Stanford University

International Relations

FSI researchers strive to understand how countries relate to one another, and what policies are needed to achieve global stability and prosperity. International relations experts focus on the challenging U.S.-Russian relationship, the alliance between the U.S. and Japan and the limitations of America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.

Foreign aid is also examined by scholars trying to understand whether money earmarked for health improvements reaches those who need it most. And FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center has published on the need for strong South Korean leadership in dealing with its northern neighbor.

FSI researchers also look at the citizens who drive international relations, studying the effects of migration and how borders shape people’s lives. Meanwhile FSI students are very much involved in this area, working with the United Nations in Ethiopia to rethink refugee communities.

Trade is also a key component of international relations, with FSI approaching the topic from a slew of angles and states. The economy of trade is rife for study, with an APARC event on the implications of more open trade policies in Japan, and FSI researchers making sense of who would benefit from a free trade zone between the European Union and the United States.

Global Europe: Rethinking migration, democracy, and what sustains Europe at home at abroad

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The "Brexit" has been seen as a major blow that changes the future of Europe, at the time when nationalist and separatist movements seem most ascendant, and the EU seems to be the toxic subject for plebiscites, the European Union is expanding its role as a global actor. These referendums, and threats to withdraw, are spurring Member States to return to the roots of the European Project. From its historical foundation, that project prizes freedom from war on the continent, and prosperity through free movement of trade and social capital.

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Comentarios Robert Schuman
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Roland Hsu
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Who Leads the West and Why: Trump or Merkel? Constitutional Cultures in the United States and Germany

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Theodor Fontane, the master of German realist fiction, published his first novel, Before the Storm, in 1876. Set during the winter of 1812–13, in and around Berlin, it explores the decisive historical moment when Prussia changed sides—breaking out of its forced alliance with France in order to side with Russia in the anti-Napoleonic war. Yet the dialectic of the moment was such that Germans could join in the rout of the French while nonetheless embracing aspects of the French revolutionary legacy. Thus near the conclusion of the novel, the Prussian General von Bamme, commenting on social changes around him, a reduction in traditional structures of hierarchy, speculates, “And where does all this come from? From over yonder, borne on the west wind. I can make nothing of these windbags of Frenchmen, but in all the rubbish they talk there is none the less a pinch of wisdom. Nothing much is going to come of their Fraternity, nor of their Liberty: but there is something to be said for what they have put between them. For what, after all, does it mean but: a man is a man.” Mensch ist mensch.

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TELOS: Critical Theory of the Contemporary
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Russell A. Berman
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Visiting Scholar: Jonas Tallberg

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Jonas TallbergJonas Tallberg is Professor of Political Science at Stockholm University. His research interests are global governance and European Union politics. He currently directs the research program “Legitimacy in Global Governance” (LegGov), funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. Tallberg’s book publications include Legitimacy in Global Governance: Sources, Processes, and Consequences (Oxford University Press, forthcoming, co-edited), The Opening Up of International Organizations: Transnational Access in Global Governance (Cambridge University Press, 2013, co-authored) and Leadership and Negotiation in the European Union (Cambridge University Press, 2006). His articles have appeared in journals such as International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, British Journal of Political Science, and European Journal of International Relations. While at The Europe Center, Jonas will work on three different projects related to European and global governance:

The Choice for Europe since Maastricht: Member States’ Preferences for Economic and Fiscal Integration Funded by the European Commission, Horizon 2020, 2015-2019

emuchoices.eu

Following the outbreak of the Eurozone crisis in 2009, European policy-makers agreed to a string of reforms that together amount to a profound deepening of fiscal and monetary cooperation in Europe. These reforms resulted from a rear-guard battle against the raging crisis and arduous negotiations among EU governments. While it is far from certain that they will suffice to alleviate the Eurozone’s problems, they raise a number of intriguing questions. What considerations led EU states to advocate these particular solutions to the Eurozone crisis? What states were successful in shaping the reforms agreed upon and why? What are the implications of these reforms for the viability of the Eurozone? This project brings together researchers in eight European countries to provide the most comprehensive and systematic analysis of domestic preference formation and interstate bargaining in the reform of the Eurozone.

