Sasha Ghosh-Siminoff – Executive Director, Syrian Emergency Task Force

Monday April 1, 2013
Spartan Room, Thwing Center 3rd Floor
11111 Euclid Avenue
Cleveland, Case Western Reserve University
5:00 – 6:30 p.m.
This program is co-sponsored by the Center for Policy Studies
and the department of political science
at Case Western Reserve University

The uprising or revolution in Syria has led to substantial uncertainty among both commentators and policy-makers in the United States and Europe. The Obama administration, in a somewhat typical pattern, has provided some rhetorical support but, at least in what is publicly visible, been much more cautious about deeper involvement. Some, like Tom Friedman of the New York Times, think this caution is justified by the risks of a dangerous outcome and the limits on U.S. power to shape the results.

Sasha Ghosh-Siminoff was studying Arabic in Aleppo, as part of his ongoing studies in Middle Eastern politics, when the uprising broke out in 2011. His experience and those of his Syrian friends committed him to working to support the revolution back in the United States. Join us to hear and discuss the case, as he and others see it, for a greater U.S. commitment to depose the Assad regime and influence what comes after.

About Our Guest

After completing his B.A. at CWRU in 2008, Sasha Ghosh-Siminoff did field work in Israel and the occupied territories and completed his Masters degree in Middle East Studies at the University of Exeter, UK. Mr. Ghosh-Siminoff then was attending an immersion Arabic program in Aleppo, Syria, when the Syrian revolution began in early 2011. He therefore had the opportunity to experience Syrian society right before, at the beginning and then immediately after the commencement of the revolution. His language program was interrupted, and he moved to Fes, Morocco, to complete it – but he had become committed to supporting the movement in which many of his Syrian friends were engaged.

Now he works with an extensive network of activists and political figures within and beyond Syria to advocate for the Syrian Revolution. With his colleagues on the Syrian Emergency Task Force and in allied organizations, he has worked to convince members of Congress and the administration to support more extensive action in support of the uprising and opposition to the Assad regime, as well as on humanitarian relief in Syria and further advocacy in the international arena.

A live webcast featuring U.S. Ambassador to China Gary Locke

October 29, 2012, at 7 p.m.
Mandel Center, Room 115
(11402 Bellflower Road, Cleveland)

This program was sponsored by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, the Asian Studies Program, and the Center for Policy Studies at Case Western Reserve University

Leadership transition in China, trade disputes between China and the United States, and America’s new focus on East Asian Security put the future of U.S.-China relations on the front burner for those interested in business and public policy choices involving the People’s Republic.

Ambassador Locke became the 10th U.S. Ambassador the People’s Republic in August 2011. From 2009 to 2010, he served as Commerce Secretary where he worked to implement the President’s National Export Initiative, presiding over a 17 percent increase in U.S. exports and a 32 percent increase in exports to China.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_7QKo8Didc

Dr. Steven P. Feldman, professor of business ethics at the Weatherhead School of Management, will provide an overview of key issues in U.S.-China business relations. Dr. Paul Schroeder, visiting professor of political science and interim director of the Asian Studies Program, will discuss Chinese domestic issues that impact U.S.-China Relations.

Professor Feldman specializes in American-Chinese business relations, business ethics, and nonprofit management. His forthcoming book, Trouble in the Middle: American-Chinese Business Relations: Culture, Conflict and Ethics, will be published by Routledge in January. In 2007 he was Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer in business ethics at Shanghai International Studies University.

Professor Schroeder specializes on China, East Asia and international relations. He was managing director of East-West Trade Development, Ltd., a trade management firm focused on business in China. Prior to that he served with the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, working in legal and economic development, and corporate programs.The video of the local Cleveland Town Hall Meeting is available below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrTN6zLV3MU

Joshua Stacher, Kent State University
Pete Moore, Case Western Reserve University – Moderators

Nada Shabout, University of North Texas, Art Education and Art History

Jessica Winegar, Northwestern University, Department of Anthropology

Ted Swedenburg, University of Arkansas, Department of Anthropology

George Trumbull IV, Dartmouth College, Department of History

Friday September 28, 2012
Wolstein Research Building Auditorium
3:00 – 5:00 p.m.
2103 Cornell Road
Cleveland, OH 44106

This forum is free and open to the public

Whether graffiti, poetry, songs, or humor, the 2011 uprisings in the Middle East were more than just political events; they were cultural and artistic productions. How did cultural and artistic products figure in the revolts? How have artists in turn been affected by the political changes underway?

