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Michael Breger
Callista Wells
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As reports of leveled mosques, detention camps, and destroyed cultural and religious sites in China's Xinjiang province emerged in the mid-to-late 2010s, the world took notice of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) flagrant oppression of Uighur Muslims and other minorities. Under the Xi Jinping administration, the Xinjiang region in northwestern China has experienced what is perhaps the greatest period of cultural assimilation since the Cultural Revolution. This massive state repression represents a primary research focus for Dr. James Millward, Professor of Inter-societal History at the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, who joined both APARC's China Program and the Stanford History Department as a visiting scholar for winter quarter 2022.

Millward's specialties include the Qing empire, the silk road, and historical and contemporary Xinjiang. In addition to his numerous academic publications on these topics, he follows and comments on current issues regarding Xinjiang, the Uyghurs and other Xinjiang indigenous peoples, PRC ethnicity policy, and Chinese politics more generally. We caught up with Millward to discuss his work and experience at Stanford this past winter quarter. Listen to the conversation: 


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Aggressive Assimilating Thrust

Millward emphasizes the importance of documenting the scope and scale of the crisis in Xinjiang. "What's happened in the last four or five years in Xinjiang is of great global importance and interest to people," he says, and although it is still early to write the history of this period of repression, "it's important at least to try and get an organized draft of it down and to try to begin to interpret rather than just narrate the litany of things going on: the camps, the digital surveillance, forced labor, birth depressions, and try and put it all into some kind of framework where we can understand it." 

China’s crackdown on Uyghur Muslims and other minorities in Xinjiang is part of aggressive intolerance of cultural and political diversity that is emerging as a central feature of Xi Jinping’s tenure, explains Millward. The shift in the CCP's assimilationist policies constitutes a complete "reversal of what had been an earlier approach to diversity in China," which allowed for 56 different nationalities to have regional autonomy. His aim is to "point out a really aggressive assimilating thrust under the Xi Jinping regime [...] and then also to look more clearly at settler colonialism in Xinjiang."

To learn more about the historical context of current events in Xinjiang and how to understand them against contemporary Chinese politics, tune in to Millward's public lecture of February 2, 2022, “The Crisis in Xinjiang: What’s Happening Now and What Does It Mean?

In this talk, Millward explains how PRC assimilationist policies, if most extreme in Xinjiang, are related to the broader Zhonghua-izing campaign against religion and non-Mandarin language and perhaps even to intensified control over Hong Kong and efforts to intimidate Taiwan.

U.S.-China Cooperation Amid Strained Ties

The Xinjiang crisis has affected how the United States views China, bringing an unexpected unity to the usually-polarized American foreign policy arena. "The Xinjiang issue has contributed to the broad-spectrum feeling in the American political sphere that engagement with China has failed," notes Millward. The parallels between China's repression of minorities and some of the worst events in the 20th century in Europe "have brought together the political sides in America and rallied them around a much stronger anti-China stance," he says.

From Millward's perspective, however, it is not only possible but also necessary for the United States to act on Xinjiang and press China on its human rights record while cooperating with China on other issues. "This is the art of diplomacy, you have to compartmentalize and deal with different issues, particularly with two countries as large as the United States and China." In Millward's view, areas pertinent to U.S.-China collaboration are varied and transcend global challenges such as climate change or pandemics. Those are simplistic dichotomies," he says. "We have 300,000 Chinese students in our universities and we welcome them and learn a lot from them [...] We benefit from Chinese expertise in all sorts of ways."

Millward spent a productive winter quarter at APARC. Returning to Stanford as a visiting scholar provided him a unique opportunity to reconnect with his past on The Farm and survey all that has changed in the years since he completed his doctorate under the tutelage of the late Professor Harold Kahn. "The trailer park where I lived as a first-year graduate student is no more, and I couldn't even find the footprint of where it was."

