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Security

FSI scholars produce research aimed at creating a safer world and examing the consequences of security policies on institutions and society. They look at longstanding issues including nuclear nonproliferation and the conflicts between countries like North and South Korea. But their research also examines new and emerging areas that transcend traditional borders – the drug war in Mexico and expanding terrorism networks. FSI researchers look at the changing methods of warfare with a focus on biosecurity and nuclear risk. They tackle cybersecurity with an eye toward privacy concerns and explore the implications of new actors like hackers.

Along with the changing face of conflict, terrorism and crime, FSI researchers study food security. They tackle the global problems of hunger, poverty and environmental degradation by generating knowledge and policy-relevant solutions. 

New Forum on Contemporary Europe research project on History, Memory and Reconciliation

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In spring 2009, the Forum on Contemporary Europe (FCE) and the Division on Languages, Civilizations and Literatures (DLCL) delivered the first part of its multi-year research and public policy program on Contemporary History and the Future of Memory.  The program explored how communities that have undergone deep and violent political transformations try to confront their past.

Despite vast geographical, cultural and situational differences, the search for post-conflict justice and reconciliation has become a global phenomenon, resulting in many institutional and expressive responses. Some of these are literary and aesthetic explorations about guilt, commemoration and memorialization deployed for reconciliation and reinvention.  Others, especially in communities where victims and perpetrators live in close proximity, have led to trials, truth commissions, lustration, and institutional reform. This series illuminates these various approaches, seeking to foster new thinking and new strategies for communities seeking to move beyond atrocity.

Part 1: Contemporary History and the Future of Memory

In 2008-2009, this multi-year project on “History and Memory” at FCE and DLCL was launched with two high profile conference and speaker series: “Contemporary History and the Future of Memory” and “Austria and Central Europe Since 1989.”  For the first series on Contemporary History, the Forum, along with four co-sponsors (the Division of Literatures, Civilizations, and Languages, principal co-sponsor; the department of English; The Center for African Studies; Modern Thought and Literature; the Stanford Humanities Center), hosted internationally distinguished senior scholars to deliver lectures, student workshops, and the final symposium with Stanford faculty respondents.

Part 2: History, Memory and Reconciliation

In 2009-2010, we launch part 2 of this project by adding “Reconciliation” to our mission.  We are pleased to welcome the Human Rights Program at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law as co-sponsor of this series.  This series will examine scholarly and institutional efforts to create new national narratives that walk the fine line between before and after, memory and truth, compensation and reconciliation, justice and peace. Some work examines communities ravaged by colonialism and the great harm that colonial and post-colonial economic and social disparities cause.   The extent of external intervention creates discontinuities and dislocation, making it harder for people to claim an historical narrative that feels fully authentic.  Another response is to set up truth-seeking institutions such as truth commissions. Historical examples of truth commissions in South Africa, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Morocco inform more current initiatives in Canada, Cambodia, Colombia, Kenya, and the United States.  While this range of economic, social, political and legal modalities all seek to explain difficult pasts to present communities, it is not yet clear which approach yields greater truth, friendship, reconciliation and community healing.  The FCE series “History, Memory, and Reconciliation” will explore these issues.

The series will have its first event in February 2010. Multiple international scholars are invited.  Publications, speaker details, and pod and video casts will be accessible via the new FSI/FCE, DLCL, and Human Rights Program websites.

Series coordinators:

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History, Memory and Reconciliation Project Addresses Communal Memories of Loss

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Mankind has regularly witnessed the immense destruction wrought by natural disasters. Similarly destructive to human life are man-made atrocities, like war and genocide. Those who are lucky enough to have survived either type of cataclysmic event must then begin the process of confronting and reconciling the memories of the catastrophe that befell them.  Public commemorations of these events have run the gamut from poetry and works of art to government sponsored “truth commissions” and institutional reform.

