Stanford University

Groups in Conflict and the Legacies of Violence

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Studies of group-based conflict typically focus on the group as the unit of analysis. But group attributes often mask individual-level variation. Why do some individuals within groups identify more strongly with the group, feel greater hostility toward out-groups, and participate in conflict more than others?

We argue that a key ingredient in explaining who within a group feels more aggrieved, more attached, and more hostile to others is the legacy of violence. Violence itself creates and amplifies group identities that then persist across generations within families. It also forges a sense of victimhood, an identity that implies moral status and out-group threat. We test this argument using multigenerational surveys we fielded in Guatemala and Cambodia in 2017 and 2018.

We find that individuals whose ancestors were exposed to more violence during prior periods of conflict identify more strongly with their group, identify as victims, and distrust the rival out-group. We find that the effect of these identities on political participation depends on the political context, both during and after the conflict, and how it shapes blame attribution and the meaning of political participation.

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

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

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Noam Lupu is Associate Professor of Political Science and Associate Director of LAPOP Lab at Vanderbilt University. He studies comparative political behavior, partisanship and political parties, class and inequality, representation, and legacies of violence. He is the author of Party Brands in Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and coeditor (with Virginia Oliveros and Luis Schiumerini) of Campaigns and Voters in Developing Democracies (University of Michigan Press, 2019).

This event is co-sponsored by CDDRL and the Center for Latin American Studies.

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Didi Kuo

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

Noam Lupu Associate Professor of Political Science Vanderbilt University
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Community policing does not build citizen trust in police or reduce crime in the Global South

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Is it possible to reduce crime without exacerbating adversarial relationships between police and citizens? Community policing is a celebrated reform with that aim, which is now adopted on six continents. However, the evidence base is limited, studying reform components in isolation in a limited set of countries, and remaining largely silent on citizen-police trust. We designed six field experiments with Global South police agencies to study locally designed models of community policing using coordinated measures of crime and the attitudes and behaviors of citizens and police. In a preregistered meta-analysis, we found that these interventions led to mixed implementation, largely failed to improve citizen-police relations, and did not reduce crime. Societies may need to implement structural changes first for incremental police reforms such as community policing to succeed.
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Issue 6571

Marisa Kellam

Encina Hall

616 Jane Stanford Way

Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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CDDRL Visiting Scholar, 2021-23
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Marisa Kellam researches the quality of democracy with a focus on Latin America and a growing interest in East Asia. Her research links institutional analysis to various governance outcomes in democracies along three lines of inquiry: political parties and coalitional politics; mass electoral behavior and party system change; and democratic accountability and media freedom. She has published her research in various peer-reviewed journals, including The British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Party Politics, Electoral Studies, and Political Communication. Originally from Santa Rosa, California, Marisa Kellam earned her Ph.D. in political science from UCLA and spent several years as an assistant professor at Texas A&M University. Since 2013, she has been Associate Professor at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan, where she also served as Director of the English-based degree programs for the School of Political Science & Economics. Currently she is a steering committee member for the V-Dem Regional Center for East Asia.

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Market Structure and Extortion: Evidence from 50,000 Extortion Payments

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About the Session: How do gangs compete for extortion? Using detailed data on individual extortion payments to gangs and sales from a leading wholesale distributor of consumer goods and pharmaceuticals in El Salvador, we document evidence on the determinants of extortion payments, firm responses to extortion, and effects on consumers. We exploit a 2016 non-aggression pact between gangs to examine how collusion affects extortion in areas where gangs previously competed. While the non-aggression pact led to a large reduction in violence, we find that it increased extortion by 15% to 20%. Much of the increase in extortion was passed-through to retailers and consumers: we find a large increase in prices for pharmaceutical drugs and a corresponding increase in hospital visits for chronic illnesses. The results shed light on how extortion rates are set and point to an unintended consequence of policies that reduce competition between criminal organizations.

 

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About the Speaker: Carlos Schmidt-Padilla received his PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was also a Research Associate at the Center on the Politics of Development. Since September 2021, Carlos has been a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford Impact Labs (SIL), affiliated with PovGov at CDDRL. Broadly, his research interests encompass the political economy of development of Latin America and of sub-Saharan Africa. In particular, he studies questions concerning crime, human capital, immigration, and policing in developing countries. Carlos is from San Salvador, El Salvador.

Carlos Schmidt-Padilla

Online, via Zoom

Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford Impact Labs (SIL), affiliated with PovGov at CDDRL
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Venezuela’s Bolivarian Armed Force: Fear and Interest in the Face of Political Change

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In a new report for the Latin American Program, Stanford University scholar Harold Trinkunas explains the role of the armed forces in Venezuela’s current regime and why they have thus far resisted democratization efforts. He argues that the armed forces have benefited greatly during the current regime from greater access to power, responsibility, and revenues. Moreover, the regime’s successful politicization and ‘coup proofing’ efforts have made dissent unworkable, even deadly, for members of the military. Democratization is seen as a risky alternative, particularly by senior leaders, who fear accountability for human rights abuses, illicit trafficking, and corruption under Maduro. Under these conditions, the armed forces prefer to support the status quo.

