Stanford University

Assessing the Impact of the NSA Spy Scandal on American-European Relations

-

Ulrich Wilhelm will be giving a talk on the German and European reaction to the NSA spying revelations.  This will be followed by discussion on the US reaction to the disclosure and the impact to American-European relations.

Ulrich Wilhelm is the Director General of Bayerischer Rundfunk (Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation) in Munich, Germany. From 1991 to 2005, he held positions within various Bavarian ministries as well as within the State Chancellery of the German Federal State of Bavaria. In November 2005, Wilhelm assumed responsibility for the German Federal Government’s Press and Information Office and became the Government Spokesman in his new capacity as a Permanent State Secretary.  Ulrich Wilhelm was elected Director General of Bayerischer Rundfunk in May 2010 and took office in February 2011. He has also served as the representative of Germany’s ARD and ZDF public broadcasting services on the Executive Board of the EBU since 2013.

Oksenberg Conference Room

Ulrich Wilhelm Director General, Bavarian Broadcasting Speaker
Conferences

Tina Olteanu

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street

0
Visiting Scholar, The Europe Center
T.Olteanu.jpg

Tina Olteanu is a post-doc at the Department for Political Science at the University of Vienna. She completed her PhD on “Democracy and Corruption: Austria and Romania compared” in 2011 and was awarded with the best dissertation (2011) by the Austrian Political Science Association (ÖGPW). She is currently working on a project comparing political participation in East and West in times of multiple crises in Europe.

Olteanu studied East European Studies in Berlin and Bucharest and was a researcher at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. She has taught at the FernUniversität in Hagen, at the University of Bucharest, Romania, at the Alpen-Adria University in Klagenfurt and at the University of Vienna, Austria.

Olteanu recently published "Religious Pluralism in Europe − Orthodox Churches and their Members in the Process of European Integration" (IPW Working Papers No. 2/2013 together with Dorothée de Nève.) Her other publications include Korrupte Demokratie?: Diskurs und Wahrnehmung in Österreich und Rumänien im Vergleich (Wiesbaden, 2012) and an edited volume on Politische Partizipation jenseits der Konventionen (Leverkusen 2013, together with Dorothée de Nève).

Manfred Nowak

Stanford Law School
Neukom Building
Room N255

(650) 736-8090
0
Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair Professor, 2013-2014
Visiting Professor, Stanford Law School
Professor of Law, University of Vienna
Manfred_Nowak.jpg

Manfred Nowak graduated from the Vienna Law School (Dr. iur. 1973) and from Columbia University New York (LL.M. 1975). He has been professor at the Institute of Constitutional and Administrative Law at the University of Vienna since 1986. He was member of the Austrian Delegation to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights (1986 and 1993) as well as director of the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM) at the University of Utrecht (1987-1989). In 1989, he founded the Austrian Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights in Vienna and coordinated NGO-parallel events during the 1993 UN Conference for Human Rights in Vienna while he also was Professor of Law at the Austrian Federal Academy of Public Administration in Vienna until 2002.

As U.N. expert on missing persons in the former Yugoslavia he started a process aiming at the identification of missing persons through exhumation of mortal remains between 1994 and 1997.

From 1996-2003, Manfred Nowak was a judge at the Human Rights Chamber in Bosnia. Since 2000, he is head of an independent human rights commission at the Austrian Interior Ministry. From 2002 to 2003 he was visiting professor at the Raoul Wallenberg of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at the University of Lund. He has been a UN expert on legal questions on enforced disappearances since 2002 and was appointed UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment in 2004 with a mandate until 2010.

In addition, Manfred Nowak is also Chairperson of the European Masters Degree in Human Rights and Democratisation (since 2000). Manfred Nowak has published more than 400 books and articles on international, constitutional, administrative, and human rights law, including the standard commentary on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. He was awarded the UNESCO Prize for the Teaching of Human Rights in 1994 and the Bruno Kreisky Prize for Human Rights in 2007.

CV

Information, Development, and Life-course Smoking Pattern in Mainland China and Taiwan over 50 Years

-

We use retrospectively reported data on smoking behavior of residents of Mainland China and Taiwan to compare and contrast patterns in smoking behavior over the life-course of individuals in these two regions. Because we construct the life-history of smoking for all survey respondents, our data cover an exceptionally long period of time – up to fifty years in both samples. During this period, both societies experienced substantial social and economic changes. The two regions developed at much different rates and the political systems of the two areas evolved in very different ways. More importantly, governments in the two areas set policies that caused the flow of information about the health risks of smoking to differ across the regions and over time. We exploit these differences, using counts of articles in newspapers from 1951 to present, to explore whether and how the arrival of information affected life-course smoking decisions of residents in the two areas. We also present evidence that suggests how prices/taxes and key historical events might have affected decisions to smoke.

Dean Lillard received his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 1991. From 1991 to 2012, he was a faculty member and senior research associate in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University. In August 2012 he joined the Department Human Sciences at Ohio State University as an Associate Professor. He is Director and Project Manager of the Cross-National Equivalent File study that produces cross-national data. He is a member of the American Economics Association, the Population Association of America, the International Association for Research on Income and Wealth, the International Health Economics Association, the American Society for Health Economics, a Research Associate at the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin, Germany, and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He serves on the advisory board of the Danish National Institute for Social Research in Copenhagen, Denmark and the Cross-National Studies: Interdisciplinary Research and Training Program – a collaborative program run by the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN), and together with the Mershon Centre at OSU.

