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.

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Ivo Daalder

Ivo Daalder has been president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs since July 2013. Prior to joining the Council, Daalder served as the Ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for more than four years. Daalder also served on the National Security Council staff as director for European Affairs from 1995-97.
 
Ambassador Daalder is a widely-published author. His most recent books include In the Shadow of the Oval Office: Profiles of the National Security Advisers and the Presidents they Served—From JFK to George W. Bush (with I. M. Destler) and the award-winning America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (with James M. Lindsay). Other books include Beyond Preemption: Force and Legitimacy in a Changing World (2007); Crescent of Crisis: US-European Strategy for the Greater Middle East (2006); and Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo (2000). Daalder is a frequent contributor to the opinion pages of the world’s leading newspapers, and a regular commentator on international affairs on television and radio.
 
Before his appointment as ambassador to NATO by President Obama in 2009, Daalder was a senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, specializing in American foreign policy, European security and transatlantic relations, and national security affairs. Prior to joining Brookings in 1998, he was an associate professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy and director of research at its Center for International and Security Studies.
 
Ambassador Daalder serves on the board of UI LABS, on the leadership board of the chancellor of the University of Illinois at Chicago, and on the Advisory Committee of the Secretary of State's Strategic Dialogue with Civil Society, for which he also cochairs the Global Cities Working Group.
 
Ambassador Daalder was educated at Oxford and Georgetown Universities, and received his PhD in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is married to Elisa D. Harris, and they have two sons.

 

 
Ivo Daalder Former U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO
Lectures
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A wave of far-right populism is sweeping across Europe. Euroskeptic, nationalist, populist parties, once on the fringes of European politics, are poised to enter the mainstream. The rise of the far right is first and foremost a cultural backlash against the rapid economic and political integration of the E.U. over the last 25 years. But while far-right parties are nothing new in Europe, their explicit pro-Russian turn is. Far right parties are not simply puppets of the Kremlin, but they are undoubtedly allies. They act as agents of influence in Europe’s institutions by supporting pro-Russian views, praising Mr. Putin’s foreign policy in Ukraine and Syria, and advocating against EU policies that would hurt Russian interests, such as sanctions. Increasing electoral support for the far right populists is no doubt domestically driven, but by supporting Putin, far-right leaders conveniently play into the Kremlin’s geo-political agenda.

 

 

Alina Polyakova, PhD, is the Director of Research for Europe and Eurasia at the Atlantic Council. She is the author of  the book, The Dark Side of European Integration (2015), which examines the rise of far-right populism in Europe. Dr. Polyakova is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a frequent media commentator on developments in Ukraine, Russia, and Europe. Her writings have appeared in major publications such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The American Interest, Newsweek, and academic journals. Concurrently, Dr. Polyakova is a Swiss National Science Foundation Senior Research Fellow and coinvestigator on a multi-year project examining the rise of far-right political parties in the European Union. She has been a fellow at the Eurasia Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Fulbright Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), and a Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer at the University of Bern. Dr. Polyakova has taught courses on European politics, foreign policy, and Russia at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Bern, Switzerland. She holds a PhD and MA in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA in Economics and Sociology with highest honors from Emory University.

 

THIS EVENT HAS REACHED FULL CAPACITY. PLEASE CONTACT MAGDALENA magdafb@stanford.edu TO GET ON THE WAITLIST. 

Alina Polyakova
Lectures
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Bringing together more than 25 scholars from Europe, Turkey, and the United States, the conference will explore the contemporary Turkey through the conceptual lenses of space, narrative, and affect/emotion. The event will start with a public screening of “Clair Obscur” (Dir. Yesim Ustaoglu) on April 27 and conclude with a public screening of “The Last Schnitzel” (Dir. Ismet Kurtulus & Kaan Arici) on April 29.
 
Please take a moment to review the conference program, which includes speaker bios, paper titles, and abstracts. The conference sessions will be open only to faculty members, students, and researchers who register in advance at this link.  The venue information will be provided only to the confirmed RSVPs.
 
 
The Abbasi Program is delighted to organize this event in collaboration with Stanford’s Mediterranean Studies, The Europe Center, CDDRL Arab Reform & Democracy Program, Global Studies Division, and CDDRL.

 

Venue information will be provided to the confirmed RSVPs.

Conferences
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Bringing together more than 25 scholars from Europe, Turkey, and the United States, the conference will explore the contemporary Turkey through the conceptual lenses of space, narrative, and affect/emotion. The event will start with a public screening of “Clair Obscur” (Dir. Yesim Ustaoglu) on April 27 and conclude with a public screening of “The Last Schnitzel” (Dir. Ismet Kurtulus & Kaan Arici) on April 29.
 
Please take a moment to review the conference program, which includes speaker bios, paper titles, and abstracts. The conference sessions will be open only to faculty members, students, and researchers who register in advance at this link.  The venue information will be provided only to the confirmed RSVPs.
 
 
The Abbasi Program is delighted to organize this event in collaboration with Stanford’s Mediterranean Studies, The Europe Center, CDDRL Arab Reform & Democracy Program, Global Studies Division, and CDDRL.

Venue information will be provided to the confirmed RSVPs.

Conferences
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Due to the overwhelming interest in this event, we are now booked to full capacity and unable to take further reservations.

Please contact khaley@stanford.edu if you would like to be placed on the wait list.

 

This is a watershed French presidential election marked by the collapse of the main political leaders and established political parties as well as the amplification of corruption scandals by social networks.  The French electorate is torn between disengagement from politics, anger and confusion.  In the first ballot on April 23rd, voters are likely to reject the traditional Right/Left divide and stage the run-off campaign as a stark choice between far-Right populist leader Marine Le Pen and 39 year old pro-European centrist Emmanuel Macron.  These candidates and their ideas are the most emblematic incarnation of the clash that increasingly defines Western politics, pitting anti-immigrant and anti-trade nationalists against the more cosmopolitan elites.  Will France vote more like the Dutch or the British and Americans?  With what consequences for herself, Europe and the transatlantic relationship?

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Image of Patrick Chamorel, Senior Resident Scholar at the Stanford University Center in Washington DC.

Patrick Chamorel
is Senior Resident Scholar at the Stanford University Center in Washington DC. He teaches Political Science, with an emphasis on comparative American and European politics, public policy and political economy, as well as transatlantic relations. He has taught Transatlantic Relations on Stanford’s California campus as well as French Politics at the Stanford in Paris campus. Over the last few years, he has been teaching a semester course and an intensive seminar at the Reims Euro-American campus of Sciences-Po Paris. In addition to Stanford, he has taught at the University of California (Berkeley and Santa Cruz), George Washington University, and Claremont McKenna College where he was the Crown Visiting professor of Government. He was a Fellow of the Institute for Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley, the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC and the Hoover Institution at Stanford, as well as a Congressional Fellow of the American Political Science Association (Offices of Harry Reid in the U.S. Senate and Norman Mineta in the House of Representatives).

Patrick Chamorel has written and lectured extensively on US and European politics. His research has focused recently on US strategic, political and economic relations with Europe and the EU, American and European political and business elites, the impact of globalization on governments, business and civil society, Euro-skepticism in America, and US and French presidential elections. He regularly contributes to the media, including the Wall Street Journal, Die Welt, Les Echos, Atlantico.fr, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and CNN International.

In the 1990s, Patrick Chamorel was a Senior Advisor to the Minister of Industry and in the Policy Planning Office of the Prime Minister in Paris. He is a graduate of Sciences-Po in Paris where he also earned his Ph.D. in Political Science after doing research at UC Berkeley and Stanford University. In addition, he holds a Master in Public Law from the University of Paris.

Patrick Chamorel Senior Resident Scholar and Professor of Political Science Speaker Stanford University Center in Washington, DC
Seminars

This event has reached full capacity and we are no longer able to accept RSVPs.

We will be livestreaming this talk on April 4th at https://livestream.com/accounts/1973198/events/7109075  beginning at 12:00pm.

Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon will discuss key international issues affecting Scottish, UK and international politics.  She will touch on a range of areas including Brexit, climate change, refugees and Syria and the relationship between the US and Scotland. This will be followed by a Q&A.

