**Cancelled** Brexit, Trump and the politics of fear: is populism here to stay?
**This event has been cancelled**
[[{"fid":"223705","view_mode":"crop_870xauto","fields":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"Image of Nick Clegg, MP ","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Image of Nick Clegg, MP ","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Image of Nick Clegg, MP ","field_credit[und][0][value]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","field_related_image_aspect[und][0][value]":"","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Image of Nick Clegg, MP ","title":"Image of Nick Clegg, MP ","width":"870","style":"width: 150px; height: 197px; float: left; margin-right: 15px; margin-top: 8px;","class":"media-element file-crop-870xauto"}}]]Nick Clegg MP is a Liberal Democrat politician who served as Deputy Prime Minister in Britain’s first post war Coalition Government from 2010 to 2015 and as Leader of the Liberal Democrats from 2007 to 2015. He is the Member of Parliament for Sheffield Hallam, where he was first elected in 2005, and was previously a Member of the European Parliament.
Nick Clegg led his party into Government for the first time in its modern history in a coalition with the Conservatives. As Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg occupied the second highest office in the country at a time when the United Kingdom was recovering from a deep recession following the banking crisis of 2008. Despite the hugely controversial decisions needed to restore stability to the public finances, Nick Clegg successfully maintained his party’s support for a full five-year term of office.
During that time, he was at the heart of decisions surrounding the conflict in Libya, new anti-terrorism measures, the referenda on electoral reform and Scottish independence, and extensive reforms to the education, health and pensions systems. He was particularly associated with landmark changes to the funding of schools, early years education and the treatment of mental health within the NHS. During the coalition years he also established himself as the highest profile pro-European voice in British politics and is well known and respected in capitals across the continent.
He remains an outspoken advocate of civil liberties and centre ground politics, of radical measures to boost social mobility, and of an internationalist approach to world affairs. Following the UK referendum on EU membership in June 2016, Nick has returned to the Liberal Democrat front bench as the party’s European Union spokesperson in order to hold the Government to account over its plans for Brexit.
Working in conjunction with the WSD HANDA Center for Human Rights and International Justice, The Europe Center is pleased to announce a talk by Emily Arnold-Fernández, Founder and Executive Director of Asylum Access. During her visit to Stanford, Ms. Arnold-Fernández will discuss the rights of refugees and obligations of states under international law more generally before focusing on how European Union law affects these rights and obligations. Discussants James Cavallaro and Jenny S. Martinez, both of whom are professors of law at Stanford Law School, will further explore how international law has influenced the ways in which Europe and the larger international community has addressed the latest refugee crisis.
Peter earned his Ph.D. in Economics, Finance, and Management from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain in 2011 and joined the faculty at Stanford University that same year. In his research, Peter uses historical evidence to shed light on the functioning of financial markets, focusing specifically on asset prices in the short and long run and on the role of bankruptcy protection on risk taking and investment. His recent article in the
Leonardo is a historian who is interested in the emergence and historical development of peripheral regions of empire. His current research uses the case of the Portuguese empire to examine the mechanisms that European empires developed to administer their colonies in the Early Modern period. The European colonial powers created vast imperial structures designed to administer distant parts of their empires. Yet the communication technology of the time resulted in both leaders in the imperial capital and administrators in far-flung territories making decisions in the absence of complete information. Scholars have sought to understand the decision-making process of authorities under these conditions of inconsistent communication and unreliable information, and some have argued that this led decision-makers to be indifferent to local knowledge. In research at Lisbon's Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, National Archive Torre do Tombo, and Biblioteca Nacional, partially supported by The Europe Center, Leonardo uncovered evidence to the contrary. His archival research suggests that local knowledge - transmitted to the imperial capital via letters from litigants seeking dispute settlements in distant parts of the empire or petitions to the king by mobile vassals - served as an important source of information for those administering faraway domains.
Europe is facing a dynamic and evolving geopolitical situation, with conflicts on two fronts. To the east, Russia seeks to expand both its territory and its power; to the south, the Syrian civil war continues to generate refugee flows into Europe. In his November visit to Stanford, General Philip M. Breedlove, Supreme Allied Commander Europe, spoke about these threats and discussed the central role of NATO in buttressing European security. General Breedlove drew attention to the nexus of these two security threats, positing that Russian involvement in Syria is intended to promote the image of Russia as a world power and to foster in the region regimes supportive of Russia. While Russia argues that its intervention in Syria is intended to promote global peace by helping to end the Syrian conflict, General Breedlove suggests that the sincerity of this claim is undermined by Russian intransigence over Georgia and Ukraine. Ultimately, he argued that maintaining security in the contemporary geopolitical context requires a continued commitment to NATO and the Transatlantic security apparatus. Following his presentation, General Breedlove engaged in a lively question and answer session with the audience, fielding questions on topics such as the ability of NATO member states to meet their 2 percent military spending commitment, how to engage with Russia without playing into the narrative that the west is surrounding them, and the prospects for Afghanistan. To watch General Breedlove's talk and the following question and answer period in full, please visit our 
The Europe Center is delighted to welcome Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair Professor, Herlinde Pauer-Studer, to Stanford University. Dr. Pauer-Studer is a professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna and her research interests include ethics, political philosophy, and legal philosophy. She earned her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Salzburg. During her time at Stanford University, Dr. Pauer-Studer will be teaching in the Department of Philosophy and working on a book about the normative distortions in the National Socialist legal system, focusing on the period 1933-1939. Please join us in welcoming Dr. Pauer-Studer to The Europe Center and Stanford University.