Sponsored by The Northeast Ohio Consortium for Middle East Studies, the Baker-Nord Center for Humanities, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Center for Policy Studies at Case Western Reserve University. This program was also made possible by the generosity of Ms. Eloise Briskin.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8O7lWhwQn4

About Our Guests

Joshua Stacher is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Kent State University. Prior to joining KSU, Stacher was a post- doctoral fellow at Syracuse University. Stacher’s scholarship focuses on authoritarian durability and social movements in the Middle East and North Africa.

Stacher is the author of the forthcoming Adaptable Autocrats: Regime Power in Egypt and Syria (Stanford UP, 2012). In addition, he also has published research on the Egyptian Society of Muslim Brothers as well as the unfolding Egyptian transition. He is also a frequent contributor to Middle East Report.

Pete W. Moore is an associate professor of political science at Case Western Reserve University. His research focuses on economic development and state-society relations in the Middle East and Africa; specifically, Gulf Arab States and Levant; business-state relations, privatization, and decentralization; sub-state conflict and regional security.

Nada Shabout is an Associate Professor of Art History and the Director of the Contemporary Arab and Muslim Studies Institute (CAMCSI) at the University of North Texas. She is a member of the Board of Governors of the Cultural Development Center of the Qatar Foundation, and a long-term advisor and guest curator at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha. She led Mathaf’s curatorial team of the inaugural exhibition Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art, as well as curated one of the two accompanying opening exhibitions, Interventions: A dialogue between the Modern and the Contemporary. Her teaching and writing interests are in the area of Arab and Islamic visual culture, theory and history, imperialism, Orientalism and globalization. She is the author of Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics, University of Florida Press, 2007; co-editor of New Vision: Arab Art in the 21st Century, Thames & Hudson, 2009; and the founding president of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art from the Arab World, Iran and Turkey (AMCA).

She has co-curated Modernism and Iraq at the Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, 2009, and curated the traveling exhibition, Dafatir: Contemporary Iraqi Book Art, 2005-2009. She has published numerous articles on modern and contemporary Iraqi art and the relationship of identity and visual representations in Iraq. Since 2003, she has been working on the recovery, documentation and digitization of modern Iraqi heritage, particularly the collection previously held at the Iraqi Museum of Modern Art, available on the Modern Art Iraq Archive website, supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities-Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants. Her awards include: TAARII fellow 2006, 2007; MIT visiting Assistant Professor, spring 2008, and Fulbright Senior Scholar Program, 2008 Lecture/Research fellowship to Jordan. She is a member of the editorial committee of MERIP.

Jessica Winegar is a sociocultural anthropologist at Northwestern University whose work investigates how people articulate understandings of history and political-economic change through cultural production and consumption, in particular through competing notions of culture and culturedness. She is primarily concerned with the multiple ways that culture projects create social hierarchies and modern subjects while frequently hiding the mechanisms of these processes, thereby contributing to their durability.

Her first book Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2006) focused on these processes in the realm of the visual arts. It is an ethnographic study of the intense debates over cultural authenticity and artistic value that occur in a postcolonial society undergoing market liberalization. It examines how cultural elites reckon with the legacies of colonialism, socialism, and modernism in order to produce meaningful, yet competing, versions of national and elite visual culture in a context where “culture” itself is becoming increasingly globalized and commodified.

She is currently working on two new books. The first, tentatively titled Culturing Youth: Democracy, Creativity, and Development in the Middle East, charts the meteoric rise, successes, and challenges of state and NGO cultural development programs directed towards poor and working class youth in Egypt. It studies how and why such programs feature arts, etiquette, and literacy training in attempts to make poor and working class youth more “cultured” with an eye towards building a democracy based mainly on market principles, and it investigates how youth engage with such elite projects. The book is ultimately concerned with the ways that “culture” has become so important to postcolonial state governance, NGO programs, and religious projects to create moral communities, in an era of waning state legitimacy, economic restructuring, and revolution.

