The Europe Center is jointly housed in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Global Studies Division.
From 2007 to 2010, a financial and economic crisis gripped the United States, Europe and the world. 7 million Americans and 2 million Europeans lost their jobs, and 10 million were pushed below the poverty line. Thousands of families lost their homes, and many lost their savings. A global recovery from the effects of the crisis will take years.
As a result of the crisis, social banking and social finance have become important trends among bank customers in Europe. In fact, European social banks are the big winners of the crisis, growing by more than 20% per year and doubling their assets between 2007 and 2010. The crisis transformed social banks from niche institutions to large, publicly visible players. This success is due to the conviction of a growing number of bank customers in Europe that social banking is a less speculative and more responsible, ethical, and community-oriented way to deal with money than traditional banking. In the aftermath of the crisis, many see social banking as less egoistic and more caring for the overall progress of society than mainstream banking. Thus, social banking may provide important lessons for the banking and finance sector as a whole, in order to avoid further crises in the future.
In order to see what can be learned from social banking, let us first take a look at what social banking is; second, review the most important social banks today; and third, examine lessons from the success of social banks.
European leaders converged in Brussels to figure a way out of a worsening debt crisis and agreed to greater financial oversight and centralization. England refuses to go along with the plan, and Stanford political scientist Francis Fukuyama says he expects some countries will start bailing out of the eurozone.
“The political difficulties of deepening any fiscal union are so great that I wouldn’t bet on that happening,” says Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellowat Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a resident at FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. “The easier path is going to be for countries to begin exiting.”
Fukuyama talks about the summit, the euro’s chances of survival and what’s at stake for America if the currency collapses.
What does the Brussels agreement mean for Europe’s debt crisis?
We will have to see how much of a binding constraint this agreement actually is. It’s just an informal agreement at this point. Political leaders can promise anything at this kind of summit and fail to deliver.
I think the most interesting thing going on is the eurozone – the 17 countries that participate in the euro – is actually splitting off from the greater EU. The reason that’s happening is that in order to save the eurozone, they need to make certain decisions on this type of deepening control. And countries like Britain will never go along with this. The 17 countries have to create their own unit that can make decisions at the expense of the larger EU.
Explain Britain’s refusal to have its budget reviewed by the European Commission
The UK is like the United States – they’ve always been jealous of their sovereignty. If you go to England and talk about crossing the Channel, they’ll say, “Oh, so you’re going to go to Europe.” While an American would say “England is a part of Europe.”
There’s a strong strain – especially within the conservative party – that really does not want to give up authority to what they regard as a bunch of French socialists in Brussels. That’s their vision of what the EU really represents. So they’re resistant about being dragged into any German scheme to deepen the powers in Brussels to include control over national budgets because that is a core element of sovereignty. The majority of people in Britain will say that will happen over their dead bodies.
What is the likelihood that countries will begin exiting the eurozone?
I don’t think it makes sense for a country like Greece to stay in the eurozone. It’s a matter of national pride that they don’t want to be the first country out, but it’s very hard to see how they actually return to growth under a system that links them to Germany in terms of the price of their currency. Long before there’s any kind of centralized fiscal reform that’s imposed on Greece, Portugal and these other peripheral countries, I think it’s more likely that they’ll exit. The euro will probably remain, but it will be at the core of the more stable countries.
What mechanism is there for countries to exit the eurozone?
There is no mechanism. Not only is there no legal way of exiting, there’s no disciplining mechanism. You have a stability pact where countries agreed they wouldn’t run a budget deficit greater than 3 percent, and Germany was really one of the first counties to violate that. But there were no sanctions. That’s the problem right now – there’s neither discipline nor an exit mechanism. That’s why everyone is fearing a disorderly, messy breakup of the EU, which would be extremely damaging.
President Obama has said the U.S. “stands ready to do our part" to help Europe resolve its crisis. What can America really do?
