Please note venue changed to Oksenberg Conference Room

The horror of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has become an inescapable part of childhood in Japan. For Toshihiro Higuchi – a CISAC fellow who this last academic year focused on the political risks and fallout of nuclear weapons – it started with comic books and pencil sales for victims of the American bombs.

“For me, like every kid in Japan, the discourse about Hiroshima and Nagasaki was always familiar – from reading graphic books about the hell-like aftermath to joining a donation drive at school for victim relief,” said Higuchi, a historian and postdoctoral fellow at CISAC. “I remember that I was fascinated by the sheer power of nuclear weapons, and how that power overshadows everything else about war and conflict.”

That fascination with the political and social fallout of nuclear weapons and the complexities of nuclear energy is what drives the six nuclear fellows at the Center for International Security and Cooperation. The fellows – funded by grants from the Stanton Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation – spend their time at Stanford conducting research to build public engagement and shape government policy.

“I have great respect for scientists who can apply their knowledge not just to advance their field, but to use their skills to more directly improve policy,” said Robert Forrest, a physicist examining the role of nuclear reactors driven by particle accelerators. “In some small way, I hope to eventually be one of them. Nuclear issues present not only a fascinating and profound set of problems, but I feel a sort of responsibility toward them as a physicist.”

Seminars, mentorships with Stanford scholars and some of the world’s thought-leaders on nuclear science and policy, as well as annual visits to national laboratories, military bases and security conferences enhance the decades-old CISAC nuclear fellowship program.

“I got properly interested in nuclear weapons on a CISAC trip to the Nevada Test Site,” said John Downer, a Stanton postdoctoral fellow who focuses on the risks of nuclear power. “It’s one thing to read about atomic bombs; it’s another to stand on the edge of a giant crater in the desert.”

Lynn Eden, CISAC’s associate director for research, recently led the center’s postdoctoral fellows to the two-day Strategic Command Deterrence Symposium in La Vista, Neb., in which top military brass, academics and policymakers gathered to discuss nuclear deterrence in the emerging international security environment.

“Panelists had very different ideas about the role of nuclear weapons now and in the future,” said Eden, author of the groundbreaking book, Whole World on Fire, which explores how the U.S. government has underestimated the potential damage of nuclear detonations. “I have to say, the Shultz, Perry, Kissinger, Nunn vision of a world without nuclear weapons was not at the top of the agenda.”

Eden was referring to the watershed editorial in the Wall Street Journal co-authored by the four Cold War veterans, who are now advocating for a vision of a world free of nuclear weapons. The heft of their credentials and the passion behind their argument enabled President Barack Obama to call for the same, and be honored with a Nobel.

Eden said many of Strategic Command’s responsibilities regarding nuclear war planning have not changed under the Obama administration, but the thinking of their top officers has. U.S. Air Force Gen. Robert Kehler, the commander of Strategic Command, met privately with the CISAC fellows. “None of our questions surprised him, and his answers were extremely thoughtful,” she said. 

The March 11, 2011, earthquake in Japan and subsequent tsunami and nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant gave the fellows rich, real-world lessons about the human and environmental costs of nuclear energy gone wrong. The worst nuclear disaster since the Chernobyl meltdown of 1986 galvanized Stanford scholars across the campus to study the cause and effects of the Japanese tragedy.  

“As someone who is interested in technological risk, I think there is no technological sphere where the stakes are higher and the knowledge more political than in nuclear power – except maybe in nuclear weapons,” Downer said. “The way formal reports and journalistic accounts construe nuclear disasters and radioactive fallout is often terrifyingly misleading. I think I can contribute something by helping restructure debates about nuclear risks.”

In keeping with CISAC’s mission, the fellows are encouraged to engage in pubic debate by drawing out the policy relevance of an issue. They publish in scholarly journals and write academic papers, as well as blog and submit op-eds and editorials to online sites.  Forrest, for example, had a commentary on Huffington Post that urged Congress to maintain federal funding for scientific research and development.

Benoît Pelopidas, a postdoctoral nuclear fellow from France, ran a Friday evening film series this last academic year, highlighting such traditional films as the Kurosawa classic “I Live in Fear” – about a Japanese man whose fear of another nuclear bomb drives him to insanity – to the recent South African science fiction thrilled, “District 9,” which explores strands of xenophobia and social segregation behind national security.