Portrait of James Millward

James Millward

Visiting Scholar at APARC
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From top left, clockwise: Lauren Hansen Restrepo, James Millward, Darren Byler and Gardner Bovingdon speaking at a panel at APARC.
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The Human Rights Crisis in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region

The Human Rights Crisis in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region
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An Uncomfortable Friendship: Understanding China’s Position on the Russia-Ukraine War and Its Implications for Great Power Competition

On WBUR’s "On Point" and Fox 2 KTVU, Center Fellow Oriana Skylar Mastro shares insights about China's alignment with Russia and the worldwide implications of its calculus on Ukraine.
An Uncomfortable Friendship: Understanding China’s Position on the Russia-Ukraine War and Its Implications for Great Power Competition
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Bargaining Behind Closed Doors: Why China’s Local Government Debt Is Not a Local Problem

New research in 'The China Journal' by APARC’s Jean Oi and colleagues suggests that the roots of China’s massive local government debt problem lie in secretive financing institutions offered as quid pro quo to localities to sustain their incentive for local state-led growth after 1994
Bargaining Behind Closed Doors: Why China’s Local Government Debt Is Not a Local Problem
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APARC Visiting Scholar James Millward discusses PRC ethnicity policy, China's crackdown on Uyghur Muslims and other minorities in Xinjiang province, and the implications of the Xinjiang crisis for U.S. China strategy and China's international relations.

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This event is made possible by generous support from the Korea Foundation and other friends of the Korea Program.

South Korean popular culture has spread to all corners of the globe, including South Korea’s closed-off neighbor to the north. While North Korea’s Kim Jong Un regime has sought to eradicate the presence of K-pop and South Korean television dramas in his country — even threatening execution for those who consume these cultural products — their popularity endures in North Korea. This panel will address questions relating to the spread of the Korean Wave (Hallyu) in North Korea. How widespread is consumption of South Korean popular culture in the North? Are these cultural products contributing to social change in North Korea, and if so, to what extent? Does the Korean Wave have the potential to contribute to political unrest and change in North Korea?

Speakers:

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portrait of Sunny Yoon

Sunny Yoon is a professor of Media and Communication at Hanyang University in Seoul. Her research encompasses the globalization of Korean media, the interaction of religion and new media, cultural politics, youth culture, and fandom of Korean popular culture. She is the author of Communication Technology and Creative Industries and Global Media and Asian Identity: Cultural Hybridity or Cultural Resistance, and she has authored papers and a book chapter on the impact of mobile media and South Korean media on North Korean youth culture and social change. She has served as Section Head for Visual Culture in the International Association for Media and Communication Research, as well as the editor-in-chief of the journal of Asian Communication Research. She has been a visiting fellow at Yale University and University of Cambridge, as well as a visiting professor at Doshisha University in Japan, National Taiwan University, and King's College London. Professor of Media and Communication, Hanyang University, Korea

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portrait of Suk-Young Kim

Suk-Young Kim is a professor of Theater and Performance Studies at UCLA where she also directs Center for Performance Studies. She is the author of Illusive Utopia :Theater, Film, and Everyday Performance in North Korea (Michigan, 2010), DMZ Crossing: Performing Emotional Citizenship Along the Korean Border (Columbia, 2014), and most recently, K-pop Live: Fans, Idols, and Multimedia Performance (Stanford, 2018). Her scholarship has been recognized by the James Palais Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies, the Association for Theater in Higher Education Outstanding Book Award, and ACLS/SSRC/NEH International and Area Studies Fellowship. Currently She is working on a book titled Way Ahead of Squid Game (forthcoming in 2023), Millennial North Korea: Forbidden Media and Living Creatively with Surveillance (Stanford UP, under contract) and is editing Cambridge Companion to K-Pop. Her comments on Korean cultural politics have been featured in major media outlets, such as Billboard, CNN, NPR, and the New York Times.

