrorist plots, the key to undermining support for and defeating ISIS was combating its perverted version of Islam.
And, he said, that effort would have to come largely from within the Islamic community itself.
“The symptoms may be suicide bombers in airports, but the root cause is this hostile ideology that’s being pushed on these at-risk individuals through aggressive radicalization and recruitment efforts carried out largely via the internet that then inspires them to carry out these self-directed, ISIS-inspired attacks,” Felter said.
“There’s got to be a longer-term effort to address the root causes of this, to discredit and delegitimize the appeal of this ideology that they’re promulgating online and through social media that’s inspiring these young men and women to go off and commit these horrible acts in the misguided belief that it is their religious obligation to do so.”
How do democratic societies respond to acts of terror? More precisely, what are the political consequences of the "Charlie Hebdo" attacks and the November 13 rampage in 2015 in Paris? Past research has examined the impact of threatening events on attitudes toward ethnic and religious minorities, as well as its influence on the endorsement of authoritarian policies. However, up until now, the impact of terrorist events on political participation has not been examined. This talk aims to assess the influence of fear and anger evoked by threat on the propensity to take part in various political activities, drawing on two representative surveys conducted in the aftermath of the January and November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris.
Martial Foucault is a professor of political science at Sciences Po in Paris, director of the CEVIPOF (CNRS) and associate researcher within the Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire d’Evaluation des Politiques Publiques (LIEPP).
This lecture is co-sponsored by the French and Italian Department, The Europe Center, Stanford University Library, the France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, the Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.
German Library, Room 252 Building 260
Martial Foucault
Professor of Political Science
speaker
Institute of Political Science (Sciences Po), Paris
After the attacks in Paris, TEC faculty affiliate Russell A. Berman argues that "ISIS is hardly the only challenge to American power and the international order" and that "strategic thinking has to consider long term issues and not merely react to immediate events or even the most terrible headlines." Instead, he encourages the U.S. to strengthen alliances with the Europeans and the Sunnis in the December 1, 2015 edition of The Caravan.
In the aftermath of the fatal attacks on the cartoonists of Charlie Hebo, TEC affiliate faculty Cécile Alduy explores the French reaction to the violence in light of the competing ideologies of an inclusive, secular republican unity and a more traditional, fearful nationalist rhetoric.
The deadly terrorist attacks in Paris last Friday that killed 129 people and wounded around 350 more signaled a significant change in strategy for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the radical jihadist organization that has claimed responsibility.
“It underscores that this threat is real and that ISIS is not going to be content to consolidate its power in Iraq and Syria,” said Joe Felter, a former Colonel in the U.S. Army Special Forces and senior research scholar Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).
“They have demonstrated their ability to project power into foreign countries and conduct what I would call an “asymmetric strategic bombing capacity” in the form of these home-grown Western citizens who are willing to strap on suicide vests and blow up targets in support of ISIS directed objectives.
“They’re able to launch attacks with centralized planning and decentralized execution in a way that makes anticipating and interdicting them very difficult.”
French President François Hollande said that the attacks were “planned in Syria, organized in Belgium, perpetrated on our soil with French complicity.”
CISAC senior fellow Martha Crenshaw said the Paris attacks represented “a shift in strategy” for ISIS with the group “taking a more Al Qaeda-like stance and striking Western countries.”
However, she emphasized that the carefully planned nature of the coordinated strikes, where multiple teams carried out simultaneous attacks in three locations across downtown Paris, indicated that this new strategy had been secretly underway for some time.
“These attacks were planned a long time ago,” said Crenshaw, whose Mapping Militants Project includes more information on groups like ISIS.
“You shouldn’t think they’re reacting to very recent circumstances…It’s not like we bombed them one day and the next day they planned these attacks.”
Apocalyptic visions
ISIS has long advocated a plan of provoking the West into a larger confrontation that would lead to an apocalyptic victory for Islam, according to Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford and an affiliate at the Center for Democracy Development and the Rule of Law.
“There’s a lot of method to this madness,” Milani said.
“If you read their literature, they have always talked about creating this sort of mayhem.”
ISIS’s propaganda magazine Dabiq, which is available online in Arabic and English, is named after a village in Syria with important symbolism for jihadists.
“They claim that the prophet has predicted that if you can get the West to come and fight the Muslims at Dabiq, then Islam will conquer the world,” Milani said.
Unlike France’s earlier battles against extremists in Algeria, it cannot rely on a proxy state to take the fight to the terrorists, according to Crenshaw.
“When terrorism in France has its origins in Algeria, France could rely on the Algerian state to crack down on these groups,” she said.
“Now you’ve got a situation where the planners are in a country where you don’t have a reliable state to go in and get them for you and wrap up their networks.”
With French warplanes already bombing targets in the Syrian city of Raqqa, Felter warned against the limits of air power in the fight against ISIS.
“There’s a risk that as we ramp up the bombing campaign and increase civilian casualties, this does play into the narrative of these extremists,” he said.
“It’s a very difficult targeting process. ISIS has occupied urban areas full of non-combatants and civilians…It’s the ultimate human shield.”
Felter acknowledged that increasing the number of US ground forces sent to interdict ISIS in Iraq and Syria may ultimately be necessary, but also that this increased presence, if not managed carefully, could backfire.
