Headquartered in Riga, Latvia, Meduza.io is the world’s number one independent source for professional reporting on Russia. The site also operates an ambitious translation project, making its content available to the global community at Meduza.io/en. Meduza launched in October 2014 and by August 2017 the monthly readership of Meduza exceeded 7.5 million unique visitors, with more than 700,000 app downloads and more than 2,000,000 followers on social media. Meduza and Buzzfeed recently announced an editorial partnership focused on joint investigative reports. Ilya Krasilshchik, Meduza’s publisher, will explain what it takes to mount such a project in an environment flooded by the Kremlin’s propaganda, and Anna Veduta, Meduza’s global outreach director, will discuss Meduza’s English-language edition.

Meduza is an online newspaper and news aggregator covering Russia and the Eurasian region, headed by Galina Timchenko, the former chief editor of the news website Lenta.ru, which during her tenure became the most popular news outlet on the Russian Internet. Meduza is run by a team of Russian journalists who resigned from their jobs at Lenta.ru, following Timchenko’s unexpected removal from her post by Alexander Mamut, the Putin-connected oligarch who owns the website.

Not long before the annexation of Crimea, Mamut fired Timchenko and replaced her with Alexey Goreslavsky, who had previously managed the pro-Kremlin website Vzglyad and later was a high-level official at the state-run news agency Interfax. The reason given for Timchenko’s dismissal was an official warning issued to Lenta.ru by Russia’s state censor because one of Lenta’s stories (an interview with a Ukrainian nationalist leader) contained a hyperlink to materials deemed extremist. More than 80 editors and reporters – nearly Lenta’s entire newsroom – quit in protest, publishing an open letter calling Timchenko’s ouster “an act of censorship” and a violation of Russia’s media laws. Timchenko and most of the staff who resigned with her went on to found Meduza. Explaining the decision to base Meduza in Latvia and register it outside the .RU domain zone, Timchenko told Forbes: “Right now, establishing an independent Russian-language news outlet in Latvia is possible, while in Russia it is not.”

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Anna Veduta is Meduza’s global outreach director, and also heads Meduza in English in Washington, D.C. Prior to Meduza, Anna served as Press Secretary to Alexey Navalny, Russia’s leading opposition politician and 2018 presidential hopeful. Anna headed Navalny's press office during his Moscow mayoral campaign in 2013, when he leveraged social media channels to break a blockage by Russia’s traditional media, nearly forcing a runoff vote. Anna holds degrees in political science and international relations from Moscow State University and Columbia University’s School of International Public Affairs.

This event is cosponsored by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

A growing body of evidence suggests that China’s schooling system, as it stands today, is unable to produce the high-skilled labor that will be needed if the nation is to avoid the middle-income trap. How does poor parenting and inadequate early childhood development attribute to this problem? Prof. Rozelle will discuss his research on cognitive delays among toddlers in rural China, and the national crisis that the country faces due to inadequate childhood development.  

Scott Rozelle holds the Helen Farnsworth Endowed Professorship at Stanford University and is Senior Fellow in the Food Security and Environment Program and the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI) for International Studies. For the past 30 years, he has worked on the economics of poverty reduction. Currently, his work on poverty has its full focus on human capital, including issues of rural health, nutrition and education. Rozelle has been the chair of the International Advisory Board of the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) for the past 20 years. He is the co-director of the Rural Education Action Project (REAP). 

Registration: 

https://www.eventbank.cn/event/9642/

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This event is co-sponsored by the Taiwan Democracy Project and the U.S.-Asia Security Initiative.

Abstract

Taiwan's defense policy faces several daunting challenges. President Tsai has inherited a complex security situation from her predecessors. The DPP's defense policy blue papers, published prior to Taiwan's January 2016 election, and Taiwan's newly published Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) outline President Tsai's plans for Taiwan's defense policy. Some of the major defense policy issues Taiwan must face under President Tsai include uncertainties about US Asia policy and Trump's approach to handling relations with China, growing Chinese military capabilities and increasing Chinese air and naval activities around Taiwan, defense budget constraints, and problems associated with Taiwan's attempt to transition to an all-volunteer military. Taiwan's proposed responses as outlined in the 2017 QDR include a defense strategy of "Resolute defense, multi-domain deterrence" and strengthening the island's domestic defense industries, a project that has both defense policy and economic implications. This presentation will assess Taiwan's approach and consider the implications for US policy in Asia.

