Stanford University

Violence

Does Terrorism Work? The Case of the Provisional IRA

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About the Speaker: Richard English is the Wardlaw Professor of Politics in the School of International Relations, and Director of the Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence (CSTPV), at the University of St Andrews. His research focuses on political violence and terrorism, Irish and British politics and history, and the history and politics of nationalism and the state. His books include Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA (which won the 2003 UK Political Studies Association Politics Book of the Year Award),Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland (which won the 2007 Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize, and the 2007 Political Studies Association of Ireland Book Prize), and Terrorism: How to Respond (OUP, 2009). His latest book, Modern War: A Very Short Introduction, is published by Oxford University Press. Professor English's current research project is for another OUP book, Does Terrorism Work? A History. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. Richard English is in residence as an International Visitor at the Stanford Humanities Center this April and was nominated by the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI)

 

 

About the Topic: Debates on the effectiveness of terrorism have become prominent in recent years, across a spectrum running from declarations that terrorism represents a deeply ineffective means of pursuing political change, to equally assertive arguments that terrorism works all too frequently. In this talk, Richard English reflects on why the question is important, why it has so far proved extremely difficult to answer in persuasive fashion, how we might better frame our reflections on the subject in future, and on what might be gleaned from deep consideration of the emergence, armed struggle, and eventual departure from the stage of one of the world's most sustainedly serious terrorist organizations - the Provisional Irish Republican Army.

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Richard English Wardlaw Professor of Politics in the School of International Relations Speaker University of St Andrews
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Empirical Studies of Conflict

The Empirical Studies of Conflict Project (ESOC) addresses critical challenges to international security through methodologically rigorous, evidence-based analyses of insurgency, civil war and other sources of politically motivated violence. The project is comprised of leading scholars from across the country from a variety of academic disciplines. ESOC aims to empower high quality of conflict analysis by creating and maintaining a repository of micro-level data across multiple conflict cases and making these data available to a broader community of scholars and policy analysts.

Building a Better Atrocities Early-Warning System

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Please note that this event is from 3:30-5:00pm. 

About the Topic: This presentation will describe a pilot program being developed by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Center for the Prevention of Genocide (CPG) that will give policy makers, analysts, advocates, journalists, scholars, students, and the public at large reliable, up-to-date forecasts of the risk of mass atrocities in countries worldwide. The central aim of this program is to enhance efforts to prevent atrocities by giving concerned actors better risk assessments with more lead time. The CPG expects to launch this pilot program in early 2014.

 

About the Speaker: Jay Ulfelder is an independent consultant and owner of the blog, The Dart-Throwing Chimp. From 2001 until 2011, he served as research director for the Political Instability Task Force, a U.S. government-funded research program that aims to forecast and explain various forms of political change in countries worldwide. Ulfelder's research interests include democratization, political violence, social unrest, state collapse, and forecasting. His publications include Dilemmas of Democratic Consolidation: A Game-Theory Approach and “Democratic Transitions” in The Routledge Handbook of Democratization and co-authored “A Global Model for Forecasting Political Instability” in the American Journal of Political Science. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University in 1997 and his B.A. in Comparative Area Studies--USSR and Eastern Europe from Duke University in 1991. 

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Jay Ulfelder Independent Consultant and Blogger, The Dart-Throwing Chimp Speaker
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The Marketplace of Ideas at War: Elites, International Law, and Public Attitudes towards Drone Warfare

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ABOUT THE TOPIC: The use of unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as drones, as a counterterrorism tool has become the subject of considerable debate. Proponents point to drones as both effective for disrupting terrorist networks and compatible with international legal commitments. Critics assert that attacks create more terrorists than they kill while also violating international law. Both defenders and detractors have increasingly sought to make their case in the public sphere with the intent of swaying public support. This research studies the marketplace of ideas on the question of drones with an eye towards explaining 1) the type of arguments—i.e., whether or not drones are compatible with international law or are militarily effective—that resonate most with the public; and 2) the source of those ideas, whether international organizations, non-governmental organizations, or the government. In doing so, it fills a gap in a literature that has typically focused on sources of public support for initially going to war rather than attitudes toward states’ actual conduct and wielding of violence in the midst of armed conflict.

