BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Center for Governance and Markets - ECPv6.15.11//NONSGML v1.0//EN
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:PUBLISH
X-WR-CALNAME:Center for Governance and Markets
X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://cgm.pitt.edu
X-WR-CALDESC:Events for Center for Governance and Markets
REFRESH-INTERVAL;VALUE=DURATION:PT1H
X-Robots-Tag:noindex
X-PUBLISHED-TTL:PT1H
BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
TZID:America/New_York
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:-0500
TZOFFSETTO:-0400
TZNAME:EDT
DTSTART:20210314T070000
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:-0400
TZOFFSETTO:-0500
TZNAME:EST
DTSTART:20211107T060000
END:STANDARD
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:-0500
TZOFFSETTO:-0400
TZNAME:EDT
DTSTART:20220313T070000
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:-0400
TZOFFSETTO:-0500
TZNAME:EST
DTSTART:20221106T060000
END:STANDARD
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:-0500
TZOFFSETTO:-0400
TZNAME:EDT
DTSTART:20230312T070000
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:-0400
TZOFFSETTO:-0500
TZNAME:EST
DTSTART:20231105T060000
END:STANDARD
END:VTIMEZONE
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20221010T080000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20221010T170000
DTSTAMP:20260523T092106
CREATED:20251029T141705Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20251029T141722Z
UID:1465-1665388800-1665421200@cgm.pitt.edu
SUMMARY:Perspectives on Ukraine: Tymofiy Mylovanov Shares His Thoughts with GSPIA
DESCRIPTION:The Center for Governance and Markets hosted Tymofiy Mylovanov\, Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Pittsburgh and the President of Kyiv School of Economics (KSE)\, last Wednesday for a discussion about his first-hand experiences of the war in Ukraine and prospects for peace. Mylovanov\, who is also a CGM affiliate\, spoke about recent developments in the conflict and the humanitarian response to the war. \nMylovanov gave context to Russia’s recent setbacks in the war and advances made by Ukrainian forces into formerly Russian-held territory in eastern Ukraine. The timing of the offensive was intentional on the part of the Ukrainian government\, Mylovanov said\, and designed to capture media coverage. This is because in a democratic government\, it is essential that the public be aware and supportive of actions made by policymakers. According to Mylovanov\, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy understood the importance of showing the world that Ukrainian forces have the ability to “embarrass the Russian military.” \nThe discussion also covered Russian President Vladimir Putin’s response to these events\, particularly his allusions to the potential use of nuclear weapons. Mylovanov said that while authoritarian regimes like Putin’s\, free of concerns related to elections or public perception\, have an easier time than democracies in designing and executing long-term strategies\, they also struggle to acknowledge and recover from mistakes. \nFrom his perspective\, even the mention of nuclear weapons is a Cold War strategy out of place in 21st-century policymaking\, even in the context of war. He pointed out that whenever the Russian military suffers losses\, Putin raises the specter of nuclear weapons to project a powerful image of Russian forces in international media and distract from military failures. However\, if Putin does use nuclear weapons in Ukraine\, Mylovanov said\, “it will be the end of Russia.” \nAn expert in game theory\, Mylovanov explained the different motivations and goals of key actors in the ongoing conflict. \n“Those who are strongly committed win\, usually. That’s what we know from game theory\,” he said. “We know two things: those who are more patient win\, and those who are truly committed [win]. So in that sense you can say that Putin is more patient than the U.S.\, but Ukrainians are more committed to survival than Russians.” \nWar crimes and human rights violations against Ukrainian civilians were also discussed. Mylovanov emphasized that events in Ukraine are the result of a decision-making system employing thousands of people; not only Putin is engaged in what he referred to as a “production of death” comparable to Nazi Germany during the second World War. He said that the ongoing conflict represents a failure to learn from history \n“It’s not specific to geography or culture. It’s a human disease\,” Mylovanov said. “I thought we learned from the previous century to build things in such a way to break the political-security framework so these things don’t repeat themselves. But apparently we did not…I don’t think it’s [up to] Ukraine or the U.S. to stop it. It’s not about stopping Putin or stopping Russians. It takes the entire humanity to stop this disease somehow. And we really have to rethink in this century: What is wrong with humans that we are destroying ourselves?”