“At Stanford, I found a real interdisciplinary community interested in nuclear issues and unexpected access to policymakers,” Pelopidas said, including former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz and Ambassador James Goodby, senior fellows at CISAC’s neighboring Hoover Institution who called on him to write a paper about the future of nuclear deterrence. “This helped me appreciate the value of interdisciplinary research in the nuclear discourse – to create opportunities for change.”

What’s next for the six fellows:

• Edward Blandford: University of New Mexico, assistant professor of nuclear engineering in the Department of Chemical and Nuclear Engineering
• Alexandre Debs: Yale University, assistant professor of political science
• John Downer: University of Bristol, U.K., assistant professor of risk and resilience in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies
• Robert Forrest: Continues his research at CISAC into the role of particle accelerators in a nuclear-powered future
• Toshihiro Higuchi: University of Wisconsin-Madison, an ACLS/Mellon Foundation postdoctoral fellow in the Department of the History of Science
• Benoît Pelopidas: University of Bristol, U.K., assistant professor of international relations at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies

Josef Joffe, a senior fellow at FSI and the Hoover Institution and the editor-publisher of Germany's Die Zeit, reviews Jonathan Fenby's  The General: Charles de Gaulle and the France He Saved in The New York Times Book Review Sunday Aug. 19. Fenby, says Joffe, knows how to turn historical breath and depth "into enthrallment " and proceeds to prove his point.

Not just a biography of Charles de Gaulle, the book tells the story of the 20th century giant "who captivated the public's imagination while still alive" and also "traces the story of a great nation that refused to come to terms with the loss of the strategic preeminence it had once enjoyed."

"As France hunkered down behind the Maginot line after World War I, de Gaulle preached the armored offense Hitler's panzer armies would use with devastating efficiency," Joffe says. When Hitler subdued France in 1940 in a matter of weeks, de Gaulle escaped to London, where he sparred with both Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt.   With Germany's defeat finally in sight, de Gaulle returned to Paris. Yet after only a few days as head of government he resigned and went to Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises where he would spend the next 12 years.

After the chaotic years of France's Fourth Republic, where "it lost Indochina, Suez, and l'Algerie francaise," de Gaulle returned to France.  He reigned over the Fifth Republic, Joffe says, "like a latter day Sun King, forced to suffer the ornery ways of democratic politics."

The French student riots of May 1968, "the mightiest student revolt in the West," per Joffe, were to prove his undoing.  de Gaulle went to French Army headquarters then in Germany to plead for the support of the military.  Meanwhile,"the faithful in Paris rallied and de Gaulle won a huge majority in the parliamentary elections of June 1968."  But, as Joffe says, he was the nation's savior no more.  When he called for a referendum on his reforms, he lost and resigned the same day. In November 1970, just before his 80th birthday, he died in Colombey.

As Joffe concludes in his review, "There is no more fitting epitaph than Fenby's last sentence: 'The world would not see his like again.'"

The demise of Moammar Gadhafi’s regime gave Abdulhafid Sidoun a second chance at life.

Six days before Sidoun was to be executed for promoting democracy in Libya, rebels toppled the government and emptied the country’s jails of its political prisoners. After more than five months of beatings and abuse on death row, Sidoun was free. Weeks later, Gadhafi was dead, gunned down by the rebels.

Sidoun’s fight to bring democracy and accountability to Libya is far from over. Qadaffi’s 40-year stranglehold starved Libya of political debate and evolution, and Sidoun knew he needed a crash-course in building an open, stable society. He received one this summer at Stanford, joining 23 other pro-democracy advocates from 22 countries in the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program on Democracy and Development.

“Gadhafi is gone, but we still have a corrupt system we need to clean up,” says Sidoun, a Tripoli-based lawyer who waged a social media campaign to unite Gadhafi opponents. “My country needs me now. I have to work with my friends and colleagues and other lawyers and tell them what I’ve learned.”

Abdulhafid Sidoun was sentenced to death for trying to topple Moammar Gadhafi’s regime. Photo credit: Rod Searcey

He has chronic back pain from the blows dealt by prison guards. And he winces when he talks about being torn from his family and isolated in a dark cell where he had no idea how – or even whether – the revolt against Gadhafi was unfolding until rebels broke him free.