Moderator: Haley Gordon, Research Associate in Korea Program at APARC, Stanford University

Via Zoom. Register at https://bit.ly/3JlGJDM

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Gi-Wook Shin
Haley Gordon
Hannah June Kim
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This article first appeared in the online magazine American Purpose.  

On March 9, South Koreans head to the voting booths to elect their new president. Although conventional wisdom posits that foreign affairs have little effect on voting preferences, South Koreans have defied this prediction in the past—and now, they may once again. Indeed, the atmosphere in this year’s election recalls that of 2002, when anti-American sentiments swept the South Korean presidential election. This time, it may be anti-Chinese sentiments that make an impact.


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According to our survey of over one thousand South Koreans, conducted this past January, a large majority of respondents—78 percent—indicated that Republic of Korea (ROK)-China relations will be an important consideration when deciding which presidential candidate to vote for. Given that younger South Koreans are expected to be the deciding factor in this election, it is particularly significant that the figure rises to 82 percent for respondents in their twenties. Twenty years ago, anti-American sentiments tipped the vote in favor of Roh Moo-hyun, the liberal candidate, who pledged not to kowtow to the United States. This time, how will anti-Chinese sentiment play out in Seoul? Will it work in favor of the conservatives, who tend to be tougher on China and emphasize the U.S.-ROK alliance? And what does this mean for Washington?

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“K-Pop Stars, Too, Should Speak Out on Human Rights Issues,” Says Stanford Sociologist Gi-Wook Shin

K-pop and North Korean human rights are the subjects of two documentaries to be released this spring to mark the 20th anniversary of Stanford University’s Korea Program, reveals Professor Gi-Wook Shin.
“K-Pop Stars, Too, Should Speak Out on Human Rights Issues,” Says Stanford Sociologist Gi-Wook Shin
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Anti-Chinese sentiment surges—especially among the young—in advance of the March 9 elections.

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an image of a map of the world with a U.S. and China flag with the event text details.

 

How can we understand the geopolitical rivalry between the U.S. and China without fueling anti-Asian hate?

Join REDI's student representatives, Maddy Morlino and Miku Yamada, for an open discussion on how we can avoid contributing to racial discrimination when engaging in academic dialogues on U.S.-China competition.

This in-person event will facilitate an open dialogue with participants and invited speakers, FSI Senior Fellow Thomas Fingar and Postdoctoral Fellow, Dongxian Jiang. Since seating is limited, registration is reserved for current Stanford faculty, students, and staff only with a Stanford.edu email.

Confirmed attendees will be notified by email on February 22.

Speaker bios:

Thomas Fingar is a Shorenstein APARC Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He was the inaugural Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow from 2010 through 2015 and the Payne Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford in 2009. From 2005 through 2008, he served as the first deputy director of national intelligence for analysis and, concurrently, as chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Fingar served previously as assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (2000-01 and 2004-05), principal deputy assistant secretary (2001-03), deputy assistant secretary for analysis (1994-2000), director of the Office of Analysis for East Asia and the Pacific (1989-94), and chief of the China Division (1986-89). Between 1975 and 1986 he held a number of positions at Stanford University, including senior research associate in the Center for International Security and Arms Control.

Dongxian Jiang is a political theorist and intellectual historian. His primary research interests lie in comparative political theory, the history of political thought, and pressing practical questions of democratic and international politics, including Western and non-Western perspectives on human rights, democracy, good governance, and political legitimacy. He is also interested in the transmission and traveling of political ideas across divergent intellectual traditions. He holds a B.A. in International Politics and Philosophy from Peking University, an M.A. in Political Science from Duke University, and a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University (as of September 2020). Dongxian Jiang is currently Civics Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Political Science, Stanford University.