URL:https://cgm.pitt.edu/event/perspectives-on-ukraine-tymofiy-mylovanov-shares-his-thoughts-with-gspia/
LOCATION:PA
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cgm.pitt.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/ukraine.png
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20221013T080000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20221013T170000
DTSTAMP:20260523T092106
CREATED:20251029T141332Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20251113T193459Z
UID:1461-1665648000-1665680400@cgm.pitt.edu
SUMMARY:Dysfunctional Centralization and Growing Fragility under Taliban Rule
DESCRIPTION:The Center for Governance and markets hosted “Dysfunctional Centralization and Growing Fragility under Taliban Rule” on October 12 as part of the center’s ongoing “Voices from Afghanistan” seminar series. The event featured Sayed Madadi\, who currently serves as a Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy and a resident scholar with the Middle East Institute’s Afghanistan and Pakistan Studies program. Madadi formerly worked for the Afghanistan State Ministry for Peace as Director of Foreign Relations and participated in Afghanistan Peace Negotiations with the Taliban in Doha. \nSince the collapse of the Afghan government and takeover of the country by the Taliban in August 2021\, the country has descended further into political instability\, human rights violations\, and extreme poverty. Madadi argues that a key contributing factor to the crisis is a dysfunctional structure of governance centered around Kabul that became even more paralyzed and unresponsive under Taliban control. \n“The Taliban’s return to power was a huge factor in how we’re seeing the country struggling with all of these political and economic challenges\, but the root cause of these challenges were there before\,” Madadi said. “And one of those factors — if not the only or the biggest one\, one of the key ones — was the centralization of political power and economic planning in Kabul.” \nPolitical and economic power in Afghanistan is heavily concentrated in Kabul\, Madadi explained\, to the detriment of the rest of the country. He said that once Kabul became a center of activity in Afghanistan in the 1880s\, wealthy Afghans began to migrate to Kabul to be near political and economic opportunities. Additionally\, Afghans seeking to increase their wealth left their home provinces and moved to Kabul. \n“Over time\, basically\, Kabul grew at the expense of the rest of the country\,” said Madadi. “Human resources came to Kabul. The best and brightest of the country had to come to Kabul for education\, for job opportunities\, and most of them never went back to their provinces.” \nKabul eventually became the center of all economic and political activity in Afghanistan and the seat of the Afghan government. Other provinces paid taxes to Kabul\, where corrupt economic and political structures had little commitment or political will to invest that money back into the well-being and infrastructure of those provinces. This created a system where\, if a province generated more revenue\, they made themselves poorer. \nThis intense centralization of funds and resources\, in addition to the problems it created in the governance of Afghanistan before 2021\, contributed massively to the instantaneous collapse of the country to the Taliban when Kabul fell. \n“In some sense\, there was no economy outside of Kabul to speak about. Everything outside of Kabul was an extension of the economic sphere we had created in Kabul\,” Madadi said. “So when Kabul collapsed\, it was almost like you just untied the very top knot of a picnic tent. So everything else will fall apart.” \nMadadi also discussed the misuse of humanitarian aid in Afghanistan and how the international community must rethink the fundamental framework of how aid is provided in countries like Afghanistan. The question neglected for years regarding aid and restructuring in Afghanistan\, Madadi explained\, was whether or not funds “created capacity for sustainable value generation in the long term\, or does it only feed people for today or the next day?” The aid currently being provided\, he said\, is the latter. The political crisis is to blame for the humanitarian crisis\, according to Madadi. The Taliban regime is isolated from the world\, and without international trade\, the economy of Afghanistan cannot function. This is the cause of poverty and hunger. \nIn fact\, the means of aid provision actually empowers the regime\, Madadi said\, by allowing it to do two things: Use aid money to pay its own soldiers while leveraging aid for political reasons within the country (for example\, withholding funds from provinces it deems as unfriendly to Taliban rule or provinces populated by ethnic minorities)\, and allow the Taliban to keep all of the funds it raises to reinforce its own grip on power while providing no governance or public services using its own money. \nInternational aid and state-building as usual will not be effective in Afghanistan. In addition to funds being misused by the regime\, the economic structure is still overly centralized in Kabul\, leaving outer provinces at a distinct disadvantage. That\, in Madadi’s opinion\, is why decentralization is essential. \n“I think state building efforts in Afghanistan have usually followed at least three objectives. The first and foremost is stability\, to make sure they keep this country together and that European definition of monopolizing the use of force. The other objective has been to create a national identity where everybody sees himself or herself in that identity as a collective. And the third one\, which has been much more prominent since 2001\, is to strengthen democratic principles and democratic institutions\,” Madadi said. “My thinking is that all of those objectives would be served at best if you have a decentralized political structure. It allows people public participation across the country in a much more meaningful way. It makes the country much more stable because the root causes of the conflict is the division of political power. The conflict that you see in Afghanistan is mainly an ethnic conflict among different communities who cannot agree on how to divide power.” \nMadadi acknowledged that this sort of ethnic infighting is one reason that some are reluctant to advocate for the decentralization of Afghanistan. Common critiques are that the country is too fragmented and requires the kind of centralization seen in Kabul\, that Afghanistan does not have the money or resources to restructure\, and that now is simply not the proper time. \n“None of the countries you see that are decentralized have decentralized during their very shiny moments in history. If everything is perfectly fine\, if a centralized system is fully functional and effective\, there is no reason to decentralize. Decentralization comes as a solution at a time of crisis\,” Madadi explained. “I think that a lot of the issues that critics of decentralization suggest as obstacles or reasons that will incentivize us not decentralize are actually the reasons for decentralization. Decentralization is not a factor that will divide the country\, it’s something that will bring the country [together].”
