2014-15 Events
08 July 2015 at 19:00
Wednesday, July 8, 2015, 7:00 pm, Bldg. 320, Room 105, 450 Serra Mall “The Battle of Algiers” (1966) by Gillo Pontecorvo (French, Arabic, English) Moderator: Dan Edelstein Sponsored by the France-Stanford Center/Mediterranean Studies Forum In the 1950s, fear and violence escalate as the people of Algiers fight for independence from the French government. This screening is a part of the SGS Summer Film Festival (more).
14 May 2015 at 17:00
May 15 (Fri) - 9:45am - 6:00pm Levinthal Hall, Stanford Humanities Center 424 Santa Teresa Street, Stanford University An international conference organized by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at Stanford University. Free and open to the public Co-sponsored by Stanford Global Studies, The Europe Center, The Mediterranean Studies Forum, The Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, the Department of History, Film and Media Studies Program in the Department of Art & Art History, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and Stanford Humanities Center, with funding from the US Department of Education Title VI National Resource Centers program.
06 May 2015 at 13:30
May 6, 2015, 1:45 pm – 5:30 pm, Venue: TBD, Stanford Humanities Center (424 Santa Teresa Street) Arab Excellence: Inspiring Role Models to Empower the Youth Featuring: Dr. Hassanein: Successful Entrepreneur, mentor and venture capitalist Dr. Abraham: Co-founder and CEO of comScore Dr. Boumehdi: Lecturer at Stanford University and Member of the Arab Excellence Team Said Aouita: Five World Olympic Records Omar Tawakol: CEO of BluKai Hamza Chraibi: President and Founder of Arab Excellence [Co-sponsored by Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, Stanford Humanities Center, the Mediterranean Studies Forum, and the Language Center]
21 April 2015 at 12:00
April 21, 2015, 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM, Okimoto Conference Room, 3rd Floor East Wing, Encina Hall (616 Serra Street) Ghazi Ben Ahmed: The Tunisian Transition and The Challenge of Youth Alienation Social and economic grievances of Tunisian youth played a major role in igniting the uprising in Tunisia, and more generally, the so-called Arab Spring. Despite a successful political transition in the country, progress on addressing youth grievances has been slow in light of deteriorating living conditions, rampant corruption, and rising unemployment. These realities continue to pose a serious challenge to the prospects of building a sustainable democracy in Tunisia. Based on data gathered from meetings with a diverse group of 500 young Tunisians, this talk will shed light on youth’s perceived and actual exclusion from social, economic, and political opportunities. In doing so it will provide a critical assessment of the underlying causes of youth alienation in the country and prospects for greater political, social and economic inclusion.
15 April 2015 at 15:00
April 15, 2015, 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm, Encina Hall West Room 208 Scott Kilner "A Career in U.S. Foreign Policy: Reflections From a Diplomat on Western Europe and Turkey" Scott Kilner will discuss his 32 years of service in the U.S. State Department as a career diplomat, and his involvement in the making of the U.S Foreign policy in Washington D.C., Western Europe, Turkey, and Afghanistan. [Co-sponsored by the Department of International Relations, International Policy Studies]
02 April 2015 at 12:00
April 2, 2015, 12: 00 pm Bechtel Conference Center, Main Hall (616 Serra Street) From Factual to Counter-factual God: A Dialogue Between Slavoj Žižek and Jean-Pierre Dupuy Free and open to the public. RSVP requested. More [Co-sponsored by the Center for Russian East European and Eurasian Studies, and the Center for South Asia]
05 March 2015 at 15:15
March 5, 2015 3:15 pm, Encina Hall West, Room 208 This lecture aims to take the participants on a journey along the intricate web of Turkish-American relations. It critically examines the process, during which the relations evolved from those of strangers into an occasionally troubled, yet resilient alliance. Through the extensive use of Turkish, American and British archival documents and numerous private paper and manuscript collections, Turkish-American relations from 1800 to 1952, starting with the earliest contacts and ending with the institutionalization of the alliance after Turkey’s entry into NATO, will be analyzed. The purpose of the lecture is to provide a better understanding of the significant issues pertaining to Turkish-American relations such as the impact of international developments on foreign policy decisions, the role of key figures and organizations in shaping the relations, the interaction of political, economic, cultural and military factors in policy formation and the importance of mutual perceptions in shaping actual relations. The analysis also situates Turkish-American relations in the larger context of diplomatic history, through an evaluation of how the United States’ relations with Turkey fit into the general framework of American foreign policy and also through an examination of the conduct and changing priorities of Turkish foreign policy in this era.
03 March 2015 at 12:00
The Crimean crisis and developments in Ukraine has once again brought the shores of the Black Sea and debates about a resurgent Russia's flexing its muscle into the limelight. In this extremely volatile political context, this public lecture aims to focus on the changing dynamics of Turkish-Russian relations, as well as the energy politics of Eurasia. The current global political economy is characterized by the growing economic interaction of BRICS and near BRICS economies, with emerging powers increasingly exercising greater influence in their neighbouring regions. The growing ties between Turkey and Russia over the past two decades will be critically analyzed in terms of opportunities for cooperation and challenges to the deepening of the strategic partnership. Moreover, the lecture also aims to examine the intricate dynamics of Eurasian energy politics with its broader implications concerning energy security.