Legitimacy in Global Governance (LegGov) Funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, 2016-2021

statsvet.su.se/leggov

The purpose of this research program is to offer the first systematic and comprehensive analysis of legitimacy in global governance. To what extent are global governance institutions (GGIs) regarded as legitimate? What explains that legitimacy? By what processes are GGIs legitimated and delegitimated? What are the consequences of legitimacy (or its absence) for the functioning of GGIs? How are these legitimacy dynamics in global governance similar to or different from the dynamics of legitimacy in the nation-state and other forms of governance? While legitimacy in global governance has generated growing interest in recent years, it has not yet been researched methodically by a coordinated team of specialists. We address the overarching question of why, how, and with what consequences GGIs gain, sustain and lose legitimacy by exploring three principal themes: (1) sources of legitimacy, (2) legitimation and delegitimation strategies, and (3) consequences of legitimacy. In the broadest sense, the program considers what systematic attention to legitimacy can tell us about world politics, and what experiences from world politics suggest for understanding legitimacy in contemporary politics generally.

The Performance of International Organizations: Institutional Design and Policy Output in Global Governance Funded by the Swedish Research Council, 2014-2018

statsvet.su.se/forskning/forskningsprojekt/pio

Many problems confronting today’s societies are transnational in character, leading states to increasingly rely on international organizations (IOs) for policy solutions. Yet the performance of IOs varies extensively. While some IOs are highly successful in developing, adopting, and enforcing policy, others are less successful. How can we account for this mixed record in IO performance? Are there identifiable factors that make IOs work better or worse? While existing research points to a multitude of factors that are beyond the control of IOs themselves, this project explores when, how, and why the institutional design of IOs shapes their performance. The project adopts a mixed-method design, combining a statistical analysis of performance in a large number of IOs with in-depth case studies of select IOs. It spans IOs in multiple policy areas and world regions over the time period 1950 to 2010. The project promises three central contributions to research and policy. First, it will offer the most systematic and comprehensive analysis so far of how institutional design shapes the performance of IOs. Second, it will generate a unique dataset on the policy output of IOs of extensive value to the research community. Third, it will be policy relevant, by providing policy-makers with evidence on the effects of design choices that can help them to systematically improve global governance.

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Jonas Tallberg
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Seminar with Lars-Erik Cederman

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Born in Sweden in 1963, Lars-Erik Cederman received an M.Sc. in Engineering Physics from the University of Uppsala in 1988 and an M.A. in International Relations from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva in 1990 before obtaining his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Michigan in 1994. Using computational modeling, he wrote his dissertation on how states and nations develop and dissolve. He has since taught at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Oxford, UCLA, and Harvard.

Lars-Erik Cederman is editor of Constructing Europe's Identity: The External Dimension (Lynne Rienner, 2001) and the author of Emergent Actors in World Politics: How States and Nations Develop and Dissolve (Princeton University Press, 1997), which received the 1998 Edgar S. Furniss Book Award. He is also the author and co-author of articles in scholarly journals such as the American Political Science Review, European Journal of International Relations, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. His main research interests include computational modeling, International Relations theory, nationalism, integration and disintegration processes, and historical sociology.

 

This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by the Munro Lectureship Fund and The Europe Center.

Lars-Erik Cederman Professor of International Conflict Research ETH Zurich
Seminars

Jonas Tallberg

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Visiting Scholar at The Europe Center, 2018
Professor of Political Science, Stockholm University
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Jonas Tallberg is Professor of Political Science at Stockholm University, where he directs the research group on global and regional governance, selected as a leading area of research at SU. His primary research interests are global governance and European Union politics. His most recent book is the The Opening Up of International Organizations: Transnational Access in Global Governance (Cambridge University Press, 2013), co-authored with Thomas Sommerer, Theresa Squatrito and Christer Jönsson. Earlier books include Leadership and Negotiation in the European Union (Cambridge University Press, 2006). His articles have appeared in journals such as International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, British Journal of Political Science, European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Organizations, and Journal of Common Market Studies.

Tallberg has won numerous awards for his research, including the Forskraft Award for the best Swedish dissertation on international relations, the JCMS Prize for the best article in Journal of Common Market Studies, and the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the German Humboldt Foundation. He has been awarded research grants from, among others, the European Research Council, Fulbright Commission, Swedish Research Council, Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, and Nordic Research Academy.

Tallberg has been a visiting researcher at, among other institutions, Harvard University, McGill University, WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and European Commission. He currently directs the six-year research program “Legitimacy in Global Governance” (statsvet.su.se/leggov) and the four-year research project “The Performance of International Organizations” (statsvet.su.se/forskning/forskningsprojekt/pio).