URL:https://cgm.pitt.edu/event/dysfunctional-centralization-and-growing-fragility-under-taliban-rule/
LOCATION:PA
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cgm.pitt.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/taliban-.png
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20221018T130000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20221018T143000
DTSTAMP:20260523T092106
CREATED:20251023T212736Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20251025T002958Z
UID:1348-1666098000-1666103400@cgm.pitt.edu
SUMMARY:The Art and Science of Election Polling
DESCRIPTION:G. Elliott Morris is a staff data journalist and US correspondent for The Economist. He writes about American politics\, public opinion polling\, demographics\, and elections. He is responsible for many of the paper’s election forecasting models\, including the 2020 US presidential election forecast and polling models for several European countries. He writes for The Economist‘s weekly “Checks and Balance” newsletter on US politics. He is proficient in machine learning models\, Bayesian statistics\, and the various tools in the standard social science toolkit. \nMichael Colaresi is the William S. Dietrich II Chair of Political Science and the research and academic director of Pitt Cyber\, as well as the director of the Pitt Disinformation Lab. His work leverages the accelerating availability of computational tools\, including machine learning and Bayesian approaches\, along with unstructured information\, such as from digitized text\, to build and improve models of information technology in democracies\, national security secrecy and oversight\,  international and intrastate violence\, and changes in human rights over time. He also develops computational and visual tools that enable domain specialists to work alongside computer scientists to improve specific applications. In 2022-23\, he is a fellow of the Stability and Change program at the Center for Advanced Studies in Oslo\, Norway. He was the co-editor of the journal International Interactions from 2014-2019 and was co-recipient of the Best Visualization Award from the Journal of Peace Research in 2017 and the Gosnell Prize for Excellence in Political Methodology from the Methodology section of the American Political Science Association in 2006. His book Democracy Declassified was shortlisted for the 2015 Conflict Research Society Book Prize. He has been PI or co-PI on four NSF grants and is a research affiliate for the ERC-funded Violence Early Warning Project at the University of Uppsala and the Peace Research Institute Oslo. At the University of Pittsburgh he co-founded the new major in Computational Social Science and in his previous position at Michigan State University\, he founded and directed the Social Science Data Analytics initiative.
URL:https://cgm.pitt.edu/event/the-art-and-science-of-election-polling/
LOCATION:William Pitt Union\, 3959 Fifth Ave\, Pittsburgh\, PA\, 15260\, United States
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cgm.pitt.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/polls.png
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20221026T133000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20221026T143000
DTSTAMP:20260523T092106
CREATED:20251113T192859Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20251113T192951Z
UID:1758-1666791000-1666794600@cgm.pitt.edu
SUMMARY:Afghanistan One Year Later: Human Rights and Civil Society under Taliban Rule
DESCRIPTION:A panel with Khalid Ramizy\, Hasina Jalal\, and Omar Sadr.
URL:https://cgm.pitt.edu/event/afghanistan-one-year-later-human-rights-and-civil-society-under-taliban-rule/
LOCATION:PA
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cgm.pitt.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/one-year-v2.png
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20221027T150000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20221027T170000
DTSTAMP:20260523T092106
CREATED:20251025T182225Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20251111T235503Z
UID:1356-1666882800-1666890000@cgm.pitt.edu
SUMMARY:Modeling the Caselaw Access Project
DESCRIPTION:Felix Chang and Erin McCabe\, University of Cincinnati \nFelix B. Chang serves as the Associate Dean for Faculty and Research at the University of Cincinnati College of Law. He is a Professor of Law\, Co-Director of the Corporate Law Center\, and Director of the Corporate Law Concentration. Professor Chang’s writings span broad aspects of markets\, inheritance\, and inequality. In antitrust and financial regulation\, his prior scholarship examined the balance between competition and systemic risk in the derivatives markets. Along with an interdisciplinary team\, he is currently developing new tools for antitrust research through topic modeling.  In the areas of wealth and racial inequality\, Professor Chang has written on\, as well as the parallels between Roma inclusion and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Currently\, he is working on how inheritance laws affect inequality in China and the United States. \nErin McCabe is Digital Scholarship Library Fellow at the University of Cincinnati. She joined the Digital Scholarship Center as the Digital Scholarship Library Fellow (one of several Mellon grant-funded positions supporting research on machine learning and data visualization) in 2018. She now works on several research teams across disciplines and acts as liaison between academic and technology units. She previously worked on data analysis projects with academic publishers at JSTOR and in reference services at the Brooklyn branch of Long Island University. \nWatch the seminar here.
URL:https://cgm.pitt.edu/event/modeling-the-caselaw-access-project/
LOCATION:PA
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cgm.pitt.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Screenshot-2025-10-25-at-2.21.17-PM-1.png
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR