What are the longer-term implications of Russia’s renewed aggression in Ukraine for relations with its Eurasian neighbors it has often referred to as the “near abroad?”

A recent and growing literature suggests that domestic public opinion will play a decisive role in their future foreign policy choices. Based on an original mass survey with an embedded experiment, this talk examines the changes in Kazakhstani public opinion toward maintaining economic and security relations with Russia through international alliances such as the Collective Treaty Security Organization (CSTO). These changes should be viewed in light of both Russia’s war against Ukraine in February 2022 and the Russian-led CSTO’s intervention in the mass protests in Kazakhstan in January 2022. It argues that Kazakhstani public opinion has changed in significant ways — especially across ethnic lines — and that these changes are likely to impact Kazakhstan-Russian relations in general and the future of the CSTO in particular.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Pauline Jones is Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan (UM) and the Edie N. Goldenberg Endowed Director for the Michigan in Washington Program. She is also Founder and Director of the Digital Islamic Studies Curriculum (DISC). Previously, she served as the Director of UM’s Islamic Studies Program (2011-14) and International Institute (2014-20). Her past work has contributed broadly to the study of institutional origin, change, and impact in Central Asia. She is currently engaged in multiple research projects: exploring how state regulation of Islam in Muslim-majority states affects citizens’ political attitudes and behavior; identifying the factors that affect compliance with health mitigation policies to combat the COVID-19 pandemic; examining the influence that evoking historical memory has on public support for foreign assistance; and developing a toolkit to assess the impact of mass protest and state narratives on domestic and foreign policy change in authoritarian regimes. She has published articles in several leading academic and policy journals, including the American Political Science Review, Annual Review of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Current History, and Foreign Affairs. She is author (or co-author) of five books, most recently The Oxford Handbook on Politics in Muslim Societies (Oxford 2021).

This talk centers around the forthcoming book, Collisions: The War in Ukraine and the Origins of the New Global Instability, to be published by Oxford University Press in March 2024. Collisions provides historical context for the war that began with Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. It weaves together the origins of this war in Russian, Ukrainian, European, and U.S. politics and policy. With an eye to global context, it assesses the many forms of disruption and instability that the war has caused. Two years after the start of this war, Collisions offers a way of taking stock and trying to understand the big-picture implications of this war.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Michael C. Kimmage is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America and a senior non-resident associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is the author of The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (Harvard University Press, 2009), and The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy (Basic Books, 2020). From 2014 to 2016, Kimmage served on the Secretary's Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State. He writes regularly on international affairs for Foreign Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Encina E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

A dictator's power is secure, the authors begin in this muscular, impressive study, only as long as citizens believe in it. When citizens suddenly believe otherwise, a dictator's power is anything but, as the Soviet Union's collapse revealed. This conviction – that power rests ultimately on citizens' beliefs – compels the world's autocrats to invest in sophisticated propaganda. This study draws on the first global data set of autocratic propaganda, encompassing nearly eight million newspaper articles from fifty-nine countries in six languages. The authors document dramatic variation in propaganda across autocracies: in coverage of the regime and its opponents, in narratives about domestic and international life, in the threats of violence issued to citizens, and in the domestic events that shape it. The book explains why Russian President Vladimir uses Donald Trump as a propaganda tool and why Chinese state propaganda is more effusive than any point since the Cultural Revolution.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Erin Baggott Carter (赵雅芬) is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California and a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. She is also a non-resident scholar at the UCSD 21st Century China Center. She has previously held fellowships at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and the Center for International Security and Cooperation. She received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University.

Dr. Carter's research focuses on Chinese politics and propaganda. Her first book, Propaganda in Autocracies, explores how political institutions determine propaganda strategies with an original dataset of eight million articles in six languages drawn from state-run newspapers in nearly 70 countries. She is currently working on a book on how domestic politics influence US-China relations. Her other work has appeared in the British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Security Studies, and International Interactions. Her work has been featured by a number of media platforms, including the New York Times and the Little Red Podcast.

Brett Carter is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California and a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Brett received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University and has previously held fellowships at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies and Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.

Brett's research focuses on politics in the world's autocracies. His first book, Propaganda in Autocracies, marshals a range of empirical evidence to probe the politics of autocratic propaganda. His second book project, Autocracy in Post-Cold War Africa, explores how Central Africa's autocrats are learning to survive despite the nominally democratic institutions they confront and the international pressure that occasionally makes outright repression costly. His other work has appeared in the Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Security Studies, and Journal of Democracy, among others.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Encina E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

This presentation examines the failure of state-building efforts in Afghanistan and argues that the international community's focus on building state capacity quickly led to the resurrection of centralized state institutions from Afghanistan's Soviet past. These institutions emphasized national governmental power and fiscal control, which significantly widened the disconnect between the Afghan state and society, posing substantial challenges to building political stability and economic development. Centralized models are in conflict with societies that have strong norms of local self-governance or are skeptical of the state. The Afghan bureaucracy, which shaped individual interactions with the state, was also overlooked. Paradoxically, efforts to build a strong state undermined it, and Afghanistan remains trapped in a vicious cycle of state collapse. This dilemma is not unique to Afghanistan but is also faced by other countries, such as Somalia and Ethiopia, where Soviet-era institutions cast a strong shadow on governance. The argument highlights that bridging the gap between de facto and de jure institutions is the key to stability, legitimacy, and development.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili is the Founding Director of the Center for Governance and Markets and a Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on issues of self-governance, security, political economy, and public sector reform. She is a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and was named one of the world's top global thinkers by Prospect Magazine (UK).

Murtazashvili is the author of Informal Order and the State in Afghanistan (Cambridge University Press, 2016), which received the Best Book Award in Social Sciences from the Central Eurasian Studies Society and received honorable mention from the International Development Section of the International Studies Association. She is also the author of Land, the State, and War: Property Institutions and Political Order in Afghanistan (with Ilia Murtazashvili) (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and several other books. Murtazashvili has advised the United States Agency for International Development, the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, World Bank, the US Department of Defense, the United Nations Development Program, and UNICEF. She served as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Samarkand, Uzbekistan.

She is the past-president of the Central Eurasian Studies Society and was elected board member of the Section for International and Comparative Public Administration of the American Society of Public Administration. She is also a member of PONARS Eurasia, a research organization focused on security issues in Eurasia. She previously served as a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Encina E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.