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Ilya Ponomarev is an opposition member of the Russian Parliament (State Duma). He is a Social Democrat representing Novosibirsk – the capital of Siberia, and chairs the Innovations and Venture Capital (formerly Hi-Tech development) subcommittee which has introduced legislation to support emerging innovation economy in Russia.

Ilya Ponomarev is one of leaders of anti-Putin opposition in Russia. He played key role in protests of 2012; during 2013-2014 he opposed antidemocratic legislation introduced in the country, was the only MP in Duma to vote against annexation of Crimea.

Mr Ponomarev serves as the Advisor on International Business Development, Commercialization and Technology Transfer for the President of Skolkovo Foundation – managing company of the project chaired by Pres. Medvedev. He is member of Society of Petroleum Engineers (IT), Council for Foreign and Defense Policies, Council for National Strategy, fellow at “Open Russia” foundation. Hon. Ponomarev is supervising innovation policies research at Institute of Contemporary Development (INSOR, think-tank chaired by Pres. Medvedev), and political studies at Institute of Globalization Studies (IPROG). Ilya Ponomarev is a member of Global Science and Innovations Council (GSIAC), chaired by Prime Minister of Malaysia.

Previously, Mr. Ponomarev held various positions in private companies, including Vice President of Yukos Oil Company, the largest Russian oil and gas corporation, and Director for CIS Business Development and Marketing for Schlumberger Oilfield Services.

He is an author of numerous research papers and magazine articles about new economy development, regional policies, education and international relations. 

David Cameron's promise to renegotiate the terms of British membership and organise an in/out referendum rested on a double gamble. The first one was that he would achieve a successful negotiation in Brussels, which he made possible by watering down his demands and relying on his partners' good will. The second is a more challenging one, which is to convince a majority of British voters to support staying in the EU. This is made particularly difficult by the long-standing anti-EU political culture in the UK, the divisions in the Conservative Party and an underlying crisis of British democracy, which finds expression in the rejection of the political elites, the rise of populist parties (UKIP) and the strains in the union between the component nations of the UK. This makes the outcome of the referendum, with massive consequences in case of a negative vote, hard to predict.

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Pauline Schnapper is professor of British Studies at the Paris Sorbonne Nouvelle University and a former fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France. She is the author (with David Baker) of Britain and the Crisis of the European Union, 2015, Palgrave Macmillan.

Abstract:

The Wild Lily movement was a student demonstration in 1990 calling for democracy through direct election. 24 years later, the Sunflower movement was driven by a coalition of students and civic groups that were discontent with the Taiwanese government's handling of China relations. We discuss the general trajectory of student movements and the subsequent rise of numerous 'Third Force' parties that represent a new way for civic engagement in politics. 

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Fan Yun (范雲), PhD, is associate professor of sociology at the National Taiwan University. She is a politician, sociology scholar, feminist theorist, and former chairperson of the Social Democratic Party in Taiwan. After graduating from NTU with a B.A. and M.A. in Sociology, she received her PhD in Sociology from Yale University. She was president of the student association at NTU, assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica, commander for the Wild Lily student movement, and chairperson for the Awakening Foundation for women's rights. Her research interests include social movement, collective action, gender politics, identity politics, civil society and democracy. She has participated in social movement since the Wild Lily student movement in 1990, and was participant and witness to the trajectory of Taiwan’s transition into modern civil society and democracy.

How do democratic societies respond to acts of terror? More precisely, what are the political consequences of the "Charlie Hebdo" attacks and the November 13 rampage in 2015 in Paris? Past research has examined the impact of threatening events on attitudes toward ethnic and religious minorities, as well as its influence on the endorsement of authoritarian policies. However, up until now, the impact of terrorist events on political participation has not been examined. This talk aims to assess the influence of fear and anger evoked by threat on the propensity to take part in various political activities, drawing on two representative surveys conducted in the aftermath of the January and November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris.

