Events

The warning signs of the 1930s feel alarmingly familiar today: nationalist rhetoric, revisionism, military rearmament, political polarization. In this book talk, historian and security expert Dr. Moritz Pöllath argues that these patterns function as an early warning system for the present: a new authoritarian axis — Russia, China, North Korea, Iran — is forming and exploiting a strategic power vacuum to impose a world order beyond freedom and democracy. 

Join us on October 1 for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Demos: How the People Ruled Athens, by Daniela Cammack, Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies (formerly Classics). Professor Cammack will be joined in conversation by James Porter, Distinguished Professor and Irving Stone Chair in Literature in the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley, and Kinch Hoekstra, Chancellor's Professor of Political Science and Law at UC Berkeley. Dylan Riley, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley, will moderate.

German atonement for the Holocaust has been widely hailed by the international community as a paragon of national reckoning, and over the last decade, African American intellectuals such as Ta-Nehisi Coates have explicitly invoked Germany as a useful model in their calls for Americans to confront the legacy of slavery and other forms of state-sanctioned racism. In this lecture, Rita Chin will trace the complicated, fraught 80-year process by which Germans have dealt with the Nazi past, focusing on developments and debates in the Federal Republic. She will consider the specific ways in which the German case is instructive for..

During the Qing period (1644–1912), late imperial China was in theory governed by approximately two thousand local administrators who were appointed for their mastery of the Confucian classics rather than for their administrative or legal expertise. How did these scholar-officials actually carry out the daily tasks of local governance, including judicial administration? Based on a forthcoming monograph, this talk analyzes the training and roles of the thousands of legal specialists who advised local officials behind the scenes and handled most of the judicial and other substantive administrative work on their behalf. Despite their important functions in local governance, these legal..

Professor Elizabeth R. Nugent will present part of a book she is finalizing on activism in exile. Dr. Nugent studies the politics and political psychology of authoritarianism and religion in the Middle East and is the author of After Repression: How Polarization Derails Democratic Transition, published by Princeton University Press (2020).

How do social norms and professional incentives affect policy discourse within the Washington foreign policy community? We conducted over 50 semi-structured interviews and a survey of nearly five-hundred American foreign policy and national security professionals about their views towards the People's Republic of China. Over one fifth of survey respondents noted instances of professional pressure to voice a more hawkish point of view towards China, and many feared being perceived as naive or compromised by their views on, ties to, and experiences in China. These pressures were particularly acute for foreign policy professionals that are traditionally marginalized from power–those who..

How have European countries coped with the challenge of industrial capitalism and the rise of superpowers? Through an analysis of European integration from 1945 to the present day, Laurent Warlouzet argues that the European response was to create both new institutions, in particular the European Union, and an original framework of governance for capitalism. Beyond the European case, he demonstrates that capitalism is not just a contest between free marketeers and their opponents, those in favour of welfare and environmental policies, because there is a third camp that defends protectionism and assertive defence policies. Hence, the governance of capitalism has..