Kamal Sadiq, University of California, Irvine

About the Seminar
At this seminar, Professor Kamal Sadiq will discuss his book Paper Citizens. Sadiq reveals that most of the world’s illegal immigrants are not migrating directly to the U.S., but rather to countries in the vast developing world. And when they arrive in countries like India and Malaysia – which are often governed by weak and erratic bureaucracies – they are able to obtain citizenship papers fairly easily. Sadiq introduces “documentary citizenship” to explain how paperwork – often falsely obtained – confers citizenship on illegal immigrants. Once immigrants obtain documents, it is a relatively simple matter for, say, an Afghan migrant with Pakistani papers to pass himself off as a Pakistani citizen both in Pakistan and abroad. Across the globe, there are literally tens of millions of such illegal immigrants who have assumed the guise of “citizens.”... Read more about A Paper Trail to Citizenship

This conversation about social innovations in government is moderated by Stephen Goldsmith and includes panel speakers Linda Gibbs, Deputy Mayor of NYC; Mitch Landrieu, Lt. Governor of Louisiana & Mayor-elect, New Orleans; Michael Lomax, Pres. & CEO, United Negro College Fund; Michelle Rhee, Chancellor, D.C. Public Schools.

Dr. Ronald Sanders, Office of the Director of National Intelligence

About the Seminar
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s Intelligence Community Civilian Joint Duty Program requires intelligence professionals to complete assignments outside their agency to achieve executive rank, with the goal to develop leaders that can break through the silos that prevented the intelligence community from “connecting the dots” prior to September 11th. The program won the Innovations in American Government Award in 2008.... Read more about Improving National Security Through Knowledge Sharing

Hank Johnston, San Diego State University

About the Seminar
In this seminar, Professor Johnston suggests that unobtrusive forms of protest and small-scale resistance commonly occur in repressive states. He will trace the various forms of anti-regime activity to suggest that they play an important role in the process of authoritarian withdrawal and democratic transition. Drawing on a wide range of cases, he will describe a bottom-up, popular approach to regime liberalization in which the recursive effects of small, isolated protest actions lay claim to public spaces and take advantage of elite divisions.... Read more about Small Talk, Unobtrusive Protest, and Authoritarian Withdrawal

Governing Local Forests in South Asia
Bina Agarwal, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi University, India

This event is co-sponsored by the Women in Public Policy Program, Harvard Kennedy School

About the Seminar
Gender and politics literature has long debated how women's proportional strength affects policy formulation within legislatures. Studies on gender and environmental governance have focused mainly on women’s limited participation in local institutions. Both bodies of work leave important aspects unexplored. The former neglects the in-between process – the impact of women’s numbers on their effective participation – such as attending and speaking up at meetings and holding office. The latter neglects to ask what impact would increasing women’s proportions have on participation and what proportions are effective. Rigorous empirical analysis is also scarce. Addressing these gaps, this seminar, based on primary data for community forestry institutions in India and Nepal, statistically tests if a group’s gender composition affects women’s effective participation, and if there are any critical mass effects.... Read more about Does Women’s Proportional Strength Affect Their Participation?

Margaret Anderson, University of California, Berkeley

About the Seminar
Can robust democratic forces develop within self-conflidently authoritarian regimes? The Germany that Bismarck created was legendarily a “hard place” for democrats: headed by an hereditary monarch, whose slogan was “the will of the king is the supreme law”; governed locally by a civil service with all the arrogance that birth and expertise bestow; and aided by an agrarian (“Junker”) aristocracy whose control of the rural population brooked no dissent. Analogous powers were claimed in the Saar and the Ruhr by industrialists who disposed of the votes along with the livelihoods of their workforce. And yet this same society produced political parties (including the largest socialist party in Europe) whose candidates, in democratic elections, regularly bested those of their conservative masters; who in parliament defeated legislation dear to the Crown and its paladins; who wrung concessions from the government and forced the Right to play the parliamentary game. Was it culture or institutions that accounts for the electoral successes of Wilhelmine Germany’s democratic forces? And did their success matter?

You can watch the seminar here.... Read more about How One Authoritarian State (Germany 1871-1914) Made the Transition to Democracy – Or Did It?