“At some level, they want to bring Western military forces to occupy these lands, because that will help turn popular opinion against the West and aid in their propaganda and recruitment,” he said.
The fight against ISIS is not limited to the territories it claims in the Middle East. It must be a global effort and include increased international cooperation and information sharing across intelligence, law enforcement and other agencies around the world, Felter said.
ISIS wants to drive a wedge between Europeans and the growing Muslim communities in their countries, so recruiting French citizens to participate in the Paris attacks served a dual purpose, Milani said.
“Using French citizens helps them with logistics, but it also helps them in terms of their strategy in that it makes it difficult for Muslims to live in a non-caliphate context,” he said.
Failed states problem
In the wake of the attacks, European nations are working to create legislation that would toughen criminal penalties for citizens who travel abroad to fight with designated terrorist organizations such as ISIS, or strip them of their citizenship, according to CISAC affiliate Anja Dalgaard-Nielsen, a former executive director of the Danish Security and Intelligence Service.
Individuals who are seen as inciting people to travel to Syria and Iraq to join the jihad could also face tougher sanctions, she said.
The emergence of ISIS and its nihilistic theology is a symptom of broader underlying problems in the Middle East, which is grappling with failed and failing states across North Africa and in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to Milani.
“ISIS is the most militant and brutal manifestation of something deeper that’s going wrong,” he said.
“I honestly have never seen the Middle East as perilously close to complete chaos as it is now… [and] I don’t think we’ve seen the worst of it yet.”
Resources & links
Get more background on the Islamic State and its leaders from Martha Crenshaw’s Mapping Militants Project
France is grappling with rising terrorism and the climate change problem, French Ambassador Gérard Araud said during a talk sponsored by The Europe Center.
"We had been expecting a terrorist attack for some time," said Araud, referencing the January massacre in Paris in which two shooters who identified themselves as Islamic terrorists killed 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper offices and wounded several others. "The attack in Paris was like our 9/11."
He said that France is undertaking both educational and law enforcement efforts aimed at taming the spread of radicalized Islamic youth in the country – but there is no easy solution.
For example, it is almost impossible to monitor all the potential suspects, shut down offensive websites only to see them pop up shortly thereafter, and even track youth coming and going from Islamic campaigns in places like Syria and Iraq.
"Everything," Araud said, "depends on the balance between civil liberties and law enforcement. We're trying to adjust to this new threat."
More than a hundred people turned out for Araud's talk, which was held in the Koret-Taube Conference Center. The event, held May 1, was billed as the "State of the France-U.S. Relationship and Priorities for 2015."
Araud was appointed Ambassador of France to the United States in 2014. He has held positions within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Development. During his career, Araud became an expert on the Middle East and security issues, and was the French negotiator on the Iranian nuclear issue from 2003 to 2006.
He spoke about the problem of increasing anti-Semitism in France.
"It's totally unacceptable," he said. On the educational front, French schools routinely teach students about the horrors of the Holocaust and some even make field trips to places like Auschwitz, one of the Nazi concentration camps where Jewish people were exterminated during World War II.
One upcoming topic of global interest, Araud said, is the United Nations climate changeconference scheduled to start Nov. 30 in Paris.
He described it as perhaps a "last chance" attempt at an effective global agreement on the issue, and sounded upbeat about the possibility of success. "Things are much more positive than in 2009" when similar talks in Copenhagen failed to spark worldwide unity.
The reasons, he said, are that more countries are acknowledging the impact of carbon emissions and that China has expressed a desire to cooperate. But much depends on the talks in Paris, both their tone and substance.
"Top down approval certainly won't work," Araud said, noting that the conference needs to produce a consistent and credible message of action on climate change that appeals to many countries.
He noted Stanford's new energysystemaims to cut campus greenhouse gas emissions by 68 percent and fossil fuel by 65 percent. "It's quite positive," he said.
Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, introduced Araud and described the bilateral relationship between the United States and France as "central to everything that we do."
McFaul pointed out that Araud played a key role in the writing of the economic sanctions that eventually brought Iran to the nuclear negotiations table.
When he started his speech, Araud said it was his first visit to Stanford. "Thank you for the weather," he smiled.
Clifton B. Parker is a writer for the Stanford News Service.
Thousands rally across France and other nations in solidarity against the January 7, 2015 attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris by gunmen shouting “Allahu Akbar” or “Allah is [the] Greatest.” What does this tragedy, called one of the worst terror attacks on French soil, portend for the future of religious integration in France?
Cecile Alduy, Stanford associate professor of French literature and affiliated faculty at Stanford's Europe Center in the Freeman Spogli Institutes for International Studies and Stanford Global Studies Division, was in Paris during the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices.
Currently writing a book on Marine Le Pen and the far-right National Front, Alduy discussed the impact of the attack on French society and politics on KQED Radio's "Forum with Michael Krasny" (Thurs., Jan. 8, 2015). She was joined by David Pryce-Jones, author and senior editor of the National Review, Hatem Bazian of Zaytuna College, BBC News Paris correspondent Hugh Schofield, and Jack Citrin, professor of political science and director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley.
Former U.S. Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton delivers a foreign policy address at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies on March 23, 2016.
Cover of the book "Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies" co-authored by Stanford Political Science professor David Laitin.