It’s an indication of how far we’ve fallen, but there’s really nothing concretely we can do apart from possibly increasing our International Monetary Fund share. But the IMF doesn’t have the ammunition to really help at all in this particular crisis. So all we can do is sit on the sidelines and try to get the Europeans to take our advice, which a lot of them are not inclined to do given the mess that happened on Wall Street three years ago. It’s a mark of the diminishment of overall American influence that we’re simply relegated to the sidelines of this crisis.
What’s at stake for America in the wake of a total European financial meltdown?
There’s a lot at stake. We are slowly crawling out of the biggest recession since the Great Depression. The one thing that could really send us back into a second leg of a recession is collapse of the European financial system and panic in Europe. If Europe doesn’t do well, the United States isn’t going to do well.
Silvio Berlusconi has been a force in Italian politics during the past two decades. As the country’s prime minister and richest man, the media mogul managed to slip through sex scandals and criminal charges only to be forced out of office by Europe’s debt crisis.
As a new government led by economist Mario Monti takes place, Ronald Spogli talks about Berlusconi’s fall, what’s next for Italy and whether the United States should get involved in the eurozone’s tailspin. Spogli, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Italy from 2005 to 2009, is a Stanford trustee and major benefactor to the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
What will Italy’s government look like under Mario Monti, and how will it trim the country’s $2.5 trillion debt?
Monti is an economist by training and has been president of Bocconi University, Italy’s most prestigious business school. He was the European Commissioner and that position earned him international influence and experience. So here’s somebody who has economic savvy, institutional gravitas, and the ability to be perceived as above politics.
The new government is expected to carry out the stability program enacted immediately before Berlusconi’s resignation on Saturday. This law contemplates asset sales to reduce debt, among other measures. The idea of a wealth tax has been floated in Italy – which by most measures is the richest country on the continent – as a way to immediately and significantly pay down the nation’s debt.
The Monti government is likely to consider this and other options to reduce the country’s indebtedness. However, it will have to gain parliamentary approval for any new laws. And depending on the nature of the bill proposed, passage of legislation could prove problematic.
How did Berlusconi manage to survive sex scandals and corruption charges, only to be brought down by Italy’s financial crisis?
I think he survived because for most Italians, his personal life was less relevant than his actions and promises as a politician who could do good things for Italy.
He came into power in 1994, and his ability to dominate Italian politics for nearly two decades has been the main story. He came in with an expectation that as Italy’s richest man and as a successful businessman, he would help jumpstart a country that had begun to stall economically. The notion was that after stagnation had begun to creep in, Silvio Berlusconi was the person to break the logjam and move Italy forward.
But for the last 20 years, Italy has had half the economic growth rate of Europe. That’s the biggest issue against Berlusconi. But nobody is 100 percent convinced that he’s really gone for good. He has an amazing ability to resurrect himself. He’s proven that throughout his political career.
How does Italy’s debt burden fit in to the rest of Europe’s economic woes?
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In terms of the sheer magnitude of the problem, the Italian circumstance dwarfs Greece’s situation and the ability of the initiatives meant to deal with other countries’ crises. The issue is whether the new Italian government will be able to calm the bond markets.
Restoring credibility is absolutely vital. The fundamental concern is that there’s no offered solution to an Italian debt problem. There is no bailout being contemplated that’s big enough to be able to deal with the issue, unlike Greece.
The euro crisis has claimed the political lives of prime ministers in Greece, Spain and Italy. Can we expect more high-profile political casualties?
It’s interesting how the markets – in such a short period of time – have forced a political change that the internal Italian political system has been unable to achieve for quite some time. It’s difficult to speculate as to whether those forces will move to more counties. But it certainly wasn’t contemplated that they’d have this impact on Italy, so its fair to say that nothing is completely off the table.
In the United States, candidates vying for the Republican nomination in next year’s election say America shouldn’t get involved in Europe’s financial mess. Is that the right attitude?
