I argue that central banks attempt to build public trust in money and monetary governance through the strategic use of what I call a stability narrative, asserting that they can maintain the value of money, can maintain the security of money, represent the nation, and have grown increasingly professional and sophisticated over time. The talk explores the stability narrative by studying its expression in central bank museums. Museums tell stories; they distill, teach, and privilege the beliefs of their creators. As such, museums represent an excellent vehicle for understanding the ways in which central banks describe and promote their ability to govern money. The research is based on interviews and site visits at over 35 central bank museums and an original database that gathers and systematizes publicly available information on central bank museums worldwide.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Juliet Johnson‘s research focuses on the politics of money and identity. She is Professor of Political Science at McGill University, an Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and former President of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. She is the author of the award-winning Priests of Prosperity: How Central Bankers Transformed the Postcommunist World (Cornell 2016) and A Fistful of Rubles: The Rise and Fall of the Russian Banking System (Cornell 2000), co-editor of Developments in Russian Politics 10 (Bloomsbury 2024) and Religion and Identity in Modern Russia: The Revival of Orthodoxy and Islam (Routledge 2005), and author of numerous scholarly and policy-oriented articles. She has been Lead Editor of Review of International Political Economy, Network Director of the Jean Monnet network Between the EU and Russia (BEAR), Advisory Council member at the Kennan Institute, Research Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. She received McGill University’s President’s Prize for Excellence in Teaching, the David Thomson Award for Graduate Supervision and Teaching, the Fieldhouse Award for Distinguished Teaching, and the Faculty of Arts Award for Distinction in Research. She earned her PhD in Politics from Princeton University and her AB in International Relations from Stanford University.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Willliam J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person.

War is often a driver of macro-institutional change (Tilly 1975), and it has been suggested that the peculiar, partial, and incremental development of the institutions of the European Union have been due to the absence of major inter-state war in Europe post-1945 (Kelemen and McNamara 2022). The return of inter-state warfare to Europe allows us to examine the effect that heightened military threat and territorial revisionism has European political development. Contrary to some expectations that Europe might achieve greater unity and integration in response to a revived Russian external threat, I find that the ongoing war is driving institutional retrenchment of Europe along national lines for three reasons. First, the war has privileged newer, post-enlargement member states, whose governments and polities do not share the elite anti-nationalist principles that have underpinned the European project since the end of WWII. Second, the emerging re-armament of European states has privileged national actors and national systems of military procurement, with incentives counter to deeper European integration of armed forces and military procurement. Military assistance for Ukraine has primarily been provided through US-coordinated bilateralism rather than European multilateralism or supranationalism. Finally, the war itself has increased the salience of national identity and the normative appeal of nationalism in ways that work against European institutions and will likely put limits on deeper European integration even in an environment of greater military threat. These preliminary findings suggest that, as with other macro-institutional processes (e.g. state-building), existential threat interacts with identity variables to produce institutional outcomes.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Keith Darden (Stanford class of ’92) is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics, Governance and Economics at the School of International Service at American University. His research focuses on nationalism, state-building, and the politics of Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia. His book manuscript, Resisting Occupation in Eurasia (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), explores the development of durable national loyalties through education and details how they explain over a century of regional patterns in voting, secession, and armed resistance in Ukraine, Europe, and Eurasia. His award-winning first book, Economic Liberalism and Its Rivals (Cambridge University Press, 2009) explored the formation of international economic institutions among the post-Soviet states, and explained why countries chose to join the Eurasian Customs Union, the WTO, or to eschew participation in any trade institutions. Prof. Darden is co-editor of the Cambridge University Press Book Series Problems of International Politics.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to William J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person.

The conquest of the Americas produced a radical transformation of pre-colonial Empires and City States. Europeans established a new institution, the Encomienda, which “entrusted” indigenous communities to individual conquistadores, which resulted in the dismemberment and fragmentation of prior political authority. Using a simple model of temporal horizons and rent extraction, I explore demographic change and epidemic disease after the conquest of Mexico. Data is drawn from the legal and census records of Tepetlaoztoc, a polity within the Acolhua Kingdom, one of the three parts of the Aztec Empire. This rich dataset allows for the reconstruction of demographic change and the calculation of individual and household level epidemiological models. The analysis suggests that the dramatic demographic decline of the 16th century in Mexico, rather than an inevitable result of exposure to unknown pathogens or epidemic diseases beyond human control, was a consequence of colonial rent extraction and the loss of political autonomy and sovereignty.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Alberto Díaz-Cayeros joined the FSI faculty in 2013 after serving for five years as the director of the Center for US-Mexico Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He earned his Ph.D at Duke University in 1997. He was an assistant professor of political science at Stanford from 2001-2008, before which he served as an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Diaz-Cayeros has also served as a researcher at Centro de Investigacion Para el Desarrollo, A.C., in Mexico from 1997-1999. His work has focused on federalism, poverty, and violence in Latin America and Mexico in particular. He has published widely in Spanish and English. His book Federalism, Fiscal Authority and Centralization in Latin America was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007 (reprinted in 2016). His latest book (with Federico Estevez and Beatriz Magaloni) is The Political Logic of Poverty Relief Electoral Strategies and Social Policy in Mexico. His work has primarily focused on federalism, poverty and economic reform in Latin America, and Mexico in particular, with more recent work addressing crime and violence, youth-at-risk, and police professionalization.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Willliam J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person.

This panel examines the impact of the ongoing wars in Gaza and Lebanon on regime stability in the region. How have ruling establishments managed popular sentiment and protests as Israel’s military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon have continued with no end in sight? How have opposition forces and protest movements responded to these developments? What challenges have they faced? What is the relationship between movements in solidarity with Palestine and Lebanon and domestic oppositional politics? The panelists will discuss the major trends and contextualize them in historical perspective.

PANELISTS:

• Joel Beinin, Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History, Emeritus
• Samia Errazzouki, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History and Humanities Center 
• Hesham Sallam, Associate Director, Program on Arab Reform and Development

This event is co-sponsored by CDDRL's Program on Arab Reform and Development and Democracy Day at Stanford University.