Martial Foucault is a professor of political science at Sciences Po in Paris, director of the CEVIPOF (CNRS) and associate researcher within the Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire d’Evaluation des Politiques Publiques (LIEPP).

RSVP to Minjia Zhong at mzhong2@stanford.edu by Monday April 11.

For more information contact Cécile Alduy at alduy@stanford.edu

This lecture is co-sponsored by the French and Italian Department, The Europe Center, Stanford University Library, the France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, the Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.

Despite the increasing state control over free speech, the Russian media market is still alive — and huge. There are tens of independent online media with a multimillion audience and each year we get more. How do you survive on the internet when it is controlled by the state? How do you find professional journalists when there are no decent schools of journalism? How do you manage a media outlet when you do not know what is going to happen tomorrow? Publisher of the popular Russian language online media outlet Meduza Ilia Krasilshchik will explain how the world of Russian media works.

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Ursula von der Leyen studied economics at the University of Göttingen, the University of Münster and the London School of Economics and Political Science. From 1980 to 1987 she attended Hanover Medical School (MHH). After obtaining her license to practise medicine, she worked at the Clinic for Obstetrics and Gynaecology. She obtained her Dissertation in Medicine in 1991 and was awarded the degree of Dr. med.. In 1992, Ursula von der Leyen and her family moved to the United States. She returned to Germany in 1996. From 1998 to 2002 she worked as a research assistant at the Department of Epidemiology, Social Medicine and Health System Research at Hanover Medical School and completed her Master’s degree in Public Health in 2001.

Ursula von der Leyen started her political activities in 1990 when she became a member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). From 2001 to 2003 she held various political offices at municipal level in the Hanover region. In 2003 she became a member of the Lower Saxony state parliament and was appointed State Minister of Social Affairs, Women, Family Affairs and Health. In 2005 Ursula von der Leyen started her career in federal politics as Federal Minister of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth. In 2009 she became a Member of Parliament (Deutscher Bundestag) and was appointed as Federal Minister of Labour and Social Affairs. After her election as member of the CDU Executive Committee she was elected as party vice chairwoman in 2010. In 2013 she was appointed as Minister of Defense of the Republic of Germany.

Ursula von der Leyen was born in Brussels in 1958. She lives near Hanover. She is married with Professor Heiko von der Leyen and the couple has seven children.

Space reports back these days ― in a brutal way. While we are told that Europe's external borders have stopped to exist, old legal-political concepts loom in the background of the current discussion on the Decline of the West: mare nostrum, mare clausum, res omnium, and the (impossible) Nomos of the Sea.

With the dangerous concept of res omnium an ominous figure is back, too: the pirate, the enemy of mankind, the terrorist in the disguise of the refugee. Linked inseparably to the birth of the concept of the state itself (by means of exclusion), this abysmal figure underwent a number of significant shifts since the enlightenment era, like the sea itself. Already in JF Cooper the pirate became a metasign, designating the readability of signs as such, the recognizability of figures, and the birth of the nation. The lecture therefore pushes forward the thesis (by drawing on art, literature, and media history at the same time) that the media and crisis history of the nomos of the sea underlies the concepts of representation and aesthetics of our modernity. The order of sense making, the order of the recognizable (i. e. aesthetics) and the possibility to discriminate between friend and foe are neither ontologically nor transcendentally "given" in the modern era but dependent on media, and therefore are permanently related to the danger of becoming indiscriminate. Hence, the ultimate metasign is the seascape.

Bernhard Siegert is the Gerd Bucerius Professor for the Theory and History of Cultural Techniques at the Department of Media Studies at Bauhaus-University Weimar and Director and Co-Founder of the International College of Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy at Weimar. His books include Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real (2015) and Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System (1999). He is a leading scholar of German Media Studies.

Hans Gumbrecht, the Albert Guerard Professor in Literature in the Departments of Comparative Literature and of French & Italian at Stanford and TEC affliliate faculty, will be the respondent. 

This event is co-sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, Department of Comparative Literature, and The Europe Center at Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.