Ted Swedenburg received his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Texas in 1988. His dissertation, a study of popular memories of the 1936-39 revolt in Palestine, involved interviewing elderly peasants living in Palestinian villages in the Galilee and the West Bank. He taught at the University of Washington -Seattle between 1988 and 1991, and at the American University in Cairo from 1992 to 1996. He joined the University of Arkansas in 1996.

Dr. Swedenburg’s recent research focuses on popular music. He is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled Sounds from the Interzone, that deals with “border” musics of the Middle East as well as Middle Eastern-inflected musics of the West. He has done research and presented papers on Franco-Algerian rai music, “Islamic” African-American rap, and Mizrahi dance music in Israel. His most recent fieldwork has been on the popular music of Nubians in Egypt.

Dr. Swedenburg teaches courses on the Middle East, race and ethnicity, gender, and public culture. He is on the editorial committee of Middle East Report, and is actively involved with the King Fahd Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.

George R. Trumbull IV is an associate professor of History at Dartmouth College. A native New Englander, George R. Trumbull IV received his A.B. from Princeton University and his Ph.D. from Yale University, where his dissertation received the Arthur and Mary Wright Prize for Best Dissertation in a field outside of European or American history.

Professor Trumbull’s first book, An Empire of Facts: Colonial Power, Cultural Knowledge, and Islam (Algeria, 1871-1914), appeared in 2009 as part of Cambridge University Press’s “Critical Perspectives on Empire” series. Situating his research at the intersection of African and Middle Eastern Studies, he is currently working on a book entitled “Land of Thirst, Land of Fear: A History of Water in the Sahara from Empire to Oil.” A future project, probably a short book, will trace the history of recent extinctions in the Maghrib, and a longer book will offer a history of Marrakesh. Social Science Research Council, Fulbright-Hays, Whiting Foundation, and, most recently, American Council of Learned Societies fellowships have supported his research in North Africa and France.

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY
ANNUAL CONSTITUTION DAY PROGRAM
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2012
4:30 – 6:00 p.m.
MOOT COURTROOM
SCHOOL OF LAW
11075 EAST BOULEVARD
CLEVELAND, OHIO 44106-1769

Internet Piracy and the Constitution

JOIN A CWRU STUDENT PANEL
FOR A PROGRAM FEATURING

	Mark Avsec, J.D. – Partner, Benesch, Friedlander, Coplan & Aronoff, LLP, and Adjunct Professor of Law at CWRU School of Law
	Raymond Ku, J.D. – Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center for Law, Technology and the Arts at CWRU School of Law

This forum is free and open to the public.

Program planned by the CWRU Constitution Day 2012 Student Committee

Sponsored by the Office of the President, Office of Government and Community Relations,
Cleveland Institute of Art, Center for Policy Studies, and the School of Law

A reception will follow at the law school.

Over the past decade, disputes about intellectual property and piracy on the internet have become steadily more prominent. In October 2011, the House Judiciary Committee introduced the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). With its bipartisan sponsors, the bill proposed anti-piracy measures allowing the U.S. Department of Justice and intellectual property owners to exercise control over websites facilitating copyright infringement. In the Senate, the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) introduced additional methods for the government and copyright holders to protect against counterfeit goods domestically and abroad. Given protests and an unprecedented internet blackout, voting on the bills was suspended. However, a third bill intended to protect against cyber threats, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), passed in the House of Representatives in April 2012.