Europe is extremely important to the United States. Not just for economic reasons, but for political reasons. This is a European problem to solve. On the other hand, if it gets to the point where it continues to have a very damaging impact on the world’s capital markets, I think the resolve to keep it as an isolated problem may fade.
Beyond the narrowly defined economic impact of the crisis, we have many issues of global security that we cannot effectively deal with without the help of Europeans. If they’re going to go into a pronounced period of economic contraction, that’s going to heavily impact their ability to be a great partner for us. Italy is a perfect example of this concern. We counted on its help in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon. Those are expensive missions, and if the country doesn’t grow its economy, it’s harder for them to be a great American ally. Italy’s economic situation extends to our basic international security interests.
Italy's economic crisis is the subject of a Nov. 18 presentation given by Roland Benedikter, a scholar at FSI's Europe Center.
In the last two decades there has been a sharp growth in the numbers of people that have been “expelled,” numbers far larger than the newly “incorporated” middle classes of countries such as India and China. I use the term “expulsion” to describe a diversity of conditions: the growing numbers of the abjectly poor, of the displaced in poor countries who are warehoused in formal and informal refugee camps, of the minoritized and persecuted in rich countries who are warehoused in prisons, of workers whose bodies are destroyed on the job and rendered useless at far too young an age, able-bodied surplus populations warehoused in ghettoes and slums. One major trend is the repositioning of what had been framed as sovereign territory, a complex conditions, into land for sale on the global market – land in Sub-Saharan Africa, in Central Asia and in Latin America to be bought by rich investors and rich governments to grow food, to access underground water tables, and to access minerals and metals. My argument is that these diverse and many other kindred developments amount to a logic of expulsion, signaling a deeper systemic transformation in advanced capitalism, one documented in bits and pieces but not quite narrated as an overarching dynamic that is taking us into a new phase of global capitalism. The paper is based on the author’s forthcoming book Expulsions.
Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and Co-Chair, The Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University (www.saskiasassen.com). Her recent books are Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press 2008), A Sociology of Globalization (W.W.Norton 2007), both translated into Spanish by Editorial Katz (Madrid y Buenos Aires), and the 4th fully updated edition of Cities in a World Economy (Sage 2012). Among older books is The Global City (Princeton University Press 1991/2001). Her books are translated into over 20 languages. She is the recipient of diverse awards and mentions, ranging from multiple doctor honoris causa to named lectures and being selected as one of the 100 Top Global Thinkers of 2011 by Foreign Policy Magazine.
Recommended readings:
Sponsored by The Europe Center, the Abassi Program in Islamic Studies, and the Mediterranean Studies Forum
CISAC Conference Room
Ronald I. McKinnon is an applied economist whose primary interests are international economics and economic development-with strong secondary interests in transitional economies and fiscal federalism. Understanding financial institutions in general, and monetary institutions in particular, is central to his teaching and research. His interests range from the proper regulation of banks and financial markets in poorer countries to the historical evolution of global and regional monetary systems. His books, numerous articles in professional journals, and op-eds in the financial press such as The Economist, The Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal reflect this range of interests.
Event Summary
Professor McKinnon first outlines the two major assumptions behind his paper (available on this page). First, that from December 2008 to August 2011, an inflow of "hot money" to emerging economies resulted from low U.S., European, and Japanese interest rates. Since then, the trend has reversed in the wake of the European banking crisis and bank lending has fallen. Second, the dollar remains the widespread central bank reserve currency despite instability in the U.S. system.
McKinnon voices concern about Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's zero interest rate policy, calling it an overreaction to the crisis and a "lose-lose" policy as it deters investment in the U.S. while simultaneously spurring destabilizing hot money flows to surrounding emerging markets. These countries are in turn forced to suppress interest rates to mitigate the inflows, and to build up dollar reserves to keep exchange rates in check. The zero interest rate policy also stimulates carry trades in commodities by speculators.