The ways in which people chose to memorialize hardship, whether organized by a group or expressed by an individual, offer illuminating insights into the human psyche and post-conflict justice and also provide valuable information about a society, government or culture.

Several Stanford groups are sponsoring a series of events and research projects designed to explore the many facets of the human phenomena called ‘memory’. Scholars participating in the endeavor, entitled “Contemporary History and the Future of Memory,” represent a broad spectrum of disciplines, but share a common objective: to analyze the range of ways that people have coped with adversity in the past so that future communities may benefit their experience. Attention to the role that memory plays in helping people move beyond tragedy is especially pertinent now as citizens of Chile and Haiti transition from survival to recovery after the devastating earthquakes that took place in each country.

“Contemporary History and the Future of Memory” began in the spring of 2008 with the launch of a multi-year research and public policy program sponsored by Stanford’s Forum on Contemporary Europe (FCE) and the Division of Literature, Cultures, and Languages (DLCL.) The aim of that program, as described on the DLCL website, is to investigate “how communities that have undergone deep and violent political transformations try to confront their past.”

In the fall of 2009 the Program on Human Rights at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law joined the initiative, bringing with them expertise in reconciliation, a fundamental phase in the cycle of memory.  The series title was amended to “History, Memory & Reconciliation” in recognition of their contribution. This year’s events featured a visit by Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, the internationally renowned scholar of comparative literature from Columbia University, who addressed the subject of cultural and linguistic memory. During the spring quarter human rights and memory will be addressed in separate events by two guest scholars. Cambridge Anthropologist Harri Englund gave a talk on April 6th and University of Chile Law professor José Zalaquett will take part in several events on April 22nd and 23rd, including a lecture on Post-Conflict International Human Rights: Bright Spots, Shadows, Dilemmas.

Four Stanford scholars co-chair “History, Memory & Reconciliation.” They are French Professor Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, Assistant Professor of English Saikat Majumdar, Law School lecturer and FSI fellow Helen Stacy, and Roland Hsu, Assistant Director of FSI’s Forum on Contemporary Europe.

Professors Majumdar and Boyi answered a few questions about the value of delving into memory and how humanities research informs the broader dialogue. Read the full interview here.

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Stalin, Soviet Policy, and the Consolidation of a Communist Bloc in Eastern Europe, 1944-1953

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Soviet policy in Eastern Europe during the final year and immediate aftermath of World War II had a profound impact on global politics. By reassessing Soviet aims and concrete actions in Eastern Europe from the mid-1940s through the early 1950s, Kramer’s essay touches on larger questions about the origins and intensity of the Cold War. The essay shows that domestic politics and postwar exigencies in the USSR, along with Iosif Stalin’s external ambitions, decisively shaped Soviet ties with Eastern Europe. Stalin’s adoption of increasingly repressive and xenophobic policies at home, and his determination to quell armed insurgencies in areas annexed by the USSR at the end of the war, were matched by his embrace of a harder line vis-à-vis Eastern Europe. This internal-external dynamic was not wholly divorced from the larger East-West context, but it was, to a certain degree, independent of it. At the same time, the shift in Soviet policy toward Eastern Europe was bound to have a detrimental impact on Soviet relations with the leading Western countries, which had tried to avert the imposition of Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe. The final breakdown of the USSR’s erstwhile alliance with the United States and Great Britain was, for Stalin, an unwelcome but acceptable price to pay.

Mark Kramer is Director of the Cold War Studies Program at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow of Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. He has taught at Harvard, Yale, and Brown Universities and was formerly an Academy Scholar in Harvard's Academy of International and Area Studies and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University.

Professor Kramer is the author of Crisis in Czechoslovakia, 1968: The Prague Spring and the Soviet Invasion; Soldier and State in Poland: Civil-Military Relations and Institutional Change After Communism; Crisis in the Communist World, 1956: De-Stalinization, the Soviet Union, and Upheavals in Poland and Hungary; The Collapse of the Soviet Union; and Income Distribution and Social Transfer Policies in the Post-Communist Transition: Changing Patterns of Inequality. He is completing another book titled From Dominance to Hegemony to Collapse: Soviet Policy in East-Central Europe, 1945-1991, which, like his earlier books on the Soviet bloc, draws heavily on new archival sources from the former Communist world.