The Constitution Day 2012 forum will examine constitutional questions raised by internet piracy, proposed legislation to regulate the internet, copyright law, and other issues related to intellectual property. It will include perspectives from the speakers, questions from a CWRU student panel, and audience participation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFdO6f92ghY

About Our Guest

Mark Avsec is an expert in negotiating agreements that involve music-related intellectual property. A significant portion of his practice is also devoted to non-musical matters, including trademark, trade dress, and copyright prosecution and litigation as well as other types of intellectual property licensing and agreements. He has experience in combating international piracy for consumer product companies and regularly counsels media clients on the doctrine of fair use. Since 2003, Professor Avsec has taught “Law of the Music Industry” at CWRU. As a member of the Federal Judicial Conference, he teaches copyright law basics and litigation to U.S. federal judges at the University of California, Berkeley.

Before becoming a lawyer, he worked as a studio musician, producer, and songwriter. He has written more than 500 songs and produced or played on sound recordings for, among other artists, Bon Jovi (“She Don’t Know Me”) (writer), Carlos Santana (“Angel Love (Come For Me)”) (writer), Donnie Iris (“Ah! Leah!” and “Love Is Like A Rock”) (writer, performer, and producer), Wild Cherry (“Play That Funky Music, White Boy”) (performer), and Mason Ruffner (“Gypsy Blood”) (performer). Professor Avsec has toured extensively with world-class artists and served as a session musician for multiple record companies in the United States and for CBS United Kingdom. He is the recipient of an American Music Award and was nominated for two Grammy Awards.

Raymond Ku received his J.D., cum laude, from NYU, where he was a Leonard Boudin First Amendment Fellow in the Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Program, and his A.B. with Honors from Brown University where he was the recipient of the Philo Sherman Bennet Prize for the best political science thesis discussing the principles of free government. Professor Ku clerked for the Hon. Timothy K. Lewis, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He then practiced constitutional, intellectual property, and antitrust law with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, LLP, and First Amendment media and intellectual property law with Levine Pierson Sullivan & Koch, LLP, both in Washington, D.C. He has taught at Cornell, Seton Hall, Thomas Jefferson, and St. Thomas law schools.

An internationally recognized scholar, Professor Ku writes on legal issues impacting individual liberty, creativity, and technology. His articles appear in the law reviews and journals of Berkeley, Chicago, Fordham, Georgetown, Minnesota, Stanford, Tulane, Vanderbilt, and Wisconsin among others. He is the lead author of the first casebook devoted exclusively to the study of cyberspace law. Professor Ku was the 2009 recipient of the CWRU Law Alumni Association’s Distinguished Teacher Award, and voted Professor of the Year by the graduating class of 2009.

Frances Lee, Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland Friday October 26, 2012 12:00 p.m. Wolstein Medical Research Building 2103 Cornell Road Cleveland, OH 44106

The Center for Policy Studies Invites Students and Colleagues to a Special Event To Honor the Memory of Alexander P. Lamis

Our colleague, Associate Professor Alexander P. Lamis, passed away on February 9. To honor and remember him, we have organized a special edition of the “Friday Lunch” on October 26, 2012.

In 1989 Alec organized the Friday Public Affairs Lunch discussions, which have become a tradition during Fall and Spring semesters. (http://fridaylunch.case.edu). He was also a proud Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University, and his greatest interest was in the changing political cleavages – often called “realignments” – that define the party system both nationally and in the states. He studied the party divisions and their effects on political institutions nationally, in Ohio, and especially in his native South.

Much of the discussion of party alignments in the past claimed either that one party was dominant (such as the Republicans after 1896, or Democrats after 1932) or that voters were becoming less aligned with either party (supposedly in the 1970s). But the current party cleavage is different. Voters and interest groups are not “dealigned” at all. Most are closely tied to one or the other party. But the cleavages are quite severe – the parties have very different policy positions – and the balance is very close. That greatly raises the stakes in each election, and so may add to the tone of extremism and “winner take all” refusal to compromise that many believe characterizes Congress today.

We therefore are very glad to welcome Alec’s and the department’s onetime colleague, Frances Lee, Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, for a talk and discussion on “Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Permanent Campaign.” Professor Lee is one of the leading scholars of parties in Congress, a fellow-alum of Vanderbilt and a personal friend of Alec from her time in this department. So she is both a leading expert who would be a great visitor to campus in her own right, and a very appropriate person to honor our late colleague by discussing the field about which he cared so much.

This special Friday Lunch will begin at 12:15 p.m. on Friday, October 26, and will be held in the auditorium of the Wolstein Medical Research building, 2103 Cornell Road. Some students and colleagues will remember Alec, and then Professor Lee will give her talk. Alec loved Mama Jo’s pies, so we will have pies as well as pizza.

Please contact Alyson Szlamas (Alyson.slamas@case.edu) or call the department (216-368-2424) with any questions about the event. We look forward to welcoming colleagues old and new.

More About Our Guest

Frances E. Lee joined the faculty of the University of Maryland in the Fall of 2004. She teaches courses in American government, the public policy process, legislative politics, and political institutions. She is also Director of the Government & Politics Honors Program.

Her research interests focus on American governing institutions, especially the U.S. Congress. She is author of Beyond Ideology: Politics, Principles and Partisanship in the U.S. Senate (University of Chicago Press, 2009) and coauthor of Sizing Up The Senate: The Unequal Consequences of Equal Representation (University of Chicago Press 1999). She is also coauthor of a comprehensive textbook on the U.S. Congress, Congress and Its Members (CQ Press). Her research has also appeared in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and Legislative Studies Quarterly. Her work has received national recognition, including the American Political Science Association’s E. E. Schattschneider Award for the best dissertation in American Politics in 1997, the APSA’s Richard F. Fenno Award for the best book on legislative politics in 2009, and the D. B. Hardeman Award presented by the Lyndon Baines Johnson Award for the best book on a congressional topic in 1999.

Dr. Lee recently discussed her latest book, “Beyond Ideology: Politics, Principles, and Partisanship in the U.S. Senate,” on C-SPAN’s BookTV.

She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Vanderbilt University in 1997. She was a Research Fellow at the Brookings Institution from 1997-98. From 1998-2003 she taught in the political science department at Case Western Reserve University. In 2002-2003, she worked on Capitol Hill as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow.

View Professor Lee’s CV

Jeffrey E. Cohen, Ph.D.
Professor of Political Science at Fordham University

Thursday October 4, 2012
Clark Hall, Room 309
4:30 – 6:00 p.m.
This forum is free and open to the public.

When an incumbent is running, presidential elections are primarily – normally – referenda on the incumbent’s performance. Knowing this, the logical incentive for the out-party is to try to ensure that the incumbent president fails. Some observers believe congressional Republicans and their allies outside Congress have followed this logic over the past four years.

Yet discussions of this pattern often treat it with surprise – as if partisanship in the past was not so extreme. Republicans would reply that the charge itself is extreme partisanship. Either way, there is a sense that partisan conflict has burst some bounds. If so, what does that tell us about what Presidents can accomplish? Would the answer be the same for a President Romney as for President Obama?

The Department of Political Science is very pleased to welcome one of the nation’s leading scholars of the Presidency to discuss one of the most basic issues about its future. There is good reason to believe the U.S. has a new party system. How can the Presidency fit into it, with what consequences?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJ8JpqwY_0g

About Our Guest

Jeffrey E. Cohen received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1979. After teaching at, among other institutions, the Universities of Alabama, Illinois, and Kansas, he joined the Fordham faculty in 1997. This June, he escaped from a term as Department Chair. Professor Cohen has published extensively in the major political science journals, including the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Politics. His books include Presidential Responsiveness and Public Policy (1997, University of Michigan Press), which won the 1998 Richard E. Neustadt Award from the Presidency Research Group of the American Political Science Association; The Presidency in an Era of 24 Hour News (2008, Princeton University Press); and Going Local: Presidential Leadership in the Post-Broadcast Age (2010, Cambridge University Press), which was awarded the Goldsmith Book Prize from the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Policy of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. His newest book is The President’s Legislative Policy Agenda, 1789-2002, to be published in October by Cambridge University Press. Professor Cohen earned his B.A. from CWRU in 1973.