The belief that under a zero interest rate regime, inflation will stimulate the economy by bringing real interest rates to negative levels, is misplaced in McKinnon's view. He argues that this simply adds uncertainty and interferes with efficient bank intermediation, as banks hold high excess reserves and tighten lending, causing a procyclical contraction as has been seen in the United States and Europe. He contrasts this approach with China, which stabilized its economy following the “dot-com” bust by expanding rather than contracting bank credit. He criticizes U.S. pressure on China to appreciate or float its currency, asserting that these strategies would fail to reduce China's trade surplus.
McKinnon suggests that international reforms should target interest rates instead of exchange rates. He recommends coordination between central banks of the major industrialized countries, especially the United States, European countries, and Japan - to collectively raise interest rates to approximately 2%. This would improve overall bank intermediation, and would benefit both central and peripheral countries in Europe.
A question and answer session following the talked addressed topics including: the likelihood of a coordinated effort between central banks; the potential effects of Kucinich's monetary reform proposal; the potential negative effects on real growth from carry trades, and whether this is a cause for concern; and the effects of bank borrowing trends in Europe on the European monetary system.
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Recognizing the political consequences for Europe of Muslim immigration, and relying on a novel identification strategy, this paper investigates why Muslim assimilation into French cultural norms is incomplete, and provides experimental and survey evidence that reveals the low expected payoffs that Muslim immigrants in France receive for full assimilation. While the data show that rooted French people initially distrust Muslims (compared to a matched set of Christians) in part due to their unwillingness to fully assimilate, the real source of Muslim reluctance to fully assimilate is their perception that in anonymous transactions (i.e., through French institutions) they will always be perceived as foreign and face discrimination.
Workshop paper is available to Stanford affiliates upon request by email to khaley@stanford.edu
David Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. He received his B.A. in Political Science from Swarthmore College and his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include comparative politics, nation-state formation, ethnic conflict, and religion. Among his publications are Politics, Language and Thought: The Somali Experience (1977), Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Religious Change among the Yoruba (1986), Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa (1992), Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad (1998), and Nations, States and Violence (2007). Prof. Laitin has been a recipient of fellowships from the Howard Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.
Event Summary
Professor Laitin opens the seminar by providing background on the research project that motivated the paper. This examined: whether Muslim immigrants in France faced unique social and economic barriers; the source of the barriers; and whether French republicanism exacerbated or lessened the barriers. He provides a brief summary of studies examining the first and third points, but the focus of his talk was on the second point: if there are higher barriers for Muslims, who is building them?
Professor Laitin then describes the study his research team carried out on a Senegalese population in France for 15 years, drawing on equal-sized groups of Muslims and Christians from similar social and economic conditions. Through a series of games and surveys, the team observed that within Senegalese Muslims in France, certain groups assimilate more than others, and those that assimilate less are treated worse by French individuals and institutions. Many of the Muslims expected to be treated less generously by French individuals, and reported more experiences of discrimination from French institutions, which Professor Laitin's team found was more difficult to overcome than individual discrimination. This group also exhibited stronger financial ties (measured by investments and remittances sent to Senegal from France) and emotional ties (measured by desire to be buried in Senegal rather than France after death). The results of the study are used to provide a series of decision rules and reward matrixes for incoming Senegalese Muslims, including the likelihood of penalties and rewards for assimilation, such as giving children French names.
During a discussion period following the presentation, such questions were raised as: Do the results of the study have more to do with the respondents being Muslim, or simply not being French - or, do other ethnic or religious groups have the same problems assimilating into French Catholic society? Is the example of preferences for burial locations more about ties to Senegal than lack of ties to France? How much of the effect is due to being black rather than Muslim? Will the results of the study change as the Muslim population in France increases? What has been the reception in France to the prohibition of collecting ethnographic data? Why is "incomplete assimilation" framed as a "response" to the discrimination - is it a choice or is it just the way things are? Where does the fault lie in the discrimination reported in the survey?