Registration required:

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Thomas Fingar FSI Senior Fellow Speaker Stanford University
Dongxian Jiang Political Science Postdoctoral Fellow Speaker Stanford University
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This event will offer simultaneous translation between Japanese and English. 
当イベントは日本語と英語の同時通訳がついています。

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Febuary 14, 4-5:30 p.m. California time/ February 15, 9-10:30 a.m. Japan time

This event is part of the 2022 Japan Program Winter webinar series, The Future of Social Tech: U.S.-Japan Partnership in Advancing Technology and Innovation with Social Impact

 

COVID-19 has changed the way we work. While remote work has become the norm, the pandemic has also highlighted the inequity in childcare, elderly care, and household work. Japanese workplaces feel a particularly acute need for adjustment, as lack of digitalization and persistent gender inequality continue to limit productivity gains and diversity in the workforce. Social entrepreneurs in Japan have started offering new technologies that address these problems and transform Japanese work environments, using matching algorithms, innovative apps, and other new technologies. How can these social technologies reshape the workplace? What principles do we need in using these technologies in practice, in order to unlock the keys to untapped human resource potentials and realize a more equitable and inclusive work environment in Japan, the United States, and elsewhere?  Fuhito Kojima, a renowned economist specializing in matching theory, will talk about market design from the perspective of regulation design and economics, and Eiko Nakazawa, an influential entrepreneur, will speak about her experiences founding education and childcare startups in the United States and Japan, moderated by Yasumasa Yamamoto, a leading expert on technology and business in Japan and the United States. 

 

Panelists

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Photo of Fuhito Kojima
Fuhito Kojima is a Professor of Economics at the University of Tokyo and Director of the University of Tokyo Market Design Center. He received a B.A. at University of Tokyo (2003) and PhD at Harvard (2008), both in economics and taught at Yale (2008-2009, as postdoc) and then Stanford (2009-2020, as professor) while spending one year at Columbia in his sabbatical year. His research involves game theory, with a particular focus on “market design,” a field where game-theoretic analysis is applied to study the design of various mechanisms and institutions. His recent works include matching mechanism designs with complex constraints, and he is working on improving medical residency match and daycare seat allocation in Japan based on his academic work. Outside of academia, he serves as an advisor for Keizai Doyu Kai as well as several private companies.

 

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Photo of Eiko Nakazawa
Eiko Nakazawa is the Founder and CEO of Dearest, Inc., a VC-Backed startup in the United States that makes high-quality learning, childcare, and parenting support accessible by helping employers subsidize those costs for their working families. She also advises and invests in early-stage startups, and has recently co-founded Ikura, Inc., an education x fintech company in Japan. Prior to founding Dearest, Nakazawa spent 11 years with Sony Corporation, where she led global marketing, turnaround, and new business launch initiatives. Nakazawa earned an M.S. in Management from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

 

 

Moderator

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Photo of Yasumasa Yamamoto
Yasumasa Yamamoto is a Visiting Professor at Kyoto University graduate school of management and has been a specialist in emerging technology such as fintech, blockchain, and deep learning. He was previously industry analyst at Google, senior specialist in quantitative analysis of secularized products, as well as derivatives at Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi in New York. Yamamoto holds a M.S. from Harvard University and a masters degree from University of Tokyo.





 

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Register:  https://bit.ly/3odkWFT 

 

 

Fuhito Kojima <br>Professor of Economics at the University of Tokyo<br><br>
Eiko Nakazawa <br>Founder and CEO, Dearest Inc.<br><br>
Yasumasa Yamamoto <br>Visiting Professor at Kyoto University
Panel Discussions
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This is a virtual event. Please click here to register and generate a link to the talk. 
The link will be unique to you; please save it and do not share with others.

 

Policies implemented by the CCP in Xinjiang since c. 2016 have become a central issue in PRC international relations, leading to international determinations that those policies constitute genocide; scrutiny of global supply chains for Xinjiang cotton, textiles and polysilicon; US sanctions on companies and individuals and Congressional inquiries directed at Airbnb and other multinationals operating in Xinjiang; and diplomatic boycotts of the Olympics. The assimilationist policies, if most extreme in Xinjiang, are related to the broader Zhonghua-izing campaign against religion and non-Mandarin language and perhaps even to intensified control over Hong Kong and efforts to intimidate Taiwan—an aggressive intolerance of cultural and political diversity that is emerging as a central feature of Xi Jinping’s tenure. This talk will review the Xinjiang crisis to date and suggest how we should understand these events and trends.