Ezra F. Vogel, Ph.D.
Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus at Harvard University

Tuesday April 10, 2012
Mandel Center, Room 108
4:30 – 6:00 p.m.
This forum is free and open to the public.
This program is sponsored by the Asian Studies Program, the Baker-Nord Center
for the Humanities and the Political Science Department at Case Western Reserve University

Perhaps no one in the twentieth century had a greater long-term impact on world history than Deng Xiaoping. And no scholar of contemporary East Asian history and culture is better qualified than Ezra Vogel to disentangle the many contradictions embodied in the life and legacy of China’s boldest strategist.

Once described by Mao Zedong as a “needle inside a ball of cotton,” Deng was the pragmatic yet disciplined driving force behind China’s radical transformation in the late twentieth century. He confronted the damage wrought by the Cultural Revolution, dissolved Mao’s cult of personality, and loosened the economic and social policies that had stunted China’s growth. Obsessed with modernization and technology, Deng opened trade relations with the West, which lifted hundreds of millions of his countrymen out of poverty. Yet at the same time he answered to his authoritarian roots, most notably when he ordered the crackdown in June 1989 at Tiananmen Square. Deng’s youthful commitment to the Communist Party was cemented in Paris in the early 1920s, among a group of Chinese student-workers that also included Zhou Enlai. Deng returned home in 1927 to join the Chinese Revolution on the ground floor. In the fifty years of his tumultuous rise to power, he endured accusations, purges, and even exile before becoming China’s preeminent leader from 1978 to 1989 and again in 1992. When he reached the top, Deng saw an opportunity to creatively destroy much of the economic system he had helped build for five decades as a loyal follower of Mao—and he did not hesitate. (Source: Book description of Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China courtesy of Amazon.com)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wtqzEINxJ4

About Our Guest

Ezra F. Vogel is the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus at Harvard. After graduating from Ohio Wesleyan in 1950 and serving two years in the U.S. Army, he studied sociology in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard, receiving his Ph.D. in 1958. He then went to Japan for two years to study the Japanese language and conduct research interviews with middle-class families. In 1960-1961 he was assistant professor at Yale University and from 1961-1964 a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard, studying Chinese language and history. He remained at Harvard, becoming lecturer in 1964 and, in 1967, professor. He retired from teaching on June 30, 2000.

Vogel succeeded John Fairbank to become the second Director (1972-1977) of Harvard’s East Asian Research Center and Chairman of the Council for East Asian Studies (1977-1980). He was Director of the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at the Center for International Affairs (1980-1987) and, since 1987, Honorary Director. He was Chairman of the undergraduate concentration in East Asian Studies from its inception in 1972 until 1991. He was Director of the Fairbank Center (1995-1999) and the first Director of the Asia Center (1997-1999). Vogel was Chairman of the Harvard Committee to Welcome President Jiang Zemin (1998). He has also served as Co-director of the Asia Foundation Task Force on East Asian Policy Recommendations for the New Administration (2001).

Drawing on his original field work in Japan, he wrote Japan’s New Middle Class (1963). A book based on several years of interviewing and reading materials from China, Canton Under Communism (1969), won the Harvard University Press faculty book of the year award. The Japanese edition of his book Japan as Number One: Lessons for America (1979) is the all-time best-seller in Japan of non-fiction by a Western author. In Comeback (1988), he suggested things America might do to respond to the Japanese challenge. He spent eight months in 1987, at the invitation of the Guangdong Provincial Government, studying the economic and social progress of the province since it took the lead in pioneering economic reform in 1978. The results are reported in One Step Ahead in China: Guangdong Under Reform (1989). His Reischauer Lectures were published in The Four Little Dragons: The Spread of Industrialization in East Asia (1991). His most recent publication is Is Japan Still Number One? (2000). He has visited East Asia every summer since 1958 and has spent a total of over six years in Asia.

Vogel has received honorary degrees from Kwansei Gakuin (Japan), the Monterrey Institute, the Universities of Maryland, Massachusetts (Lowell), Wittenberg, Bowling Green, Albion, Ohio Wesleyan, Chinese University (Hong Kong) and Yamaguchi University (Japan). He received The Japan Foundation Prize in 1996 and the Japan Society Prize in 1998. He has lectured frequently in Asia, in both Chinese and Japanese.