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Sarah Kreps Assistant Professor Speaker the Department of Government, Cornell University
Priya Satia Associate Professor of British History, Department of History, Stanford University Commentator
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State Strategies in Multi-Ethnic Territories: Explaining Variation in the Former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc

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Abstract

After the collapse of the Soviet bloc, its twenty-seven successor states were charged with devising policies with respect to their ethnic minorities. This shock enables an analysis of the conditions that render states more likely to repress, exclude, assimilate or accommodate their minorities. One would anticipate that groups that are most ‘threatening’ to the state's territorial integrity are more likely to experience repression. However the data do not validate this expectation. Instead, the analysis suggests that minority groups’ demographics and states’ coercive capacities better account for variation in ethnic minority policies. While less robust, the findings further indicate the potential importance of lobby states and Soviet multinational legacies in determining minority rights. The results have implications for ethnic politics, human rights, nationalism, democratization and political violence.

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British Journal of Political Science
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Sarah Z. Daly
Sarah Zukerman Daly
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CISAC-SCICN Special Seminar: Investigating Post-Conflict Violence at the Micro-Level: Accounting for Patterns among Victims of Past Atrocities in Liberia

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Anupma Kulkarni is currently a Fellow of the Stanford Center for International Conflict and Negotiation (SCICN) and Co-director of the West Africa Transitional Justice (WATJ) Project, a cross-national study on the impact of truth commissions and international criminal tribunals from the perspective of victims of human rights violations in Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.  Dr. Kulkarni received her PhD in Political Science from Stanford University and was Assistant Professor at Arizona State University from 2007-2009.  She has been a MacArthur International Peace and Cooperation Fellow at CISAC and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Democracy, Development and Rule of Law.  Her research specializes in transitional justice, the ways in which post-war and post-authoritarian societies address matters of memory and accountability for human rights violations as part of the larger project of effecting democratic change and political and social reconciliation.  Her book manuscript, Demons and Demos: Truth, Accountability and Democracy in Post-Apartheid South Africa, is based on her award-winning fieldwork in South Africa.  She is also co-authoring, with David Backer, The Arc of Transitional Justice: Violent Conflict, Its Victims & Pursuing Redress in Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone, a book based on primary research conducted under the auspices of the WATJ Project, made possible through generous support from the National Science Foundation.

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Anupma Kulkarni Fellow Speaker Stanford Center for International Conflict and Negotiation (SCICN)

Shiri Krebs

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Shiri Krebs is a Professor of Law at Deakin University and Director of the Centre for Law as Protection. She is also the Chair of the Lieber Society on the Law of Armed Conflict, an affiliate scholar at Stanford University Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), and co-lead of the Australian Government Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre (CSCRC) Law and Policy Theme. In 2024, she was appointed as a Visiting Legal Fellow at the Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). Her research on drone warfare and predictive technologies in counterterrorism and armed conflict is currently funded by a 3-year Australian Research Council (ARC) DECRA fellowship and an Alexander von Humboldt Experienced Researcher Fellowship at the University of Hamburg.

Prof Krebs’ research projects on international fact-finding, biases in counterterrorism decision-making, and human-machine interaction in drone warfare, have influenced decision-making processes through invitations to brief high-level decision-makers, including at the United Nations (CTED, Office of the Secretary-General), the United States Department of Defense, and the Australian Defence Force.

Her recent research awards include the David Caron Prize (American Society of International Law, 2021), the ‘Researcher of the Year’ Award (Australian Women in Law Awards, 2022), the Australian Legal Research Awards (finalist, Article/Chapter (ECR), 2022), and the Vice-Chancellor’s Researcher Award for Career Excellence (Deakin, 2022).

Before joining Deakin University, Prof Krebs has taught in several law schools, including at Stanford University, University of Santa Clara, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she won the Dean’s award recognizing exceptional junior faculty members.

She earned her Doctorate and Master Degrees from Stanford Law School, as well as LL.B. and M.A., both magna cum laude, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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Shiri Krebs Predoctoral Fellow Commentator CISAC
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Regional Conflict and Cooperation

CDDRL-CISAC Special Seminar: The Logic of Violence in Drug Wars: Cartel-State Conflict in Mexico, Brazil and Colombia

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Abstract:

Why have militarized crackdowns on drug cartels had wildly divergent outcomes, sometimes exacerbating cartel-state conflict, as in Mexico and, for decades, in Brazil, but sometimes reducing violence, as with Rio de Janeiro's new 'Pacification' (UPP) strategy?  CDDRL-CISAC Post Doctoral Fellow Benjamin Lessing will distinguish key logics of violence, focusing on violent corruption--cartels' use of coercive force in the negotiation of bribes. Through this channel, crackdowns can lead to increased fighting unless the intensity of state repression is made conditional on cartels' use of violence--a key difference between Mexico and Brazil.

