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Alternatives to Partition: New Visions for Israel/Palestine

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The logic of partitioning the land has dominated the various attempts to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Several developments in the last few years cast serious doubts regarding the feasibility of partition. This talk seeks to critically explore alternatives to partition in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. More specifically, it seeks to examine feasible, reasonable, and fairly just alternatives to partition that would secure the national and individual rights, interests and identities of Arabs and Jews alike.

Bashir Bashir is a research fellow at The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and a Civic Education and Leadership Fellow at Maxwell School of Citizenship at Syracuse University. He holds a Ph.D. and Master’s degree in Political Theory from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a Bachelor’s degree in Politics, Sociology and Anthropology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has taught Political Theory at the London School of Economics, Queen's University, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  His primary research interests are democratic theories of inclusion, multiculturalism, civic education, conflict resolution and the politics of reconciliation, historical injustices, Palestinian nationalism, and Israeli politics.  Among Bashir's publications is: Will Kymlicka and Bashir Bashir (eds.), The Politics of Reconciliation in Multicultural Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

CISAC Conference Room

Bashir Bashir Research Fellow, Van Leer Jerusalem Institute; Civic Education and Leadership Fellow at Maxwell School of Citizenship, Syracuse University Speaker
Seminars

Heinz Gaertner

Berggasse 7
A-1090 Vienna
Austria

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Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair Professor, 2001-2002
Visiting Scholar, FSI, 2008 and 2012
Heinz_Gaertner.jpg PhD

Prof. Heinz Gärtner is academic director (since 2013) at the Austrian Institute for International Affairs (oiip) in Vienna, Austria and senior scientist at the University of Vienna. He is Lecturer at the National Defense Academy and at the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna. He was a Fulbright Fellow at the World Policy Institute as well as the Visiting Austrian Chair at Stanford University in 2001-2002. In 2008 he held again a Fulbright Professorship at the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI). In 2012 he was Visiting Professor at the FSI. Heinz Gärtner was visiting Professor at St. Hugh's College, Oxford (1992), and at the Institute for International Relations, Vancouver, Canada (1993), and at the University of Erlangen (Germany) (1994/95). He lectures often at other American, European, and Asian universities and research institutes. Heinz Gärtner has received international recognition for his work on European, international security, and arms control. He is also a frequent commentator on European and Austrian television, radio, and print media, including CNN Europe and the BBC. He also acts as a Special Adviser to the Austrian Ministry of Defense. He was academic member of the Austrian delegation of the Wassenaar arms export control arrangement in the framework of the Austrian presidency (2005). He supervised several large projects on NATO, and comprehensive security, and arms control. Heinz Gärtner received the Bruno Kreisky (legendary former Austrian Chancellor) Award for most outstanding Political Books: “Models of European Security“ (1998). Gärtner holds several international, and European, and Austrian academic memberships.

Heinz Gärtner is the author of numerous academic articles and books.

Some of his books are:

  • Die neue Rolle der USA und Europa (America’s New Role and Europe), (lit-Verlag: Münster), 2012.
  • Obama and the Bomb: The Vision of a World free of Nuclear Weapons (ed.), (Peter Lang publisher: Frankfurt-New York- Vienna; 2011).
  • USA – Weltmacht auf neuen Wegen: Die Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik Barack Obamas, (America - World Power breaks New Ground), third updated edition, (lit-Verlag: Münster), 2010.
  • Internationale Sicherheit - Definitionen von A-Z (International Security - Definitions from A-Z), second revised and extended edition, (Nomos: Baden-Baden), 2008.
  • European Security and Transatlantic Relations after September 11 and the Iraq War, editor together with Ian Cuthbertson, (Palgrave-MacMillan: Houndmills), 2005.
  • Small States and Alliances, editor together with Erich Reiter, (Springer: Berlin) 2001, 300 pages.
  • Europe’s New Security Challenges, editor together with Adrian Hyde-Price and Erich Reiter, (Lynne Rinner: Boulder/London) 2001, 470 pages.

Heinz Gärtner also is editor of the books series “International Security” (Publisher: Peter Lang).

Some of his recent academic articles are:

  • Deterrence and Disarmament, Europe’s World online, 26 02 2012.
  • The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and Libya,” Europe’s World online, 02 07 2011.
  • A Nuclear-Weapon Zone in the Middle East, Europe’s World online, 24 05 2011.
  • A year of Amano's leadership in IAEA, Bulletin of American Atomic Scientists, December, 2011.
  • Non-proliferation & Engagement: Iran & North Korea should not let the opportunity slip by, Defense & Security Analysis, Volume 26 edition 3, September 2010.
  • Towards a Theory of Arms Export Control, International Politics, Vol. 47, 1, January 2010, 125–143.