From fall 1993 to fall 1995, Vogel took a two-year leave of absence from Harvard to serve as the National Intelligence Officer for East Asia at the National Intelligence Council in Washington. He directed the American Assembly on China in November 1996 and the Joint Chinese-American Assembly between China and the United States in 1998.

Julia C. Strauss, Ph.D.
Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political and International Studies
University of London School of Oriental and African Studies

Monday, March 26, 2012
Clark Hall, Room 309
4:30 – 6:00 p.m.
This forum is free and open to the public.

One aspect of the “Rise of China” that is causing anxiety among foreign policy specialists and other people looking for something to be anxious about involves China’s developing relations in what used to be called the third world. As part of China’s “rise,” its state and businesses have become increasingly involved in both commercial and development activities. There is a lot of speculation about whether China is challenging the existing norms of international economics and politics. Dr. Strauss co-edited a special issue of The China Quarterly about China and Africa, and she and colleagues will be publishing an issue about China and Latin America in March. Her talk will focus on how the Chinese think about their engagement in Latin America, and in particular differences in how Chinese actors are engaging with small countries like Peru, as compared to another “rising” state and economy, Brazil.

Dr. Strauss served as editor of The China Quarterly, the premier academic journal about China, from 2002 – 2011. She brings to her currrent work not only deep knowledge of China but close attention to how the relationship works from the other side, from Latin America.

This program is made possible by the generosity of Ms. Eloise Briskin and sponsored by the Center for Policy Studies at Case Western Reserve University.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opxDCXwr0Q8

About Our Guest

Julia C. Strauss is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political and International Studies at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). She was also the Editor of The China Quarterly from 2002 to 2011. Her research interests span both sides of the Taiwan Straits and are focused on state building and institution building, governance, the environment, and China-Africa relations. Her publications include the edited volumes China and Africa: Emerging Patterns in Globalization and Development (CUP 2009), The History of the People’s Republic of China (CUP, 2006), and the monograph Strong Institutions in Weak Polities: State Building in Republican China, 1927-1940 (Clarendon, 1998). Articles include “Forestry Reform and the Transformation of State Capacity in fin de siècle China” (Journal of Asian Studies, 68:4), and “Paternalist Terror: The Campaign to Suppress Counter revolutionaries and Regime Consolidation in the People’s Republic of China, 1950-53” (Comparative Studies in Society and History).

John Zaller, Ph.D.
Professor of Political Science at UCLA

Tuesday April 17, 2012
Clark Hall, Room 309
4:30 – 6:00 p.m.
This forum is free and open to the public.

Anyone who has watched the bitter competition between the Democrats and Republicans in Congress in recent years, or the fight to win the Republican nomination for President this year, might be wondering how to explain the current political party system in the United States. It looks like a period of deep ideological cleavages between the parties, and pretty strict enforcement of some form of ideological correctness at least in one of them. Yet for decades or even centuries scholars of politics have argued that ideological divisions were relatively weak in our elections and legislative process. What is happening, and what has happened?

This may be the central question for understanding the current state of American politics. So it will be a special pleasure to welcome to campus, on April 17, one of the leading and most original scholars of both parties and public opinion in the country, John Zaller.

Zaller’s book on The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (1992) is widely ranked with just a few other works, such as The American Voter, as a classic in the study of citizen attitudes. In The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform (2008), John and colleagues have made an argument about how party elites, including interest groups aligned closely with one or the other party, shape presidential nominations. Their argument has become one of the tools used by commentators seeking to handicap the current nomination process.

Now he is delving more deeply into the nature of political parties in the United States, both now and in the past. As in his other work, a central theme is the relationship between mass opinion and political leadership. And that has to involve where ideology fits in. Are we in an era where ideology is much more central to parties? Why, and with what consequences?