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Portrait of James Millward
James Millward is Professor of Inter-societal History at the Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, teaching Chinese, Central Asian and world history. He joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as visiting scholar with the China Program for the 2022 winter quarter. He is also an affiliated professor in the Máster Oficial en Estudios de Asia Oriental at the University of Granada, Spain. His specialties include Qing empire; the silk road; Eurasian lutes and music in history; and historical and contemporary Xinjiang. He follows and comments on current issues regarding the Uyghurs and PRC ethnicity policy. Millward has served on the boards of the Association for Asian Studies (China and Inner Asia Council) and the Central Eurasian Studies Society, and was president of the Central Eurasian Studies Society in 2010. He edits the ''Silk Roads'' series for University of Chicago Press. His publications include The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction (2013), Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (2007), New Qing Imperial History: The Making of Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde (2004), and Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity and Empire in Qing Central Asia (1998). His articles and op-eds on contemporary China appear in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Review of Books and other media.  

Via Zoom Webinar. Register at: https://bit.ly/3zX2GoF

James Millward Visiting Scholar, APARC, Stanford University; Professor of Inter-societal History, Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University
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The REDI Task Force invites you to the next event in our Critical Conversations: Race in Global Affairs series; an exploration of the life of enslaved women. This panel discussion will feature experts of enslavement across the Atlantic including the U.S., Brazil, West Africa, and the West Indies.

What do we really understand about the lives and legacies of African enslaved women across the Atlantic? Enslavement is often rendered through a genderless lens, one in which the category of "race" trumps all else. However, research tells a very different story and one that requires an intimate analysis - enslaved women across the Atlantic held an experience that was shaped uniquely by their race and gender. This conversation will explore how Black women during the slave period acted and reacted to the material forces that shaped their lives in an attempt to not only survive the harsh conditions but to carve out a future for ancestors. This interdisciplinary discussion will draw from various archival sources ranging from Senegambia to Brasil's sugar plantations to articulating novel understandings of enslaved women's selfhood. 

The panel will feature perspectives from three historians to uncover the intimate lives of African women; their kinship, religious, and resistance practices. Tracing a path through different locales, from free to enslaved status, we will discuss not only the lives of enslaved women, but their legacies.

This event is free and open to the public. There will be time for a Q&A.

Note: This discussion will be recorded. 

Speaker bios:

Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies whose teaching and research explores the intersections of race, religion, and gender in the United States. A historian of African-American religion, she specializes in the religiosity of enslaved people in the South, religion in the African Atlantic, and women’s religious histories.  Her first book The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South (UNC 2021) offers a gendered history of enslaved people’s religiosity from the colonial period to the onset of the Civil War. She is currently at work on her second project, which traces the gendered, racialized history of phenomena termed “witchcraft” in the United States. Her work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and Forum for Theological Education, among others. She received her B.A. in English from Spelman College, and Master of Divinity and Ph.D. from Emory University.