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Department of Political Science
Stanford University
Encina Hall, W423
Stanford, CA 94305-6044
David Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science and a co-director of the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford. He has conducted field research in Somalia, Nigeria, Spain, Estonia and France. His principal research interest is on how culture – specifically, language and religion – guides political behavior. He is the author of “Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-heritage Societies” and a series of articles on immigrant integration, civil war and terrorism. Laitin received his BA from Swarthmore College and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
Conference organizer: Nancy Ruttenburg
What is conscience, what was conscience, and what is its future?
The purpose of the conference is to examine the authority of conscience as it is presently invoked in various arenas of contemporary life—including law, medicine, journalism, and politics—and as its meaning is inflected by scholarly debates in the fields of history, literature, religious studies, psychology, and philosophy. From their various fields of expertise and interest, participants will address the central question the conference raises: in our post-Freudian and post-Nietzschean age, to what degree does conscience possess the kind of authority that an earlier and less secular age reserved for first things? This question entails a host of others. Do our invocations of conscience reveal it to be the still-vital residue of a kind of certainty linked to infallible authority from which we cannot alienate ourselves even when we’d like to? If so, is the enduring vitality of conscience a sign that the process of secularization remains incomplete, even in secular rationalists, those who might consider themselves to be exempt from the religiosity that distinguishes United States culture from those of other modern Western democracies? Do we regard conscience as a type of knowledge? Or is it possible to understand conscience ontologically, as a category of self or mind that—insofar as it speaks to all humanity by means of a "small, still voice" issuing from each human heart—bridges the gap between individual and corporate being? Whether or not underwritten by a discipline or a tradition, conscience is commonly invoked to justify a range of acts and behaviors: what relation do these invocations of moral law, even when unexamined, bear to the burgeoning interest in ethics we see across the humanities disciplines and into the legal, medical, and journalistic fields? Between the extremes of authoritarianism and anarchy, where do we place conscience in American political life and how do we understand its peculiar agency?
CONFERENCE VIDEO AND AUDIO RECORDINGS:
Please click on the panel titles and the keynote speaker's name below to view videos and listen to audios of each:
November 8, 2012
Panel 1: The Pre-Revolutionary Conscience: From Religious Burden to Natural Right (video)
Panel 2: MIA: Conscience and the First Amendment (video)
Panel 3: Roundtable: The Religious Conscience in Modernity (audio only)
Panel 4: Conscience/Ethics: The Secular Conscience (audio only)
November 9, 2012
Panel 5: Conscience and Reportage (video)
Panel 6: Roundtable: Embodied Conscience (video)
Panel 7: Roundtable: Conscientious Objection (video)
Keynote: Anne Aghion, award-winning documentary filmmaker (video)
PROGRAM AND PARTICIPANTS:
Opening Event: Wednesday, November 7, 6:00-8:30 p.m.
Screening of keynote speaker Anne Aghion’s documentary film, My Neighbor, My Killer, to be introduced by the filmmaker. Will be held in the Oksenberg Conference Room, Encina Hall Central, 3rd floor.
For more information on the film, please visit this event listing on our website by clicking <here>.
Thursday, November 8, 9:00 a.m. - 7:00 p.m:
Conscience and its Conceptual Evolution: Religion/Rights/Ethics
Thursday Morning Panels: What Was Conscience? The American Context
1) Andrew Murphy, Associate Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Walt Whitman Center for the Culture and Politics of Democracy, Rutgers University, author of Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America and Prodigal Nation: Moral Decline and Divine Punishment from New England to 9/11.
2) Mark Valeri, E. T. Thompson Professor of Church History, Union Presbyterian Seminary. Among the editors of the multi-volume Works of Jonathan Edwards, he is the author most recently of Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America.