For three weeks in late July and early August, Sidoun and the other fellows participated in faculty-led sessions on democracy, economic development, global health and hunger, human rights and the new technologies making it easier to organize and inspire reform. They took field trips to San Francisco and Monterey and met with officials at Google, Facebook and the Omidyar Network, a philanthropic investment firm that is contributing to the fellowship program.

And they spent time getting to know each other. Entrepreneurs, lawyers, journalists, politicians and civil society leaders sharing stories of overwhelming repression and the small successes they’ve had in trying to reform governments in places like Chile, China, Serbia and Zimbabwe.

“Everyone here has different stories and cultures, but we all talk about the same corruption,” Sidoun says. “We are learning that our problems are not very different.”

Fighting ignorance, encouraging debate

Now in its eighth year, the Draper Hills program – run by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies – has created and grown a worldwide network of up-and-coming leaders.

About 200 fellows from more than 60 countries have passed through the program and are now trying to craft policy and bring about political and economic reform.

“Many governments in Latin America are suffering from very strong political leaders who were elected presidents but think they are little kings or queens who own the country,” says Laura Alonso, a national representative in the Argentine Congress selected as one of this year’s fellows.

“The main problem is that the people who become so powerful distort the rule of law,” she says. “There is a rule of law for their friends and a different rule of law for their enemies. So this is what I want to go home and address – how can we have a rule of law that applies to everyone? My time at Stanford is giving me the perspective I need to go back to the basics of democracy.”

The fellowship program also addresses the overlap of business and government, and has increased its emphasis on the role entrepreneurs play in building democracy.

"We have brought a few entrepreneurs into the group of fellows," says Kathryn Stoner, an expert on Russia who lectured to the fellows about democratic transitions. "It is good for them to know how to get around corrupt practices in government. We also know that a strong middle class is the backbone of democracy. Once people have property, they tend to want to protect it as well as to demand representation for any taxes they pay. Encouraging entrepreneurship then is a good way to pursue both economic and political development worldwide."

While they’re all at Stanford to learn, the fellows are eager to share their newfound knowledge.

Kamal Siddiqi uses his position as a newspaper editor to strengthen democracy in Pakistan. Photo credit: Rod Searcey

Bassim Assuqair was raised in Yemen by parents who forbade him from working as a teenager so he could devote all his energy to his studies. After earning a degree in English education from Sana’a University, he has worked for various development organizations. But he’s most interested in organizing Yemen’s youth and teaching them about the benefits of living in a country with free elections and the rule of law.

“There is so much ignorance, so much illiteracy in my country,” he says. “The people aren’t bad. They’re simple. They need awareness. I want them to know peace. It’s my task – I am ordering myself – to explain to others what I’m learning here.”

Kamal Siddiqi is another self-styled evangelist of democracy. As editor of The Express Tribune, an English-language daily in Pakistan, Siddiqi uses the newspaper as a check on government power while making the case that “a very bad elected prime minister is still better than a very good dictator.”

As a Draper Hills fellow, Siddiqi picked up technological tips and made connections with Stanford faculty that will help him better monitor crime, corruption and his country’s upcoming elections.

“I want to draw on the strength of the faculty and fellows of CDDRL to write for my newspaper,” he says. “They will play a part in my attempt to introduce some more ideas and issues in the general debate on elections and democracy.”

A chance to reflect

When FSI Director Coit D. Blacker and a core group of FSI’s senior fellows – including CDDRL Director Larry Diamond, Stoner-Weiss, former Stanford President Gerhard Casper and Michael A. McFaul, now Washington’s ambassador to Moscow – created the fellowship program, they wanted to give practitioners a chance to reflect and learn about democratic theory.

"We felt that practitioners from developing countries or countries in political and economic transition often feel isolated in the work that they do and they burn out," says Stoner-Weiss. "There were no such programs for international practitioners when we began eight years ago. We wanted to provide them with a sense of international community and the knowledge that they are not toiling away on their own." 

And the lessons the fellows learn from Stanford faculty can be invaluable. When it comes to building a constitution – something several of the fellows grapple with – Francis Fukuyama says there’s only a certain amount of time for a newly formed government to “get it right.”