Jessica Marie Johnson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the Johns Hopkins University and a Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is also the Director of LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure. Johnson is a historian of Atlantic slavery and the Atlantic African diaspora. She is the author of Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2020), a winner of numerous awards including the 2021 Wesley-Logan Best Book in African Diaspora History Prize from the Association of American Historians and the 2021 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize of the American Studies Association. Her work has appeared in Slavery & Abolition, The Black Scholar, Meridians: Feminism, Race and Transnationalism, American Quarterly, Social Text, The Journal of African American History, the William & Mary Quarterly, Debates in the Digital Humanities (2nd edition), Forum Journal, Bitch Magazine, Black Perspectives (AAIHS), Somatosphere and Post-Colonial Digital Humanities (DHPoco) and her book chapters have appeared in multiple edited collections. She is the Founding Curator of #ADPhDProjects which brings social justice and histories of slavery together. She is also Co-Kin Curator at Taller Electric Marronage.  She is also a Digital Alchemist at the Center for Solutions to Online Violence and a co-organizer of the Queering Slavery Working Group with Dr. Vanessa Holden (University of Kentucky). Her past collaborations include organizing with the LatiNegrxs Project. As a historian and Black Studies scholar, Johnson researches black diasporic freedom struggles from slavery to emancipation. As a digital humanist, Johnson explores ways digital and social media disseminate and create historical narratives, in particular, comparative histories of slavery and people of African descent.

Nohora Arrieta Fernández is a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA. She received her Ph.D. in Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies from Georgetown University in 2021. Her current research focuses on art history, visual studies, the history of commodities, and the intellectual traditions of the African Diaspora in the Americas. She has published essays and articles on Latin American literature and visual arts, comics, and the Afro-Latin American Diaspora, and is a collaborator of art magazines as Artishock and Contemporyand. She recently co-edited Transition. The Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora, 130. Her first co-translation project, Semantic of the World, the Poetry of Romulo Bustos, will be published by New Mexico Press (2022).

 

 

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Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Stanford University
Jessica Marie Johnson Assistant Professor History Johns Hopkins University
Sonita Moss Research Associate Discussant REDI
Nohora Arrieta Fernandez Postdoctoral Fellow UCLA
Seminars
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The REDI Task Force invites you to the next event in our Critical Conversations: Race in Global Affairs series; an exploration of colonialism and empire.

Capitalism and colonialism are often invoked in discussions in the social sciences and the humanities as the profound causes of racism, discrimination, human rights abuses, and the subaltern status of minority (and sometimes majority) groups in contemporary societies. These concepts are often useful more as a shorthand to describe deep historical processes. This panel seeks to elaborate on the specific mechanisms and accumulated social, political and economic events of colonialism that lead to particular outcomes of poverty, inequality or violence today. Comparative perspectives from history, political science and economics, from various regions of the world may advance our understanding of the deep forces that hinder racial equity, diversity, and inclusion.

About the Speakers:

Beatriz Magaloni is the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science, FSI Senior Fellow, and affiliated faculty at the Center on Global Poverty and Development at Stanford University. She is the current Chair of the REDI Task Force.

Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006), won the Best Book Award from the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association and the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations. Her second book, Strategies of Vote Buying: Democracy, Clientelism, and Poverty Relief in Mexico (co-authored with Alberto Diaz Cayeros and Federico Estévez), studies the politics of poverty relief. In 2010 she founded the Poverty, Violence and Governance Laboratory (POVGOV). The mission of  POVGOV is to develop action-oriented research through the elaboration of scientific knowledge that is anchored on state-of-the-art methodologies, multidisciplinary work, and innovative on-the-ground research and training. The Lab regularly incorporates undergraduate, masters, Ph.D. and post-doctoral students to pilot and evaluate interventions to reduce violence, combat human rights abuses and improve the accountability of law enforcement and justice systems.

Alberto Cayeros-Diaz joined the FSI faculty in 2013 after serving for five years as the director of the Center for US-Mexico studies at the University of California, San Diego. He earned his Ph.D at Duke University in 1997. He was an assistant professor of political science at Stanford from 2001-2008, before which he served as an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Diaz-Cayeros has also served as a researcher at Centro de Investigacion Para el Desarrollo, A.C. in Mexico from 1997-1999. His work has focused on federalism, poverty and violence in Latin America, and Mexico in particular. He has published widely in Spanish and English. His book Federalism, Fiscal Authority and Centralization in Latin America was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007 (reprinted 2016). His latest book (with Federico Estevez and Beatriz Magaloni) is: The Political Logic of Poverty Relief Electoral Strategies and Social Policy in Mexico. His work has primarily focused on federalism, poverty and economic reform in Latin America, and Mexico in particular, with more recent work addressing crime and violence, youth-at-risk, and police professionalization. 