Dean Lillard's current research focuses on health economics, the economics of schooling, and international comparisons of economic behavior. His research in health economics is primarily focused on the economics of the marketing and consumption of cigarettes and alcohol. His research on the economics of schooling includes studies of direct effects of policy on educational outcomes and on the role that education plays in other economic behaviors such as smoking, production of health, and earnings. His cross-national research ranges widely from comparisons of the role that obesity plays in determining labor market outcomes to comparisons of smoking behavior cross-nationally.

Download pdf

Philippines Conference Room

Dean R. Lillard Associate Professor, Department Human Sciences Speaker Ohio State University
Seminars

Incentives and Norms on the Ground: EU Accession, NGOs, and Human Rights

-
Abstract:
 
How can international organizations influence behavior at the level of the individual?  This paper tests whether incentive-based and norm promoting strategies have effects that trickle down to individuals and affect their behavior at the ground level.  The study uses a hard case, that of discrimination against the Roma (commonly known by the disfavored term  "Gypsies"), and spans three towns, Murska Sobota and Novo mesto in Slovenia and Cakovec in Croatia.  Levels of discrimination were estimated via trust games played with money, which are particularly appropriate because the Roma are widely stereotyped as cheaters and thieves.  The findings suggest that the EU accession process, widely regarded as an exceptionally strong incentive-based mechanism of rights diffusion, does not severely reduce discrimination on the ground.  Instead, they suggest that ground level organizing aimed at improving relations between Roma and non-Roma helps reduce discrimination.
 
 
Speaker Bio: 
 
Ana Bracic is a postdoctoral fellow at CDDRL. She received her PhD from NYU in May 2013, and was a Junior Visiting Fellow at the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School in 2012-13. Her research aims to identify and understand mechanisms that tangibly improve the lives of people whose rights are violated, whether through measures are best applied at the state level or on the ground. Her dissertation consists of three related projects: a micro-level fieldwork study of discrimination against the Roma in Slovenia and Croatia, a macro-level study of cross-country diffusion of human rights practices, and a macro-level comparison of physical integrity rights violations in failed and stable autocracies. Her work has been funded in part by the American Political Science Association.

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Ana Bracic Postdoctoral Fellow Speaker CDDRL
Seminars

Regionalism and State Weakness

-

 

Abstract:

Scholars of state development have paid insufficient attention to the question of regionalism; too often modeling state-building as the extension of the authority of a 'center' over peripheral territories, and too often linking regionalism to cultural or ethnic heterogeneity. A purely spatial account of the challenges to central control shows that even in the absence of cultural fractionalization, the presence of economically powerful and politically salient regions undermines political development. Three analytically distinct mechanisms - divergent public good preferences, economic self-sufficiency, and institutional design - underlie this relationship. I explore these issues through a region-wide analysis of Latin America, and case studies of the United States, Ecuador, Colombia, and early modern Poland.

Speaker Bio:

Hillel David Soifer earned his PhD in the Government Department at Harvard, and is currently Assistant Professor of Political Science at Temple University. His research has been centered in Latin America, with a focus on political development and state capacity, and has been published in journals including Latin American Research Review and Comparative Political Studies. He is currently completing a book on the long-term divergence in state capacity in Latin America which contrasts the cases of Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru.

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Hillel Soifer Assistant Professor of Political Science Speaker Temple University
Seminars

Development Aid Confronts Politics: The Almost Revolution

-

Speaker bio:

Thomas Carothers is vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is the founder and director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Program and oversees Carnegie Europe in Brussels.

Carothers is a leading authority on international support for democracy, rights, and governance and on comparative democratization as well as an expert on U.S. foreign policy. He has worked on democracy-assistance projects for many public and private organizations and carried out extensive field research on international aid efforts around the world. In addition, he has broad experience in matters dealing with human rights, the rule of law, civil society building, and think tank development in transitional and developing countries.

He is the author of six critically acclaimed books as well as many articles in prominent journals and newspapers. Carothers has also worked extensively with the Open Society Foundations (OSF), including currently as chair of the OSF Think Tank Fund and previously as chair of the OSF Global Advisory Board. He is an adjunct professor at the Central European University in Budapest and was previously a visiting faculty member at Nuffield College, Oxford University, and Johns Hopkins SAIS.

Prior to joining the Endowment, Carothers practiced international and financial law at Arnold & Porter and served as an attorney adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State.

Carothers is the co-author (with Diane de Gramont) of Development Aid Confronts Politics: The Almost Revolution (Carnegie, 2013) and author of Confronting the Weakest Link: Aiding Political Parties in New Democracies (Carnegie, 2006); Promoting the Rule of Law Abroad: In Search of Knowledge (Carnegie, 2006); Uncharted Journey: Promoting Democracy in the Middle East, co-edited with Marina Ottaway (Carnegie, 2005); Critical Mission: Essays on Democracy Promotion (Carnegie, 2004); Funding Virtue: Civil Society Aid and Democracy Promotion, co-edited with Marina Ottaway (Carnegie, 2000); Aiding Democracy Abroad: The Learning Curve (Carnegie, 1999); and Assessing Democracy Assistance: The Case of Romania (Carnegie, 1996).

CISAC Conference Room

Thomas Carothers Vice President for Studies Speaker Carnegie Endownment for International Peace
Seminars

Book: "Tristan's Shadow: Sexuality and the Total Work of Art after Wagner," written by Adrian Daub

News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs

Stanford associate professor of German Studies, Adrian Daub, presents a new study on German opera in his book Tristan's Shadow: Sexuality and the Total Work of Art after Wagner.

For more information, please visit the publication's webpage by clicking on the book title below.

All News button
1
Subscribe to Central Europe