Bio

Michael S. Chase is a senior political scientist at RAND, a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School, and an adjunct professor in the China Studies and Strategic Studies Departments at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C.

A specialist in China and Asia-Pacific security issues, he was previously an associate professor at the U.S. Naval War College (NWC) in Newport, Rhode Island, where he served as director of the strategic deterrence group in the Warfare Analysis and Research Department and taught in the Strategy and Policy Department. Prior to joining the faculty at NWC, he was a research analyst at Defense Group Inc. and an associate international policy analyst at RAND. He is the author of the book Taiwan's Security Policy and numerous chapters and articles on China and Asia-Pacific security issues. His work has appeared in journals such as Asia Policy, Asian Security, China Brief, Survival, and the Journal of Strategic Studies.

His current research focuses on Chinese military modernization, China's nuclear policy and strategy and nuclear force modernization, Taiwan's defense policy, and Asia-Pacific security issues. Chase holds a Ph.D. in international affairs and M.A. in China Studies from SAIS and a B.A. in politics from Brandeis University. In addition, he studied Chinese at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center in Nanjing, China.

Although sheep are only one of the important domesticates exploited in many parts of the world, it has played a near-paradigmatic role throughout the emergence and spread of European civilization. Domestic sheep and goat unambiguously originate from Southwest Asia where their wild ancestors live. Therefore sheep distributions across Europe represent an element of evident diffusion in the otherwise complex neolithization process. The numerical increase in sheep remains can be spectacular at Early Neolithic sites in Central Europe, even in habitats less than favorable for sheep. In various instances mutton outcompeted locally available pork in the diet as shown by animal remains from archaeological sites across Eurasia. Reasons for this trend seem to be diverse, ranging from greater pastoral mobility through secondary products (wool and dairy) to side effects of religious regulations such as the Iron Age taboo imposed on pork first documented in Judaism. Concomitant strict regulations concerning the “proper” way of slaughtering livestock link the increased dietary importance of sheep to the emergence of metallurgy, i.e. availability of quality blades.

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László Bartosiewicz has worked as an archaeozoologist since 1979. He has studied animal-human relationships during various time periods in several countries of Europe and some in the Near East as well as South America. His research often has a cultural anthropological focus viewing animals as material culture. Recently he has specialized in animal palaeopathology. He published three books and over 350 academic papers. Following teaching positions at the Universities of Budapest (Hungary) and Edinburgh (UK), he currently heads the Osteoarchaeological Research Laboratory at Stockholm University (Sweden). He was twice elected president of the International Council for Archaeozoology (2006–2014).

This event is part of the Origins of Europe Series and is sponsored by the Stanford Archaeology Center and co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

The Center for Latin American Studies invites you to join us for a lecture with Professor Beatriz Magaloni on criminal violence in Latin America. Lunch will be served. 

Beatriz Magaloni is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is also an affiliated faculty member of the Woods Institute of the Environment (2011-2013) and a Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Center for International Development. 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 Program on Poverty and Governance (POVGOV) within FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. There she pursues a research agenda focused on governance, poverty reduction, electoral clientelism, the provision of public goods and criminal violence. Her work has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Latin American Research Review, Journal of Theoretical Politics and other journals.Prior to joining Stanford in 2001, Professor Magaloni was a visiting professor at UCLA and a professor of Political Science at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM). She earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from Duke University. She also holds a law degree from ITAM.

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Ivo Daalder has been president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs since July 2013. Prior to joining the Council, Daalder served as the Ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for more than four years. Daalder also served on the National Security Council staff as director for European Affairs from 1995-97.
 
Ambassador Daalder is a widely-published author. His most recent books include In the Shadow of the Oval Office: Profiles of the National Security Advisers and the Presidents they Served—From JFK to George W. Bush (with I. M. Destler) and the award-winning America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (with James M. Lindsay). Other books include Beyond Preemption: Force and Legitimacy in a Changing World (2007); Crescent of Crisis: US-European Strategy for the Greater Middle East (2006); and Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo (2000). Daalder is a frequent contributor to the opinion pages of the world’s leading newspapers, and a regular commentator on international affairs on television and radio.
 
Before his appointment as ambassador to NATO by President Obama in 2009, Daalder was a senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, specializing in American foreign policy, European security and transatlantic relations, and national security affairs. Prior to joining Brookings in 1998, he was an associate professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy and director of research at its Center for International and Security Studies.
 