26 February 2015 at 12:00
February 26, 2015, 12:00-1:30 pm, Encina Hall Ground Floor Conference Room E008 Paul Amar (University of California, Santa Barbara) "Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism Paul Amar will discuss his book The Security Archipelago, winner of the 2014 Charles Taylor Book Award of the American Political Science Association. The book provides an alternative historical and theoretical framing of the refashioning of free-market states and the rise of humanitarian security regimes in the Global South by examining the pivotal, trendsetting cases of Brazil and Egypt. Addressing gaps in the study of neoliberalism and biopolitics, Amar describes how coercive security operations and cultural rescue campaigns confronting waves of resistance have appropriated progressive, antimarket discourses around morality, sexuality, and labor. Homing in on Cairo and Rio de Janeiro, Amar reveals the innovative resistances and unexpected alliances that have coalesced in new polities emerging from the Arab Spring and South America's Pink Tide. These have generated a shared modern governance model that he terms the "human-security state."
20 February 2015 at 14:00
February 20, 2015, 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm, Encina Central CISAC Central Conference Room Thomas de Waal (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) "Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide" Thomas de Waal is a senior associate in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington D.C. He is a writer and analyst on the Caucasus, Russia and the Black Sea region and the author, most recently, of Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide (2015). He is also the author of The Caucasus: An Introduction (2010) and of Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War (2003, 2013), the authoritative book on the Nagorny Karabakh conflict, which has been translated into Armenian, Azeri, Russian and Turkish. In the 1990s de Waal worked as a newspaper journalist in Moscow, specializing in Russian politics and events in Chechnya. With Carlotta Gall, he wrote Chechnya, A Small Victorious War, (1997). De Waal has also worked as a radio journalist for the BBC and for the NGOs, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting and Conciliation Resources. He studied Russia and Modern Greek at Oxford University.
19 February 2015 at 19:00
February 19, 2015, 7:00 pm, Bechtel Conference Center (616 Serra Street) Join the Spanish Conductor and multi-instrumentalist for a free lecture and demonstration of Turkish and Iberian musical traditions with musicians Hakan Gungor and Yurdal Tokcan
11 February 2015 at 16:00
Ana Gomez-Bravo (University of Washington) "Jewish/Converso Food and Racial Profiling in Fifteenth Century Spain"
04 February 2015 at 12:00
February 4, 2015 12:oo pm - 1:15pm, Building 260, Room 216 Zrinka Stahuljak (University of California, Los Angeles) "The Aesthetics of Translation: Approaching the Mediterranean from the Burgundian-Flemish Perspective”
03 November 2014 at 12:15
The Mevleviye, a Sufi order with a tradition going back to the thirteenth-century mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi, was an intellectual and spiritual centre of attraction to (mostly, male) members of the Muslim Ottoman elite; even some Ottoman rulers were affiliated with it. Moreover, the field of activity the Mevleviye covered was more or less congruent with the Ottoman Empire; while it was well represented in all big and quite a number of smaller urban centres of the Ottoman realm it did not reach out to Central Asia or the Indo-Iranian world. Thus, the Mevlevis constituted a network of actors that was ingrained in the structure of the Ottoman polity. In recent years, a lively debate on the character of the Ottoman Empire has been going on among historians of the early modern era (the discussion continues also with regard to the time of reforms and modernity, but is of secondary importance for this presentation). The question of how the Ottomans managed to administer territories of a remarkable geographical, linguistic, religious, ethnic and socio-political diversity has been in the foreground of this discussion. A collective biography of Mevlevi poets, the Tezkire-i Șuara-yı Mevleviye by Esrar Dede, compiled at the end of the eighteenth century in the Mevlevi convent of Galata just outside the Ottoman capital, allows to look into some of the details that made this network function as a bearer of elite “Ottomanness” and as an integrating force in different settings. Looking at the “careers” of 18th century Mevlevi poets, at the character of their work and the network of convents helps to understand, how this dervish order was one important of quite a number of structures that produced a cultural, social and even political sphere that helped to hold up the imperial framework.
21 October 2014 at 12:15
Students of liberal democracy have long pointed to its many paradoxes. Individual rights are a necessary if not sufficient condition of liberal democracies. Yet they remain in tension with the dictates of electoral majorities in liberal democracies. In this presentation, I shall focus, in the Turkish context, on the inherent tension between liberalism that priorities individual rights and democracy that is based on popular sovereignty. The Justice and Development Party came to power in 2002 with 34% of the vote and a promise of democracy. The party raised its electoral support to 47% in the 2007 and to almost 50% in the 2011 elections. I will first summarize how JDP contributed to the democratization process in the country and then examine and analyze its illiberal turn since 2007. As JDP’s popular support increased, its democratic practices waned. The party restricted civil liberties, controlled the media and undermined separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary. I shall argue that the legitimacy popular support gives to executive office can be instrumental in undermining an effective democracy.
14 October 2014 at 12:15
Yeşim Arat (2014-15 FSI-SHC International Visiting Scholar) and Zilka Spahić-Šiljak (CREEES Visiting Scholar) will discuss political change and women in the context of contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina and Turkey.
02 October 2014 at 12:15
The Republican People's Party (CHP) is Turkey's oldest political party, which under Kemal Ataturk, established the foundations of the modern republic. Since transition into competitive party politics during the 1950s, the CHP has failed to consistently convince voters that the party 'represents' the people's interests. This is particularly the case since the ascendency of Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) to high office in 2002. The CHP stands accused of projecting an exclusionary and elitist program, taking into account mostly the interests of Turkey's secular and educated elite. Ciddi in his talk will try to explore the reasons behind the CHP's failure to build a larger electoral alliance, representative of broader section of Turkish voters; the implications of a seemingly ineffective political opposition party, and the possible longer term effects on Turkey's democratization process.
