If America frames its response to Russia and China as one of “civilizational struggle,” Diamond says, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping will only get stronger. Listen and read here. 

The Korea Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center is pleased to welcome Robert R. King and Victor Cha as Koret fellows in Korean studies during the 2019-20 academic year. Supported by the Koret Foundation, the Koret Fellowship brings leading professionals to Stanford to conduct research on contemporary Korean affairs with the broad aim of strengthening ties between the United States and Korea.​

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Robert R. King will join the Korea Program as Koret Fellow during the fall quarter of 2019. King served as special envoy for North Korean human rights Issues, an ambassadorial ranked position at the Department of State (2009-2017). The role was established by Congress in the North Korea Human Rights Act with a mandate to “coordinate and promote efforts to improve respect for the fundamental human rights of the people of North Korea.” Since leaving the Department of State, Ambassador King has been senior advisor to the Korea chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a senior fellow at the Korea Economic Institute (KEI), and a board member of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK).

Earlier, Ambassador King served for 25 years (1983-2008) on Capitol Hill as chief of staff to Congressman Tom Lantos (D-California), and as staff director and minority staff director of the House Foreign Affairs Committee (2001-2008). King received a Ph.D. in International Relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University and a B.A. from Brigham Young University.

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Victor Cha, professor of government and international affairs at Georgetown University, will join the Korea Program as the Koret Fellow through the winter quarter of 2020. He is the author of five books, including The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future (Haper Collins, 2012) and Powerplay: Origins of the American Alliance System in Asia (Princeton University Press, 2016). He holds Georgetown's Dean's Award for teaching for 2010, the Distinguished Research Award for 2011, and a Distinguished Principal Investigator Award for 2016.

Professor Cha left the White House in 2007 after serving since 2004 as Director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council, where he was responsible for Japan, the Korean peninsula, Australia/New Zealand, and Pacific Island affairs. He serves as Senior Advisor at CSIS, and is a non-resident Fellow in Human Freedom at the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas, Texas. He received a Ph.D. from Columbia University, M.A. from the University of Oxford, and MIA and B.A. from Columbia University.

Larry Diamond discusses the Chinese Communist Party’s range of influence and interference activities that target the public, civic, and social institutions of democracies, including subnational governments, universities, think tanks, media, corporations, and ethnic Chinese communities. Listen here.

Did you know MIP has a joint degree program with Stanford Law? Find out why our graduate student, Julia Neusner, decided to add on the MIP program to her studies on our FSI blog. #MIPFeatureFriday

Marcella Alsan and Marianne Wanamaker are recipients of this year’s prestigious Arrow Award from the International Health Economics Association for research that shows the health of African-American men was adversely impacted by the Tuskegee syphilis study of the early 20th century.

The annual award recognizes excellence in the field of health economics and is named after the late Kenneth J. Arrow, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and mathematician. He was a Stanford Health Policy fellow and senior fellow by courtesy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). He was also a senior fellow, emeritus, at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR).

The IHEA awarded the 27th annual Arrow Award to Alsan, a core faculty member at Stanford Health Policy, a senior fellow at FSI and SIEPR, and co-author Wanamaker of the University of Tennessee for their paper, “Tuskegee and the Health of Black Men” published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

The infamous Tuskegee study began in 1932 when the U.S. Public Health Service began following approximately 600 African-American men, some of whom had syphilis, for the stated purpose of understanding the natural history of the disease. The government willingly withheld treatment even after penicillin became an established magic bullet for treating the illness. 

The medical doctors and staff of the CDC followed the men for four decades, until ultimately the study was halted in 1972 when it was brought to the attention of the media by law student Peter Buxtun.

As noted in this story about the research, Alsan and Wanamaker found that the public disclosure of the study in 1972 was associated with an increase in medical mistrust and mortality among African-American men in the immediate aftermath of the revelation.

“The award is an immense honor for both Marianne and me. First, it sheds light on the importance of history for understanding health disparities. Second, it reaffirms the “expected behavior of the physician” that Professor Arrow eloquently described in his seminal 1963 paper on the distinctive features of the market for medical care and the externalities associated with deviating from those expectations.”

African-American men today have the worst health outcomes of all major ethnic, racial and demographic groups in the United States. Life expectancy for black men at age 45 is three years less than their white male peers, and five years less than for black women.

When their working paper was first published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, it became part of the national discussion about the lasting impact of the Tuskegee study.

“The story that Alsan and Wanamaker uncovered is even deeper than the direct effects of the Tuskegee Study,” wrote Vann R. Newkirk II in The Atlantic. “Their research helps validate the anecdotal experiences of physicians, historians, and public health workers in black communities and gives new power to them.”