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Image of Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister of Scotland


Nicola Sturgeon: Voted into the Scottish Parliament in 1999, Nicola Sturgeon became the First Minister of Scotland in 2014 – the first female to hold the position. She led her party to success in the Westminster and Holyrood elections, with the SNP becoming the first party in Scotland to secure a third term in government. Following the Brexit vote in the UK, the First Minister has been a leading voice arguing for a continuing relationship between Scotland and the EU and an open and welcoming approach to immigration. She was ranked as the 50th most powerful woman in the world in 2016 and 2nd in the United Kingdom by Forbes magazine.
 
 
Nicola Sturgeon First Minister of Scotland
Lectures
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If you thought that world politics is boring, think again. 2016 was potentially as important as 1945 and 1989. The end of WWII marked the beginning of our current global institutions and a bipolar world. The end of the Cold War kicked off an unprecedented era of liberal democracy, social market economics, and globalization. Last year arguably marked an end of that era, as demonstrated by Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Was Brexit and the election of Donald Trump the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning? Come and find out. As a former Prime, Finance, and Foreign Minister of Finland, Alex will give you a practical answer with a theoretical twist and a blend of humour.

 

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Alexander Stubb image

 

Alexander Stubb has served as Prime Minister, Finance Minister, Foreign Minister, Trade and Europe Minister of Finland. He was a Member of the European Parliament from 2004-2008 and in the national government from 2008-16. He was the Chairman of the National Coalition Party from 2014-16 and is currently a Member of the Finnish Parliament.

Stubb's background is in academia and civil service. He has published 16 books, tens of academic articles and hundreds of columns. He holds a Ph.D. From the London School of Economics and Political Science, a Master's degree from the College of Europe in Bruges, and a B.A. from Furman University in South Carolina. He also studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. He worked as an expert adviser at the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Helsinki and in Brussels, and in President Romano Prodi's team at the European Commission. He has been a visiting Professor at the College of Europe in Bruges.

His expertise includes European and International Affairs, Foreign and Security Policy, the Euro and the Global Economy. His current interests are Brexit, global affairs, the Fourth Industrial Revolution (digitalisation, robotisation and artificial intelligence) and health and exercise science. Stubb is a sought after speaker and a frequent commentator on international affairs for many global news channels. He writes a regular column for the Financial Times and Dagens Industri, the Swedish business journal.

Stubb speaks Finnish, Swedish, English, French and German. He is an avid sportsman, having played ice-hockey, handball, and national team golf in his youth. His current passions are cycling and triathlon. He participated in the Ironman World Championships in Hawaii in October 2016.

Alexander Stubb Speaker former Prime Minister of Finland and current member of the Finnish Parliament
Lectures
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Around the world, our allies are worried. Here in South Korea, President-elect Donald Trump’s unexpected election victory has fueled a deep sense of uncertainty about the future of American leadership in Asia and the world. Government officials and foreign policy experts are scrutinizing every Trump utterance about South Korea, trade and security made during the campaign, and they don’t like what they find. As I have been asked repeatedly during my stay here, does he really believe that the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement kills American jobs, that South Korea does not contribute substantially to the costs of basing our soldiers here, or that South Korea and Japan should defend themselves against the “maniac of North Korea,” including by acquiring their own nuclear weapons?

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Publication Type
Commentary
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
The Washington Post
Authors
Michael A. McFaul
Paragraphs

Austria is perhaps the most dramatic example of this process. In the parliamentary elections of 2013, the Five Star Movement came in second, with 25 percent of the vote. Because the electoral law favors coalitions, Grillo's movement won only 109 out of 630 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, which is still impressive [5] for a group that celebrates its lack of organizational efficiency and programmatic coherence.

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1
Publication Type
Commentary
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
Commonweal
Authors
James J. Sheehan
Paragraphs

Relations between the United States and Russia today are more strained and confrontational than at any time since the end of the Cold War. In fact, even some periods of the Cold War seemed more cooperative than our current era. For the first time since the end of World War II, a European country has annexed territory of a neighbor. Emboldened by the relative ease of Crimea’s annexation, Vladi-mir Putin then went a step further and intervened in eastern Ukraine in an attempt to wrestle more territory away from Kiev’s control. Inside Russia, Putin has increased his autocratic grip, in part by blaming the United States for “fomenting revolution” against his regime.

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1
Publication Type
Commentary
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
Hoover Digest
Authors
Michael A. McFaul
Number
4
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