Leonard Wantchekon is a Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, as well as Associated Faculty in Economics. A scholar with diverse interests, Wantchekon has made substantive and methodological contributions to the fields of Political Economy, Economic History and Development Economics, and has also contributed significantly to the literatures on clientelism and state capture, resource curse and democratization. Wantchekon’s research includes groundbreaking studies on the long-term effects of historical events. For example, his paper “Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa” (AER, 2011, co-authored with Nathan Nunn) links current differences in trust levels within Africa to the transatlantic and Indian Ocean slave trade, and is widely regarded as one of the foundational papers in the emerging field of cultural economics. Similarly, his “Critical Junctures” paper (co-authored with Omar Garcia Ponce) finds that levels of democracy in post-Cold War Africa can be traced back to the nature of its anti-colonial independence movements. He is the Founder and President of the African School of Economics, which opened in Benin in 2014.

 

 

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Alberto Díaz-Cayeros FSI Senior Fellow Panelist CDDRL
Leonard Wantchekon Professor of Politics and International Affairs Panelist Princeton University
Beatriz Magaloni FSI Senior Fellow REDI Task Force Chair REDI
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Air purification in Chinese contexts over the last half century has been generative for a way of being human, what the author calls “filtered life.” This is a materially, aesthetically, and even humorously mediated form of dwelling. In it, people confront ethics and anxieties under conditions of aerosolized ruination.

This article sheds special light on links between gender binaries and filtered life. It traces how, prior to the COVID‐19 pandemic, scientists, marketers, and many others residing in urban China interacted with air filters in ways textured by the male state. Notably chronicled here is a critique of ecological ruin emergent in homes of the People's Republic of China (PRC), one mutating from ire toward husbands for smoking cigarettes in the home to more recent indictments of men despoiling the environment.

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Air Purification, Gender, and Cigarettes in the People's Republic of China
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Matthew Kohrman
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Abstract: The fiscal federalism and decentralization literatures suggest that larger cities often deliver better public goods more effectively because of scale economies. Yet small cities exhibit higher rates of access to basic health and education services in Brazil, India, and Indonesia. Why is this the case? Building on modernization theory and models from urban economics, we argue that citizens in smaller cities prioritize investments in basic health and education facilities because there are few low- cost substitutes for government offerings, and because they face few characteristically “urban” problems, such as congestion and insecurity. Residents of larger cities, in contrast, prioritize investment in a wider set of policy areas because they experience more negative externalities from urban growth and can turn to a larger supply of non-state providers of basic social services. Moreover, public officials in smaller cities find it easier to earn political returns for investments in “divisible” infrastructure for service delivery, such as schools and clinics, because they can coordinate lobbying and credit-claiming more effectively than politicians in larger cities. We illustrate the mechanisms underlying these differences across policy areas through data analysis and paired comparison of representative cities of different sizes in Brazil, and with shadow cases from Indonesia.

Alison Post is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Global Metropolitan Studies.  Her research lies at the intersection of comparative urban politics and comparative political economy, with regional emphases on Latin America and South Asia. Her research examines regulation and business-government relations, decentralization, and urban politics and policy.  She is the author of Foreign and Domestic Investment in Argentina: The Politics of Privatized Infrastructure (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and articles in the Annual Review of Political Science, Comparative Politics, Governance, Perspectives on Politics, Politics & Society, Studies in Comparative International DevelopmentWorld Development, and other outlets. She is currently the President of the Urban and Local Politics section of the American Political Science Association and Chair of the Steering Committee for the Red de Economía Política de America Latina (Repal). 

LIVESTREAM HERE: https://tinyurl.com/apostlive

This event is co-sponsored by Center for Latin American Studies and Center for South Asia

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Professor Alison Post

 

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