In this talk, Michta focuses on the current condition of European security and defense policy, including the roles played by the US and NATO, and Europe’s attempts to build up an EU-based security architecture.  He will explore the hard security/military dimension of the issue in the context of a broader discussion of regionalized security optics and internal political change. 

Speaker: Andrew A. Michta is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Hamilton School. Before joining Hamilton, Michta was a Senior Fellow with the GeoStrategy Initiative in the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and the former dean of the College of International and Security Studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies. He holds a PhD in international relations from the Johns Hopkins University. His areas of expertise are international security, NATO, and European politics and security, with a special focus on Central Europe and the Baltic states.

His most recent book with Paal Hilde, The Future of NATO: Regional Defense and Global Security, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2014. He is currently completing a book Europe Reconfigured: U.S. Europe Strategy for an Age of Great Power Conflict, funded by a two-year grant from the Smith Richardson Foundation. The book will be published in 2026.

Michta is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. He is fluent in Polish and Russian and proficient in German and French.

REDS: RETHINKING EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT AND SECURITY

The REDS Seminar Series aims to deepen the research agenda on the new challenges facing Europe, especially on its eastern flank, and to build intellectual and institutional bridges across Stanford University, fostering interdisciplinary approaches to current global challenges.

REDS is organized by The Europe Center and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Learn more about REDS and view past seminars here.

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In its early days, the European Union was accused of having a democratic deficit because its central institutions were not elected.  The response was to increase the democratic responsiveness of the European Parliament and to give it a greater role in lawmaking.  As for the Commission and the Council, however, the argument was that Member States populated these bodies and the governments of those states were democratically elected so those institutions were indirectly democratically accountable.   But what happens if some Member States are no longer reliably democratic?   This talk traces the way that the EU responded to first Hungary and then Poland taking an autocratic path, and assesses the successes and failures of those EU efforts.

Speaker: Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University and visiting professor of law at Stanford Law School. Scheppele's work focuses on the rise and fall of constitutional democracy. After 1989, Scheppele studied the new constitutional courts of Hungary and Russia, living in both places for extended periods. After 9/11, she researched the effects of the international "war on terror" on constitutional protections around the world.   Since 2010, she has been documenting attacks on constitutional democracy by legalistic autocrats. Her book Destroying (and Restoring) Democracy by Law is forthcoming from Harvard University Press. 

Scheppele is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the International Academy of Comparative Law. In 2014, she received the Law and Society Association’s Kalven Prize for influential scholarship in comparative constitutional law and in 2024, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work on democratic backsliding. She started her career in the political science department at the University of Michigan before moving to a full-time law teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. She was the founding director of the gender program at Central European University Budapest and has held visiting faculty positions in the law schools at Yale, Harvard, Erasmus/Rotterdam, and Humboldt/Berlin. She was President of the Law and Society Association from 2017-2019. 

REDS: RETHINKING EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT AND SECURITY

The REDS Seminar Series aims to deepen the research agenda on the new challenges facing Europe, especially on its eastern flank, and to build intellectual and institutional bridges across Stanford University, fostering interdisciplinary approaches to current global challenges.

REDS is organized by The Europe Center and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Learn more about REDS and view past seminars here.

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What is everyday life under autocracy like? We have an image of violence, all-powerful elites, and jackbooted thugs, but many people living in modern autocratic regimes instead experience mundane repression, self-censorship, and distrust of formal institutions. In this panel, several Stanford scholars who research and who have lived through authoritarian rule reflect on how autocracies govern people’s daily lives, and how it is possible to resist these incursions. At a time when democracy is threatened in many countries, these experiences and lessons in resistance are more relevant than ever.

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Anna Grzymala-Busse is the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies in the Department of Political Science, the Director of the Europe Center, and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute. Her research focuses on the historical development of the state and its transformation, political parties, religion and politics, and post-communist politics. Other areas of interest include populism, informal institutions, and causal mechanisms.