Co-sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europe and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

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Mark Kramer Director of the Cold War Studies Program at Harvard University; Senior Fellow of Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies Speaker
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Post-Conflict International Human Rights: Bright Spots, Shadows, Dilemmas

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José Zalaquett is a Chilean lawyer and legal scholar known for his work defending human rights in Chile during the regime of General Pinochet. During Chile's transition to democracy, he served on the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission where he investigated and prosecuted human rights violations committed by the military regime. He has served as President of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and as the head of the International Executive Committee of Amnesty International. He currently co-directs the Human Rights Centre at the University of Chile, serves on the board of the International Centre for Transitional Justice, and is a member of the International Commission of Jurists. He has been awarded UNESCO's Prize for Human Rights Education and Chile's National Prize for Humanities and Social Sciences.

Video recording of the event is available here.

Event co-sponsored by the Stanford International Law Society, Departments of English, History, and Comparative Literature; the Program in Modern Thought and Literature; the Center for African Studies; the Stanford Humanities Center; and the Center for South Asia

History, Memory, and Reconciliation futureofmemory.stanford.edu is sponsored by the Research Unit in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at Stanford University.

Stanford Law School
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Jose Zalaquett Professor Speaker Universidad de Chile
Terry L. Karl Professor, Political Science, Stanford Commentator
James Campbell Professor, History, Stanford Commentator
Lectures
History, Memory and Reconciliation

Ewa Domanska

Department of History
Adam Mickiewicz University
ul. sw. Marcin 78
61-809 Poznan, Poland

Spring Quarter:
Department of Anthropology
Main Quad, bldg 50
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2034
ewka@stanford.edu

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Associate Professor of Theory and History of Historiography, Department of History, Adam Mickiewicz University at Poznan
Visiting Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University
Ewa_Domanska.jpg PhD

Ewa Domanska is an associate professor of theory and history of historiography at the Department of History, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland.  Since 2002, she has been a Visiting Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, and is a Visiting Associate Professor with the Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages. Her teaching and research interests focus on  contemporary Anglo-American theory and history of historiography, comparative theory of the human and social sciences and posthumanities.

Domanska is the program chair of the Bureau of the International Commission of Theory and History of Historiography and a member of the Commission of Methodology of History and History of Historiography (Committee of Historical Sciences, Polish Academy of Sciences), and the Commission of the Anthropology of Prehistory and the Middle Ages (Committee of the Prehistory, Polish Academy of Sciences).  She is also a member of the editorial boards of Storia della Soriografia (Italy),  Ейдос. Альманах теорії та історії історичної науки (Ukraine), Frontiers of Historiography (China), Journal of Interdisciplinary Crossroad (India) and Historyka (Poland).

Professor Domanska was a Fellow of The Netherlands Organization for International Cooperation in Higher Education (NUFFIC) from 1991-1992 (doctoral studies at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands - with Frank Ankersmit), a Fulbright fellow at the University of California at Berkeley from 1995-96 (postdoctoral studies with Hayden White), a Kościuszko Foundation fellow at Stanford University from 2000-2001, and a fellow of the Center of Cultural Studies, University of California at Santa Cruz (1996), and The School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University (1998).