Read the rest at Wilson Center

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In a new report for the Latin American Program, CISAC Interim Co-Director Harold Trinkunas explains the role of the armed forces in Venezuela’s current regime and why they have thus far resisted democratization efforts. He argues that the armed forces have benefited greatly during the current regime from greater access to power, responsibility, and revenues.

The Concept of Public Goods, the State, and Higher Education Finance: A View from the BRICs

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Because higher education serves both public and private interests, the way it is conceived and financed is contested politically, appearing in different forms in different societies. What is public and private in education is a political–social construct, subject to various political forces, primarily interpreted through the prism of the state. Mediated through the state, this construct can change over time as the economic and social context of higher education changes. In this paper, we analyze through the state’s financing of higher education how it changes as a public/private good and the forces that impinge on states to influence such changes. To illustrate our arguments, we discuss trends in higher education financing in the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India, and China. We show that in addition to increased privatization of higher education financing, BRIC states are increasingly differentiating the financing of elite and non-elite institutions.

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Prashant Loyalka

Impacts of Chilean forest subsidies on forest cover, carbon and biodiversity

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In response to the important benefits forests provide, there is a growing effort to reforest the world. Past policies and current commitments indicate that many of these forests will be plantations. Since plantations often replace more carbon-rich or biodiverse land covers, this approach to forest expansion may undermine objectives of increased carbon storage and biodiversity. We use an econometric land use change model to simulate the carbon and biodiversity impacts of subsidy driven plantation expansion in Chile between 1986 and 2011. A comparison of simulations with and without subsidies indicates that payments for afforestation increased tree cover through expansion of plantations of exotic species but decreased the area of native forests. Chile’s forest subsidies probably decreased biodiversity without increasing total carbon stored in aboveground biomass. Carefully enforced safeguards on the conversion of natural ecosystems can improve both the carbon and biodiversity outcomes of reforestation policies.

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Nature Sustainability
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Eric Lambin

Testing the limits of China and Brazil’s partnership

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Brazil is China’s most important economic and political partner in South America, as well as a key participant in the Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) grouping of emerging powers that China increasingly leads. When it comes to global aspirations, China and Brazil have historically been in sync on their critiques of the liberal international order, if not on their preferred remedies. Historically, their prescriptions for foreign policy differ in important ways. China would prefer a world order that better accommodates its interests, and it is becoming less reluctant to use the threat of force in foreign policy to maintain its ascendancy in its geopolitical neighborhood. Brazil traditionally has preferred a rules-bound liberal international order that applies to everyone, especially superpowers. Unlike China, it foreswears the use of coercion in international affairs, even to protect its interests in its immediate neighborhood, South America.

Read the rest at Brookings

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During the periods when it sought international autonomy, Brazil has found in China an attractive partner in criticizing the liberal international order fostered by the United States in the wake of World War II.

Kasumi Yamashita

616 Jane Stanford Way
Encina Hall, E005
Stanford, CA 94305-6060

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AM

Kasumi Yamashita is an Instructor for the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE), currently teaching an online course for high school students in Oita Prefecture, Japan, called Stanford e-Oita. Kasumi’s academic interests are in cultural anthropology, international education, and language technologies, and her research focuses on the Japanese diaspora in the United States and Latin America. While conducting fieldwork for her PhD in Anthropology at Harvard University, she spent a year at the University of São Paulo, as a Fulbright Scholar. She explored narrations of memory and migration, and community involvement in the emergence of Japanese diaspora museums throughout Brazil, including the Museu Histórico da Imigração Japonesa no Brasil (Historical Museum of Japanese Immigration to Brazil). Kasumi researched Nikkei Latin American communities in Japan while at Hitotsubashi University on a Japanese government scholarship. She earned an AM in Regional Studies–East Asia from Harvard University. 

Kasumi received a BS in Studio Art from New York University. She was a University Scholar and spent her junior year in Spain at the Instituto Internacional in Madrid. After graduating from NYU, she taught English as an Assistant Language Teacher (ALT) and later worked as a Coordinator for International Relations (CIR) on the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program. As a CIR at Yukuhashi City Hall, Fukuoka Prefecture, she founded a Japan–U.S. student and teacher exchange program between middle schools in Yukuhashi City and the Grace Church School in New York. More than 500 students and teachers from the United States and Japan have participated in the program since she launched it in 1994. That year, she published a book of essays chronicling her experiences as a Japanese American woman in a small Japanese town, Kasumi no Yukuhashi Nikki (Kaichosha Press).

In New York, she served as a member of the local staff of the Permanent Mission of Japan to the United Nations under the leadership of Ambassador Hisashi Owada. She also served on the Executive Committee of the Convención Panamericana Nikkei (COPANI XI) in New York and has been involved in past conferences across the Americas, most recently COPANI XX in San Francisco (CA) in 2019.

Kasumi also teaches and develops web-based curricula for the Translation and Interpretation Program at Bellevue College (WA). Kasumi frequently interprets for Japanese delegations in various fields (including education, technology, international relations, film, art, and museums) and serves on the Board of the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Washington (JCCCW).

 

Instructor, Stanford e-Oita
Instructor, Stanford e-Fukuoka
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