Ambassador Daalder serves on the board of UI LABS, on the leadership board of the chancellor of the University of Illinois at Chicago, and on the Advisory Committee of the Secretary of State's Strategic Dialogue with Civil Society, for which he also cochairs the Global Cities Working Group.
 
Ambassador Daalder was educated at Oxford and Georgetown Universities, and received his PhD in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is married to Elisa D. Harris, and they have two sons.

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A wave of far-right populism is sweeping across Europe. Euroskeptic, nationalist, populist parties, once on the fringes of European politics, are poised to enter the mainstream. The rise of the far right is first and foremost a cultural backlash against the rapid economic and political integration of the E.U. over the last 25 years. But while far-right parties are nothing new in Europe, their explicit pro-Russian turn is. Far right parties are not simply puppets of the Kremlin, but they are undoubtedly allies. They act as agents of influence in Europe’s institutions by supporting pro-Russian views, praising Mr. Putin’s foreign policy in Ukraine and Syria, and advocating against EU policies that would hurt Russian interests, such as sanctions. Increasing electoral support for the far right populists is no doubt domestically driven, but by supporting Putin, far-right leaders conveniently play into the Kremlin’s geo-political agenda.

Alina Polyakova, PhD, is the Director of Research for Europe and Eurasia at the Atlantic Council. She is the author of  the book, The Dark Side of European Integration (2015), which examines the rise of far-right populism in Europe. Dr. Polyakova is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a frequent media commentator on developments in Ukraine, Russia, and Europe. Her writings have appeared in major publications such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The American Interest, Newsweek, and academic journals. Concurrently, Dr. Polyakova is a Swiss National Science Foundation Senior Research Fellow and coinvestigator on a multi-year project examining the rise of far-right political parties in the European Union. She has been a fellow at the Eurasia Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Fulbright Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), and a Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer at the University of Bern. Dr. Polyakova has taught courses on European politics, foreign policy, and Russia at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Bern, Switzerland. She holds a PhD and MA in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA in Economics and Sociology with highest honors from Emory University.

THIS EVENT HAS REACHED FULL CAPACITY. PLEASE CONTACT MAGDALENA magdafb@stanford.edu TO GET ON THE WAITLIST. 

A Chinese flag and American flag fly on a lamp post along Pennsylvania Avenue near the U.S. Capitol in Washington during Chinese President Hu Jintao's state visit, January 18, 2011.

Multimedia for this event.

Max Sieben Baucus is the former U.S. Ambassador to the People's Republic of China (2014-2017) and a former U.S. Senator from Montana (1978-2014). On January 7, 2014 U.S. President Barack Obama nominated Max Sieben Baucus to be Ambassador of the United States of America to the People's Republic of China. He served as Ambassador from February 21, 2014 until January 19, 2017.  Ambassador Baucus formerly served as the senior United States Senator from Montana from 1978 to 2014 and was Montana’s longest serving U.S. Senator as well as the third longest tenure among those serving in the U.S. Senate. Senator Baucus was Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Finance, Vice Chairman of the joint Committee on Taxation, member of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, and a member of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction (Super committee). Before his election to the U.S. Senate, he represented Montana in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1975 to 1978. Ambassador Baucus has extensive experience in international trade. As Chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance, he led the passage and enactment of the Free Trade Agreements with 11 countries: Australia, Bahrain, Jordan, Chile, Colombia, Morocco, Oman, Panama, Peru, Singapore and South Korea. He also was deeply involved in orchestrating the congressional approval of permanent normal trade relations with China in 2000 and in facilitating China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization in 2001. Ambassador Baucus was also the chief architect of the Affordable Health Care Act (ACA), which was signed into law on March 23, 2009. Ambassador Baucus earned a bachelor’s and law degree from Stanford University. He is married to Melodee Hanes and they have three children and one granddaughter.

The Oksenberg Lecture, held annually, honors the legacy of Professor Michel Oksenberg (1938–2001). A senior fellow at Shorenstein APARC and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Professor Oksenberg served as a key member of the National Security Council when the United States normalized relations with China, and consistently urged that the United States engage with Asia in a more considered manner. In tribute, the Oksenberg Lecture recognizes distinguished individuals who have helped to advance understanding between the United States and the nations of the Asia-Pacific.

At times beginning in 2009 the decision was made to expand this series from its original lecture format to a workshop in order to bring scholars and policy makers together to discuss the ever-changing role China is playing in today's world. This new format allows for the exchange of ideas and opinions amongst today's top experts.

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