Stanford Respondent: Caroline Winterer, Professor of History, Professor by courtesy of Classics
1) Jack Rakove, William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and Professor of Political Science at Stanford, where has taught since 1980. He is the author of six books, including Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (1996), which received the Pulitzer Prize in History, and Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America (2010), which was a finalist for the George Washington Prize. He is currently at work on Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience: The Radical Significance of the Free Exercise of Religion, which will be part of the Oxford University Press series on Inalienable Rights.
2) Michael J. Perry, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law, and Senior Fellow for the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, Emory University School of Law. Author most recently of The Political Morality of Liberal Democracy; Constitutional Rights, Moral Controversy, and the Supreme Court; Toward a Theory of Human Rights: Religion, Law, Courts; and Under God?: Religious Faith and Liberal Democracy.
Stanford Respondent: Derek Webb, Fellow, Constitutional Law Center, Stanford
Thursday Afternoon Panels: What Is Conscience: The Secular/Religious Divide
1) Nathan Chapman, Executive Director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center who joined the Law School as a Fellow in 2010. After clerking for the Honorable Judge Gerald Bard Tjoflat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit Court, he practiced with WilmerHale in Washington, D.C. He graduated from Duke University School of Law and Duke Divinity School in 2007. His most recent publications include Disentangling Conscience and Religion, 2013 U. Ill. L. Rev. (forthcoming) and Due Process As Separation of Powers, 121 Yale L. J. 1672 (2012) (with Michael W. McConnell).
2) Steven Knapp, President of the George Washington University since August 2007, former Dean of Arts and Sciences and subsequently Provost at Johns Hopkins University, and Professor of English at UC Berkeley. Author most recently with Philip Clayton of The Predicament of Belief: Science, Philosophy, Faith. A specialist in Romanticism, literary theory, and the relation of literature to philosophy and religion, Dr. Knapp earned his doctorate and masters degrees from Cornell University and his Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University.
3) Arnold Eisen, Chancellor, Jewish Theological Seminary, NYC. Author most recently of Rethinking Modern Judaism: Ritual, Commandment, Community and Taking Hold of Torah: Jewish Commitment and Community in America.
Stanford Moderator: Nancy Ruttenburg, William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature, Professor by Courtesy of Comparative Literature and Slavic, Director, Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel
1) Jay M. Bernstein, University Distinguished Professor, New School for Social Research. Author most recently of Against Voluptuous Bodies: Adorno’s Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting; Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics; and a co-authored volume published through UC Berkeley’s Townsend Center entitled Art and Aesthetics After Adorno.
2) Kent Greenawalt, University Professor, former Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Law Review, Columbia Law School. Author, among many other works, of Religion and the Constitution: Vol. I: Free Exercise and Fairness and Vol. II: Establishment and Fairness, as well as Does God Belong in Public Schools? and Private Consciences and Public Reasons.
Stanford Respondent: Nancy Ruttenburg, William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature, Professor by Courtesy of Comparative Literature and Slavic, Director of Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel
Friday, November 9, 9:00 a.m. - 6:45 p.m.
Contemporary Casuistry: Cases of Conscience in Action
Friday Morning Panels: Narrating Conscience: Modes of Witnessing
1) Dr. Sheri Fink, M.D., Ph.D., 2010 Pulitzer Prize- and National Magazine Award-winner in investigative journalism for “The Deadly Choices at Memorial” about difficult choices made at a New Orleans hospital during the aftermath of Katrina; contributor to ProPublica who has reported globally on health, medicine, and science; senior fellow with the New America Foundation and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative; author of War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival (2003) during the Balkan crisis, winner of the American Medical Writer’s Association special book award and finalist for PEN Martha Albrand awards.
2) Colin Dayan, Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities, Vanderbilt, and expert in literary, legal, and religious studies of the Americas; books include Haiti, History, and the Gods (1998); The Story of Cruel and Unusual (2007); and, most recently, The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons, selected as a Choice top-25 "outstanding academic book of 2011."