Featured Faculty Research: Dan Edelstein

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Dan EdelsteinDan Edelstein earned his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and came to Stanford in 2004. He is William H. Bonsall Professor of French, chair of the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and director of the Summer Humanities Institute. Dan's research is focused on eighteenth-century France, with interests at the crossroads of literature, history, political theory, and digital humanities. His most recent book manuscript, On the Spirit of Rights, concerns the history of natural and human rights from the wars of religion to the age of revolution (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2018). Currently, Dan's two main projects are On Permanent Revolution and Digital Humanities.

On Permanent Revolution, a book-length project, explores how revolution went from being the means toward a constitutional settlement, to becoming an end in and of itself. Stretching from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, it focuses in particular on the transformation of revolutionary authority during the French Revolution; on Marx's development of the concept of a "revolution in permanence"; and finally on the relation between this new model and the political violence that has often accompanied revolutions. 

Dan Edelstein, Nicole Coleman, Paula Findlen
Dan is a PI on the NEH-funded Digital Humanities project Mapping the Republic of Letters. This project, which brings together other scholars at Stanford and around the world, aims to map the correspondence and social networks of major intellectual figures. In an interview for the Stanford Report, Dan said, "We tend to think of networks as a modern invention, something that only emerged in the Age of Information. In fact, going all the way back to the Renaissance, scholars have established themselves into networks in order to receive the latest news, find out the latest discoveries and circulate the ideas of others. We've known about these correspondences for a long time – some of them have been published – but no one has been able to piece together how these individual networks fit into a complete whole, something we call the Republic of Letters." The tool-building part of this project has now been subsumed in the Humanities + Design Research Lab, of which he is the founding faculty director. The work of Dan and his colleagues on the correspondence of figures as diverse as Voltaire and Athanasius Kircher a century earlier "really reconfigures the map of Enlightenment Europe." Dan and his co-writers received another NEH grant to develop Palladio, a tool for visualizing complex historical data, and an ACLS grant to develop a new social network grap visualization, Fibra. This Lab is itself part of Stanford's Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, or CESTA.

More recently, he has been working on the project "Writing Rights," and published an article exploring the potential of JSTOR's data portal for exploring the "great unread" of scholarship. He was also the faculty advisor for Stanford's French Revolution Digital Archive (FRDA), and collaborates regularly with the Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL). At Stanford, Dan teaches courses on the literature, philosophy, culture, and politics of the Enlightenment; nineteenth-century novels; the French Revolution; early-modern political thought; and French intellectual culture (“Coffee & Cigarettes”).

 

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The Long Hangover: Putin's New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past

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This event is now full, and we are no longer able to accept reservations.
Please send an email to sj1874@stanford.edu if you would like to be added to the wait list.

 

Shaun Walker provides new insight into contemporary Russia and its search for a new identity, telling the story through the country's troubled relationship with its Soviet past. Walker not only explains Vladimir Putin's goals and the government's official manipulations of history, but also focuses on ordinary Russians and their motivations. He charts how Putin raised victory in World War II to the status of a national founding myth in the search for a unifying force to heal a divided country, and shows how dangerous the ramifications of this have been.

The book explores why Russia, unlike Germany, has failed to come to terms with the darkest pages of its past: Stalin's purges, the Gulag, and the war deportations. The narrative roams from the corridors of the Kremlin to the wilds of the Gulags and the trenches of East Ukraine. It puts the annexation of Crimea and the newly assertive Russia in the context of the delayed fallout of the Soviet collapse.
 
The Long Hangover is a book about a lost generation: the millions of Russians who lost their country and the subsequent attempts to restore to them a sense of purpose. Packed with analysis but told mainly through vibrant reportage, it is a thoughtful exploration of the legacy of the Soviet collapse and how it has affected life in Russia and Putin's policies.
 

Shaun Walker

Shaun Walker is Moscow Correspondent for The Guardian and has reported from Russia for more than a decade. He studied Russian and Soviet history at Oxford University, and has worked as a journalist in Moscow for more than a decade.

 
Copies of this book will be on sale at the event.
Shaun Walker Speaker
Lectures

The Magnitsky Act - Russian lawyer in Trump Jr. meeting lobbied against it; why does Putin hate it so much?

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Norman Naimark, Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies, Professor of History, and Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution writes about Putin's views on the Magnitsky Act.

To read the full story, please visit the Fox News Opinion webpage.

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Reflection in pool of Spasskaya tower of Moscow Kremlin Sergey V. Butorin
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