Speaker Bio:

Benjamin Lessing is a recent Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a joint postdoctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center on International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), and will join the Political Science faculty at University of Chicago as assistant professor in 2013.

Lessing studies 'criminal conflict'—organized armed violence involving non-state actors who, unlike revolutionary insurgents, are not trying to topple the state. His doctoral dissertation examines armed conflict between drug trafficking organizations and the state in Colombia, Mexico and Brazil. Additionally, he has studied prison gangs’ pernicious effect on state authority, and the effect of paramilitary groups’ territorial control on electoral outcomes. 

Prior to his graduate work, he conducted field research on the licit and illicit small arms trade in Latin America and the Caribbean for international organizations like Amnesty International, Oxfam, and the Small Arms Survey, as well as Viva Rio, Brazil’s largest NGO, and was a Fulbright Student Grantee in Argentina and Uruguay.

 

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Benjamin Lessing Post-doctoral Fellow Speaker CDDRL and CISAC

Beatriz Magaloni

Dept. of Political Science
Encina Hall, Room 436
Stanford University,
Stanford, CA

(650) 724-5949
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations
Professor of Political Science
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MA, PhD

Beatriz Magaloni Magaloni is the Graham Stuart Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science. Magaloni is also a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, where she holds affiliations with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She is also a Stanford’s King Center for Global Development faculty affiliate. Magaloni has taught at Stanford University for over two decades.

She leads the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (Povgov). Founded by Magaloni in 2010, Povgov is one of Stanford University’s leading impact-driven knowledge production laboratories in the social sciences. Under her leadership, Povgov has innovated and advanced a host of cutting-edge research agendas to reduce violence and poverty and promote peace, security, and human rights.

Magaloni’s work has contributed to the study of authoritarian politics, poverty alleviation, indigenous governance, and, more recently, violence, crime, security institutions, and human rights. Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006) is widely recognized as a seminal study in the field of comparative politics. It received the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations, as well as the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section. Her second book The Politics of Poverty Relief: Strategies of Vote Buying and Social Policies in Mexico (with Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estevez) (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores how politics shapes poverty alleviation.

Magaloni’s work was published in leading journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Criminology & Public Policy, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, Latin American Research Review, and others.

Magaloni received wide international acclaim for identifying innovative solutions for salient societal problems through impact-driven research. In 2023, she was named winner of the world-renowned Stockholm Prize in Criminology, considered an equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of criminology. The award recognized her extensive research on crime, policing, and human rights in Mexico and Brazil. Magaloni’s research production in this area was also recognized by the American Political Science Association, which named her recipient of the 2021 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review, the leading journal in the discipline.

She received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University and holds a law degree from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.

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Beatriz Magaloni Associate Professor of Political Science Commentator Stanford
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Responding to Terrorism: Provocation, Retaliation and Deterrence

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Martha Crenshaw

Not in residence

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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Emerita
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science, Emerita
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PhD

Martha Crenshaw is a senior fellow emerita at CISAC and FSI. She taught at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, from 1974 to 2007.  She has published extensively on the subject of terrorism.  In 2011 Routledge published Explaining Terrorism, a collection of her previously published work.  A book co-authored with Gary LaFree titled Countering Terrorism was published by the Brookings Institution Press in 2017. She recently authored a report for the U.S. Institute of Peace, “Rethinking Transnational Terrorism:  An Integrated Approach”.

 

 She served on the Executive Board of Women in International Security and is a former President and Councilor of the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP). In 2005-2006 she was a Guggenheim Fellow. She was a lead investigator with the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland from 2005 to 2017.  She is currently affiliated with the National Counterterrorism, Innovation, Technology, and Education (NCITE) Center, also a Center of Excellence for the Department of Homeland Security.  In 2009 the National Science Foundation/Department of Defense Minerva Initiative awarded her a grant for a research project on "mapping terrorist organizations," which is ongoing.  She has served on several committees of the National Academy of Sciences.  In 2015 she was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.  She is the recipient of the International Studies Association International Security Studies Section Distinguished Scholar Award for 2016. Also in 2016 Ghent University awarded her an honorary doctorate.  She serves on the editorial boards of the journals International Security, Security Studies, Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict, Orbis, and Terrorism and Political Violence.

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Martha Crenshaw Senior Fellow Speaker CISAC
Thomas Hegghammer Zukerman Fellow Commentator CISAC
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