She is the author of Unconventional Histories. Reflections on the Past in the New Humanities (2006, in Polish) and Microhistories: Encounters In-between Worlds (1999, revised edition, 2005 in Polish).  She also edited or co-edited several books, including French Theory in Poland (with Miroslaw Loba, 2010, in Polish), Encounters: Philosophy of History After Postmodernism (Virginia University Press, 1998, also in Chinese - 2007, in Russian - 2010), History, Memory, Ethics (2002, in Polish), Shoah: Contemporary Problems of Comprehension and Representation (with Przemyslaw Czaplinski, 2009 in Polish), Re-Figuring Hayden White (with Frank Ankersmit and Hans Kellner, Stanford University Press, 2009), and Hayden White's Historical Prose (2009, in Polish).  She edited and translated Hayden White's Poetics of Historical Writing (with Marek Wilczynski, 2000, in Polish), and Frank Ankersmit's Narrative, Representation, Experience (2004, in Polish).  Domanska is currently working on a new book entitled Posthumanities: Introduction to the Comparative Theory of the Human and Social Sciences.

Courses taught:

  • FrenGen 361: Theories of Resistance: Postsocialism, Postcolonialism, Postapartheid (Spring, 2010)
  • Anthro 337A; FrenGen 367: Violence, the Sacred, and Rights of the Dead (Spring 2009)
  • CASA 324: Human/Non-Human. Continental Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Spring 2008)
  • CASA 326; FrenGen 326: Continental Philosophy and the Human Sciences. The Self and the Oppressive Other (Spring 2007)

Capote and Atxaga versus the Counterterrorists: Why Counterterrorism Fails

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Joseba Zulaika is Professor at the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno. Professor Zulaika holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Princeton University. His most recent publications include Terrorism: the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), and Contraterrorismo USA: profecía y trampa (Irun: Alberdania, 2009). Professor Zulaika’s ongoing research addresses the Bilbao Guggenheim Museoa and the ethnography of Bilbao with additional emphasis on global culture, architecture, museum politics, and tourism industries. His primary research interests include Basque culture and politics, the international discourse of terrorism, various traditional occupations (fishermen, hunters, farmers), diasporic and global cultures, history of anthropological thought, and theories of symbolism, ritual, and discourse.

Sponsored by the Iberian Studies Program at the Forum on Contemporary Europe, and the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University.

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Joseba Zulaika Professor, Center for Basque Studies Speaker University of Nevada, Reno
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FCE Announces Book Release: "Ethnic Europe: Mobility, Identity, and Conflict in a Globalized World"

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The Forum on Contemporary Europe is pleased to announce the release of "Ethnic Europe: Mobility, Identity, and Conflict in a Globalized World" (Stanford University Press, 2010) edited by FCE Associate Director Roland Hsu.

Ethnic Europe offers accessible, comprehensive, and influential thinking on immigration, and the challenge of how we are to defend minority identity and encourage social solidarity in our world of global migration.  Focused on Europe as a destination for global immigration, eleven of the most influential social science and humanities authors address the increasingly complex challenges facing the expanding European Union—including labor migration, strains on welfare economies, local traditions, globalized cultures, Islamic diasporas, separatist movements, and threats of terrorism.  The authors confront the struggle shared in Europe and the U.S. to balance minority rights and social cohesion.  For the first time in one volume, these writers give startling insight into Europe’s fast-growing communities, taking the reader from global views to local detail.  From questions of high politics (If Europe includes Turkey, where does Europe end?) to local culture wars (How does McDonalds appeal to Catalans?), this collection engages theory, history, and generalized views of diasporas, including the details of neighborhoods, borderlands, and the popular literature and new media and films spawned by the creative mixing of ethnic cultures.

Roland Hsu, Associate Director of Stanford University’s Forum on Contemporary Europe at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, edited, and wrote the opening essay to make “Ethnic Europe” a foundation text and approachable guide to the experience of ethnic politics, migrant life, and movements for integration and exclusion.  With his experience at the Forum bringing scholarship, policy, and public comment to bear of our most pressing issues, Hsu offers this book on “Ethnic Europe” as an approachable guide to the general and specific of ethnic politics, migrant life, and movements for integration and exclusion. 

Roland Hsu earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, and before coming to Stanford was Assistant Professor of European History at the University of Idaho.  Hsu currently teaches, in addition to his research and work at the Forum, in the Humanities at Stanford University.

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