Stanford Respondent: David Palumbo-Liu, Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor, Professor of Comparative Literature, Professor by courtesy of English
1) Dr. Abraham Verghese, author of the novel Cutting for Stone (2010)as well as the non-fiction works, My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story (1995)about his experience as a physician working in rural Tennessee at the beginning of the AIDS crisis, and The Tennis Partner: A Story of Friendship and Loss (1998). Currently Professor for the Theory and Practice of Medicine and Senior Associate Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine, Stanford.
2) Mark Johnson, Philip H. Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon. Author most recently of The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (co-authored with George Lakoff); Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics; and a second edition of Metaphors We Live By (co-authored with George Lakoff).
3) Dr. Fady Joudah, Internal Medicine and Palestinian-American poet; former practitioner with Doctors Without Borders in Darfur, Sudan and Zambia; translator of the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Zaqtan, and 2007 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition for The Earth in the Attic (2008).
Stanford Moderator: Blakey Vermeule, Professor of English
Friday Afternoon Panels: Conscience in the World: Problems of Toleration and Intervention
1) Air Force Reserve Col. Steven Kleinman, Senior Intelligence Officer, U.S. Air Force; a widely recognized subject matter expert with extensive experience in human intelligence operations, special operations, strategic interrogation, and resistance to interrogation; Senior Advisor to the Intelligence Science Board’s study “Educing Information” which issued guidelines for improving the government’s interrogation techniques. Publicly opposed “enhanced interrogation” techniques for battling the war on terror in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the House Judiciary Committee. Authored numerous articles laying out his argument against torture published in several peer-reviewed professional journals, the law review of the City University of New York and Valparaiso University law schools, and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.
2) Eyal Press, author of Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times and Absolute Convictions; contributor to several journals, including The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, The Atlantic Monthly, and others.
3) Yusef Komunyakaa: Global Distinguished Professor of English, NYU, Vietnam veteran and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose collections include The Chameleon Couch, Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Pleasure Dome and many others.
Stanford Moderator: Debra Satz, Associate Dean of Humanities, Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society; Professor of Philosophy and by courtesy Political Science; Research Affiliate, Program on Global Justice
4:45 – 6:45: KEYNOTE ADDRESS: ANNE AGHION
For her work on the gacaca trials in post-genocide Rwanda, documentary filmmaker Anne Aghion won the UNESCO Fellini Prize, an Emmy Award, the Human Rights Watch 2009 Nestor Almendros Prize, and she was a nominee for the 2009 Gotham Award. Her feature-length documentary, My Neighbor, My Killer, was one of the few documentaries to be an Official Selection at the Cannes Film Festival.
Bechtel Conference Center
Jacob Funk Kirkegaard has been a research fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics since 2002 and is also a senior associate at the Rhodium Group, a New York-based research firm. Before joining the Institute, he worked with the Danish Ministry of Defense, the United Nations in Iraq, and in the private financial sector. He is a graduate of the Danish Army's Special School of Intelligence and Linguistics with the rank of first lieutenant; the University of Aarhus in Aarhus, Denmark; and Columbia University in New York.
He is author of The Accelerating Decline in America's High-Skilled Workforce: Implications for Immigration Policy (2007) and coauthor of US Pension Reform: Lessons from Other Countries (2009) and Transforming the European Economy (2004) and assisted with Accelerating the Globalization of America: The Role for Information Technology (2006). His current research focuses on European economies and reform, pension systems and accounting rules, demographics, offshoring, high-skilled immigration, and the impact of information technology.
Jacob Kierkegaard interviews on the European financial crisis can be found in the following NPR articles:
"Why European Leaders are Suddenly Backing More Bank Bailouts"
"Ireland Went Down with its Banks. Why Didn't that Happen in the U.S.?"
"Is This Europe's 'Lehman Moment'? Banks Don't Think So"
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