Jovana Lazić is an historian whose research and teaching interests focus on belligerent occupation and the social and cultural history of the First World War; urban history; and the Habsburg Empire, the Balkans and Yugoslavia. She is author of several book chapters and articles on gender and war and the Habsburg-occupied Serbian capital of Belgrade during World War I.  A graduate of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and recipient of a diplome from Sciences Po-Paris, she received her PhD from Yale University. Jovana came to Stanford in 2006 to teach in the History Department and joined the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies in 2013.

Haiyan Lee is Professor of Comparative Literature, Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Walter A. Haas Professor of the Humanities. Her first book, Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950, is a critical genealogy of the idea of “love” (qing) in modern Chinese literary and cultural history. It was awarded the 2009 Joseph Levenson Prize from the Association for Asian Studies for the best English-language book on post-1900 China. It is the first recipient of this prize in the field of modern Chinese literature. Her second book,  The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination, examines how the figure of “the stranger”—foreigner, migrant, class enemy, woman, animal, ghost—in Chinese fiction, film, television, and exhibition culture tests the moral limits of a society known for the primacy of consanguinity and familiarity. Her third book,  A Certain Justice: Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination investigates Chinese visions of “justice” at the intersection of narrative, law, and ethics. She is working on a new project on animism, cognition, and the Chinese environmental imagination.

Hesham Sallam is a Senior Research Scholar at CDDRL, where he serves as Associate Director for Research. He is also Associate Director of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy. Sallam is co-editor of Jadaliyya ezine and a former program specialist at the U.S. Institute of Peace. His research focuses on political and social development in the Arab World. Sallam’s research has previously received the support of the Social Science Research Council and the U.S. Institute of Peace. He is author of Classless Politics: Islamist Movements, the Left, and Authoritarian Legacies in Egypt (Columbia University Press, 2022), co-editor of Struggles for Political Change in the Arab World (University of Michigan Press, 2022), and editor of Egypt's Parliamentary Elections 2011-2012: A Critical Guide to a Changing Political Arena (Tadween Publishing, 2013). Sallam received a Ph.D. in Government (2015) and an M.A. in Arab Studies (2006) from Georgetown University, and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh (2003).

Ali Yaycıoğlu is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies and Middle Eastern Studies Forum. He is a historian specializing in the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. His research examines various dimensions of political, economic, and legal institutions and practices, as well as the social and cultural dynamics of the Ottoman world and Turkey, from the sixteenth century to the present. He is also interested in using digital tools to understand, visualize, and conceptualize historical developments. Dr. Yaycıoğlu teaches courses on the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey; Empires, Markets & Networks in the Early Modern World; the Age of Revolutions; Histories of Democracy and Capitalism; and Digital Humanities.

This event is sponsored by The Europe Center; Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL); Office of the Dean of Humanities & Sciences; and CREEES Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 

Don't Panic, Don't Panic! The Baltic States in the New World Orde

Russia's annexation of Crimea in early 2014 kick-started a process of reassessing security threats to the Baltic region and profound political and social change in the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 further raised the temperature and saw sharp rises in defense spending, a restructuring of the party system and new nationalizing domestic policies aimed at increasing social cohesion and tackling intelligence and misinformation threats from the East.

However, the first few months of the new presidential administration in the U.S.A. have, arguably, accelerated even greater change in the three Baltic states as they are forced to rapidly adjust to a new world order.

This talk will reflect on how swiftly shifting US-European relations have led the Baltic states to reconsider their security arrangements, realign diplomatic partnerships and refocus core domestic policies.

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Daunis Auers is Professor of European Studies and Jean Monnet Chair at the University of Latvia, Director of the Latvia’s Strategy and Economic Research (LaSER) think tank and a member of the Latvian president’s National Competitiveness Council. His recent research interests are in the comparative politics, economics and regional integration of the Baltic and Nordic states and has recently worked on bureaucratic reform and efficiency. He is a member of the Latvian prime minister's working group on "Cutting Bureaucracy". Professor Auers defended his PhD at University College London and previously studied at the London School of Economics. He has been a Fulbright Scholar at the University of California-Berkeley (2005-2006), University of Washington in Seattle (2023-2024) and a Baltic-American Freedom Foundation Scholar at Wayne State University in Detroit (2014).

Free and open to the public. Registration is requested.

This event is part of Global Conversations, a series of talks, lectures, and seminars hosted by Stanford University Libraries and Vabamu with the goal of educating scholars, students, leaders, and the public on the benefits of but also challenges related to sustaining freedom.

After more than three years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, international support for Ukraine is coming under increasing attack, even as it is more important than ever to safeguard Ukraine’s independence and sovereignty. 

This paper builds on two waves of online public opinion surveys in eight countries bordering Ukraine and/or Russia (Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Moldova, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan) to analyze the drivers of popular attitudes towards the war among citizens of neighboring countries, and identify the factors that may counter the growing war fatigue and the barrage of misinformation and propaganda from Russia (and increasingly from Western politicians). We also present the results of a pre-registered survey experiment, in which respondents were selectively exposed to an empathy induction prompt that encouraged them to reflect on the challenges of daily life in war-time Ukraine, and tests the impact of this empathy treatment on different dimensions of support for Ukraine.

Speaker: Grigore Pop-Eleches

I am a Professor of Politics and International Affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the Politics Department at Princeton University. I joined the Princeton faculty in 2003 after receiving my PhD in Political Science from UC Berkeley. I am co-director of the Princeton Workshop on Post-Communist Politics(Link is external).

My main current research interests are in comparative political behavior with a focus on authoritarian and post-authoritarian regimes (largely in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union). I have also worked on comparative and international political economy of Eastern Europe and Latin America, and on democratization and democratic backsliding, with a focus on the role of electoral behavior and political parties.

My first book, entitled "From Economic Crisis to Reform: IMF Programs in Latin America and Eastern Europe" was published by Princeton University Press in February 2009. My second book, "Communism's Shadow: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Political Attitudes" (joint with Joshua A. Tucker), was published in 2017 by Princeton University Press. My work has also appeared in a variety of academic journals, including The American Journal of Political Science, The Journal of Politics, World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Democracy, Studies in Comparative International Development, and East European Politics and Societies.

REDS: RETHINKING EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT AND SECURITY

The REDS Seminar Series aims to deepen the research agenda on the new challenges facing Europe, especially on its eastern flank, and to build intellectual and institutional bridges across Stanford University, fostering interdisciplinary approaches to current global challenges.

REDS is organized by The Europe Center and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Learn more about REDS and view past seminars here.

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How Transnational Conservative Networks Target Sexual and Gender Minorities

In the past three decades, remarkable progress has been made in numerous countries for the rights of individuals marginalized due to their sexual orientation and gender identity. The advancements in LGBTI rights in a variety of diverse countries can largely be attributed to the tireless efforts of the transnational LGBTI-rights movement, forward-thinking governments in pioneering nations, and the evolving human rights frameworks of international organizations. However, this journey towards equality has been met with formidable opposition. An increasingly interconnected and globally networked resistance, backed by religious-nationalist elements and conservative governments, has emerged to challenge LGBTI and women's rights, even seeking to reinterpret and co-opt international human rights law.

In this lecture, Phillip Ayoub draws on his new book with Kristina Stöckl to investigate this complex landscape, drawing from over a decade of in-depth fieldwork with LGBTI activists, anti-LGBTI proponents, and various state and international organization actors. Moral conservative TANs have employed many of the same transnational tools that garnered LGBTIQ people their widespread recognition. As the double-helix metaphor suggests, rival TANs have a reciprocal relationship, having to navigate each other’s presence in an interactive space and thus using related strategies and instruments for mutually exclusive ends."

Phillip M. Ayoub is a professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science at University College London. He is the author of four books and volumes, including When States Come Out: Europe’s Sexual Minorities and the Politics of Visibility (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and his articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, Social Forces, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, the European Journal of International Relations, the European Journal of Political Research, the Review of International Studies, Mobilization, the European Political Science Review, the Journal of Human Rights, Social Politics, Political Research Quarterly, and Social Movement Studies, among others. Further information can be found under www.phillipayoub.com.