Scholars and the public have had many different views of this question. In one traditional view, they were gangs of entrepreneurs seeking to capture and divide the spoils of office. Broad principles were to be adapted and adopted only as useful. For many years political scientists who believed this view also criticized it. They argued that, instead, parties should be organized around clear principles so that voters would be given clear choices about the ideology that would govern them – an idea called “responsible party government.” A third view argued, in ways that might look more plausible now than in the past, that reducing American politics to a fight about principles between just two sides couldn’t possibly represent a huge country fairly, would leave many voters feeling unrepresented, and maximize conflict. From this view, truly partisan divisions were dangerous, and a politics based on interest groups would be both more representative and less dangerous.

The latter view assumes, however, that interest groups create cross-cutting cleavages: that peoples’ identities mean they agree with lots of other people on different things. What happens, however, if the interest groups become more ideological, and more closely linked to parties? What happens if voters are more easily mobilized on broader, ideological issues than narrower (“save the whales”) issues? More precisely, what happens when one party sees “save the whales” as an attack on its basic principles?

It is getting harder to argue that political parties are not so important, but not much easier to figure out what they do or how they do it. The central questions have to do with the roles of voters and public opinion, organized interests, and politicians. What motivates each, and what influence does each have? Nobody has contributed more than John Zaller has to our understanding of these questions. It will be very interesting to hear about his new work.

This program is sponsored by the Center for Policy Studies at Case Western Reserve University.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_P3TWMVUyo

About Our Guest

John Zaller is Professor of Political Science at UCLA. His first book, The American Ethos: Public Attitudes Towards Capitalism and Democracy (with Herbert McCloskey, 1984) explored the tensions in public opinion between the two most basic tenets of American ideology. In The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (1992) he explored how political messages reach the public and influence its thinking. The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform (with Marty Cohen, David Karol and Hans Noel, 2008), argues that, contrary to the common view that the party reforms of the 1970s gave the voters more power, the most consequential contests remain the candidates’ fights for prominent endorsements and the support of various interest groups and party leaders. Among his other projects is “A Theory of Media Politics,” a widely-cited paper and book in progress that describes how the conflicting interests of reporters, politicians and citizens shape the political news. Other recent projects use simulation models to explore incumbency advantages in elections to the U.S. House of Representatives and to determine the power of opinion surveys to identify the influence of media events on public sentiment.

Professor Zaller teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in American politics, public opinion and statistical methods. He earned his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. He served for eight years on the Board of Overseers of the biennial National Election Studies, and has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Alexander Thompson, Ph.D.
Associate Professor pf Political Science
Ohio State University

Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Clark Hall, Room 309
4:30 – 6:00 p.m.
This forum is free and open to the public.

A variety of political and legal institutions have been established over time to manage the issue of climate change at the global level, mostly centered on the UN. These institutions have varied in terms of the nature and depth of obligations they impose on states. The shallow and nonbinding Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992) was followed by the more legalized Kyoto Protocol, which in turn is being replaced by a more decentralized and flexible approach. Professor Thompson will describe these changes and offer an explanation for the design and evolution of climate institutions from the perspective of political and environmental effectiveness. He will also offer policy recommendations based on current problems in the regime and the political realities exposed by ongoing negotiations.

This program is made possible by the generosity of Ms. Eloise Briskin and sponsored by the Center for Policy Studies at Case Western Reserve University.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXJXNruGPQY

About Our Guest

Alexander Thompson’s research focuses on international relations, especially in the area of international institutions and cooperation. His book, Channels of Power: The UN Security Council and U.S. Statecraft in Iraq (Cornell University Press, 2009), asks why powerful states often conduct coercive foreign policies through international organizations. Professor Thompson provides an information-based explanation and assesses arguments looking at U.S. policy toward Iraq from 1990 to the current intervention and its aftermath. Channels of Power won the International Studies Association’s Chadwick F. Alger Prize for the best book on international organization and multilateralism and the Best Book Award from ISA-Midwest.

Much of Alexander Thompson’s research addresses issues of institutional delegation and design at the international level, with recent and ongoing projects on the design of the global climate regime, the politics of investment treaty ratification, the domestic politics of legalization in the WTO, the principal-agent dynamics of multilateral weapons inspections, determinants of how international organizations perform, and the enforcement of international law. Professor Thompson also writes and speaks on the question of unilateralism versus multilateralism in U.S. foreign policy.