Francis Fukuyama

Encina Hall, C148
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

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Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy
Research Affiliate at The Europe Center
Professor by Courtesy, Department of Political Science
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Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a faculty member of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also Director of Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy, and a professor (by courtesy) of Political Science.

Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His book In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir will be published in fall 2026.

Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation, and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004. He is editor-in-chief of American Purpose, an online journal.

Dr. Fukuyama holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), Aarhus University (Denmark), the Pardee Rand Graduate School, and Adam Mickiewicz University (Poland). He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Trustees of Freedom House, and the Board of the Volcker Alliance. He is a fellow of the National Academy for Public Administration, a member of the American Political Science Association, and of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.

(October 2025)

Global Populisms

A new project examining the global surge in populist movements and what it means for established democratic rules and institutions.
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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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CISAC Conference Room

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
Seminars

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
Rm 280A

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

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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Visit by Czech Prime Minister Jan Fischer

Jan Fischer was born in Prague in 1951 to a family of mathematical statisticians and actuarial mathematicians. His father was a scientific employee of the Mathematics Institute of the Czech Academy of Science and devoted himself to statistical applications in genetics, breeding and medicine.

Fischer finished his studies at the national economics faculty of the University of Economics, Prague with a degree in statistics and econometrics in 1974. He joined the statistical office after university, where he worked until the beginning of the 1980s as a research employee of the Research Institute of Socioeconomic Information (then a part of the statistics office). In 1985, he finished his post-graduate studies at the Prague School of Economics and gained the title of Candidate of Science in the field of economic statistics. He served in various functions at the Federal Statistical Office until 1990, when he became deputy chairman of the office. After the creation of an independent Czech Republic in 1993, he became the deputy chairman of the Czech Statistical Office.

From the beginning of the 1990s he led teams processing the results of parliamentary and municipal elections. He was also in charge of contacts with the European Union's Eurostat statistical office. In the spring of 2001, he worked on a mission of the International Monetary Fund which examined the possibility of building statistical services in East Timor.

From September 2000 he worked as the director of the production department for the Taylor Nelson Sofres Factum company, and from March 2002 until his naming as chairman of the Czech Statistical Office, he was the head of the research facilities of the Faculty of Informatics and Statistics of the Prague School of Economics.

He was named chairman of the Czech Statistical Office by the President of the Czech Republic on 24 April 2003.

He was named Prime Minister by the President of the Czech Republic on 9 April 2009.

He is a member of a number of prestigious institutions, including the Czech Statistics Society, the International Statistics Institute, the Science Council, the Board of Trustees of the University of Economics, Prague, as well as the Science Council of the University of J.E. Purkyně in Ústí nad Labem.

Jan Fischer is married for the second time and is the father of three children.

Jan Fischer Prime Minister, Czech Republic; Chairman, Czech Statistical Office Speaker
Panel Discussions

Ideas of Secularization in Trans-Atlantic Perspectives

This workshop will address different ideas of secularization, the ways they have been historically narrated, and now function discursively, and how these insights may help us address the subject’s present day politicization. Workshop sessions will especially focus on the different approaches to secularization in the US and Europe.

In cultural, sociological, and geopolitical realms, religion and religiosity have become central issues in the contemporary world. This centrality raises questions about associating modernity with the secular, and also about what we mean by ‘secularism’ or ‘secularization.’ These concepts have been used variously to designate the progressive disappearance of religion and also its transformation into modern institutions, and connoting both emancipation and a nostalgia for lost origins. Today, this ambiguity is less an obstacle than a promise for future theory, since it encourages a promising debate about the modern and its relation towards religion.

Concepts of secularization appear to follow distinct perspectives: While an American debate focuses on the political issue of secularism and on sociological approaches, in Europe the concept is rather related to philosophy and cultural history. Both perspectives should be understood as interrelated and each responds to different historical and contemporary roles of religion in Europe and America, and raises important political questions. The 'neutrality' of the state toward religion, for example, as seen from a juridical or a historical perspective, has different meanings in the U.S. and Europe. No less important are the relations of Europe and the U.S. towards Islam in particular.

The present workshop aims to develop understandings of secularization that will be productive for cultural, political, and legal applications. Beyond a unified theory, secularization may be understood as a discursive construct, and as a series of figurative ideas: including metaphors such as the ‘death of God’ or modern ‘disenchantment,’ topoi such as Mysticism, Nihilism or the Vera Icon, and narratives such as the Weber-Thesis or the afterlife of antiquity. This workshop is intended to facilitate analysis of historical and contemporary issues including: Can ideas of secularization contribute to a fruitful analysis of the relation between religion and modernity? In what ways are secularism and faith integral to modern and postmodern thought? How can we put into productive debate American and the European approaches towards secularization? Does the idea of secularization necessarily cast theological communities as anti-modern?

WORKSHOP SCHEDULE

June 3

9:30am: Breakfast

10:00am:  Welcome and Workshop Introduction, Daniel Weidner

I. (Secularization in Question) 10:15am – 11:45am 

  • Adrian Pabst, "The Paradox of Faith – Religion beyond secularization and de-secularization"
  • Jean Claude Monod, "Has the concept of 'Secularization' lost any relevance?"

Lunch break 12:00pm-1:00pm

II (Rhetorics and Politics of Secularization) 1:00pm-2:30pm

  • Daniel Weidner, " ‘Secularization’ as Metaphor, Myth, and Allegory"
  • Christopher Soper, "Clothing the Naked Public Square:  Religion, Secularism, and the Future of Politics"

Break: 2:30pm-3:00pm

III (Case studies) 3:00pm-4:30pm

  • David Myers,  "Reflections on the 'Deprivatization' of Religion: Lessons Learned from Kiryas Joel, New York"
  • Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, "Disestablishment, American Style"

Day 1 summary remarks 4:30pm-5:00pm

Dinner

June 4

8:30am Breakfast, with day 2 opening remarks by Daniel Weidner

IV (Secularization in between) 9:00am-10:30am

  • John McCole, "Between disenchantment and the post-secular: Georg Simmel on religion"
  • Brian Britt, "Secular Reading, Religious Writing: Benjamin and Freud on Schreber"

Break 10:30-10:45am

V (Secularization and Literature) 10:45am-12:15pm

  • Christian Sieg , "Between the Religious and the Secular. Heinrich Böll’s Early Oeuvre in the Context of the Secularization Debate"
  • Russell Berman, "Konrad Weiss and the 'Christian Epimetheus' -- Secularization and the Weimar Crisis"

Lunch break 12:15pm-1:30pm

VI (Temporalities sacred and secular) 1:30pm-3:00pm

  • Andrea Schatz, "Irresistible Secularism? Time, Language and the Jewish Enlightenment"
  • Nitzan Lebovic, "Hannah Arendt and Extraordinary Secularism"

Workshop concluding remarks (Weidner) with concluding discussion 3:00pm-4:00pm.

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Board Room
Stanford Humanities Center

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Law and Religion Program Speaker University at Buffalo Law School, State University of New York
Daniel Weidner Associate Director Speaker Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin

Russell A. Berman

Department of Comparative Literature
Stanford University
Building 260, Room 201
Stanford, CA 94305-2030

(650) 723-1069 (650) 725-8421
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, by courtesy
Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities
Professor of Comparative Literature
Professor of German Studies
Senior Fellow at The Hoover Institution
Faculty affiliate at The Europe Center
110501-7227rb.jpg PhD

Russell Berman is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution where he co-directs the Working Group on Islamism and the International Order. He holds a courtesy appointment at the Freeman Spogli Institute. He formerly served as Senior Advisor on the Policy Planning Staff of the United States Department of State and has been awarded a Mellon Faculty Fellowship at Harvard and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for research in Berlin; he has also been honored with the Bundesverdienstkreuz of the Federal Republic of Germany.

His books include The Rise of the Modern German Novel: Crisis and Charisma (1988) and Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture (1998), both of which won the Outstanding Book Award of the German Studies Association. Some of his other books include Anti-Americanism in Europe: A Cultural Problem (2004), Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007) and Freedom or Terror: Europe Faces Jihad (2010). In his books and many articles Berman has written widely on the cultural history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, critical theory, and cultural dimensions of trans-Atlantic relations, as well as on topics between Europe and the Middle East. His commentary on current events has appeared in The New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times Internationale Politik, Telos, Daily Beast, the Los Angeles Review Books, die Welt, die Neue Zuercher Zeitung, die Weltwoche,  and American Greatness and elsewhere.

Faculty affiliate at The Europe Center
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Russell A. Berman Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities; Professor, Comparative Literature Speaker Stanford University
Andrea Schatz Lecturer, Jewish Studies Speaker King's College, London
Jean Claude Monod Researcher Speaker Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Adrian Pabst Lecturer, Politics Speaker Rutherford College, University of Kent
Brian Britt Professor, Director of Religious Studies Speaker Virginia Tech Virginia Tech
John McCole Associate Professor and Department Head, History Speaker University of Oregon
David N. Myers Professor, History Speaker UCLA
Christian Sieg Researcher, German Studies Institute Speaker WWU Muenster
Christopher Soper Professor, Political Science Speaker Pepperdine University
Nitzan Lebovic Lecturer, Mineva Insitute for German History, Tel-Aviv University Speaker
Workshops
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