FSI's Gerhard Casper waves a copy of the Magna Carta while speaking to the fellows about the rule of law. Photo credit: Rod Searcey

“If you don’t, your window of opportunity slams shut,” says Fukuyama, a FSI senior fellow who lectured to the group about economic development and governance.

“But you don’t want to invite more problems by not thinking through exactly what kind of government you want," he says. "You need to have a theoretical and academic perspective.”

And the learning goes both ways.

“I’m getting the problems and issues of 22 countries downloaded onto me in a very short period of time,” says Erik Jensen, a law professor and CDDRL faculty member who also helped start the fellowship program.

“The fellows bring important insights and opinions that don’t land on the front page of The New York Times, but are integral to understanding what’s going on in the developing world,” he says. “That’s pretty great to have in one room.”

Courage, risk and magic

After building momentum and attracting a growing number of faculty who wanted to work with the fellows, the program that began in 2005 quickly caught the interest of venture capitalist Bill Draper and philanthropist Ingrid Hills. Their $1.5 million gift gave the program its name in 2007.

Draper’s interest in the program is deeply tied to his background running the United Nations Development Programme between 1986 and 1994.

“There are wonderfully courageous leaders in this world who are willing to take risks,” Draper says. “It’s magical what can happen, and I’ve seen how one person really can make an enormous difference. A lot of people selected for this fellowship program have that opportunity.”

Hills anticipates the fellows will create a network that extends beyond the three weeks they spend together at Stanford. And former fellows plan to connect in Africa later this year to explore how to combat regional corruption and increase government accountability.

“My hope is that the program will give the fellows the knowledge and tools to build an infrastructure in their respective countries based on democratic principles,” Hills said.

Diamond, whose opening day lecture on defining democracy sets the stage for the learning that unfolds over the coming weeks, says the program ultimately invests in people with the potential to expand democracy.

“It gives them skills, ideas and comparative experiences to draw on,” he says. “Some of these people will continue to work in an important and incremental way to advance and defend human rights and the rule of law. Some will go on to have very prominent roles in government and civil society.”

Life sentence

Some of them, like Ethiopia’s Birtukan Midekssa, are already renowned political leaders whose stories underscore the most extreme hardships of building democracy.

Pardoned from the lifelong prison sentence she received for opposing Ethiopia's authoritarian government, Birtukan Midekssa is still fighting for democratic reform. Photo credit: Rod Searcey

By the second time Midekssa was in prison, her daughter was old enough to ask if her mother was going to come home.

“I’ll be back,” Midekssa told the 3-year-old. But the promise was tenuous. She was serving a life sentence, convicted of trying to overthrow Ethiopia’s constitutional order. Her actual crime was promoting honest democracy in a country run by a government intolerant of dissent and dismissive of civil liberties.

She was first sentenced to life in prison in 2005. Her daughter was 8 months old and Midekssa – then a federal judge – was just elected deputy chair of the Coalition for Unity and Democracy. Her party had won a majority in parliament, but Prime Minister Meles Zenawi cracked down on the rising opposition. Midekssa and about 30,000 others were thrown in jail. Security forces killed nearly 200 demonstrators during rallies that began peacefully.

Midekssa was pardoned 18 months later, but re-arrested in 2008 after being accused of violating the terms of that agreement. She had also recently been elected chair of a new opposition group.

“They had me in solitary confinement and cut off from the entire world,” she says. “Sometimes I felt like the whole world was forgetting about me.”

It had not. When she was pardoned again in 2010, throngs of overjoyed supporters greeted her with shouts, songs and dance when she returned to her neighborhood in Addis Ababa.

But Midekssa was drained. Her party was weakened and her political prospects were uncertain. With few options in Ethiopia, she and her daughter moved to the United States in 2011.

“There was little I could do,” she says. “I wanted to learn more, study more and figure out how to establish democracy and stability.”

Landing a Draper Hills fellowship meant the chance to tap into a deep academic perspective and think about how she might take another pass at building democracy when Ethiopia’s authoritarian system shows some sign of opening up.

“She’s not a revolutionary in favor of violence or radical change,” Diamond says. “If the regime decides it wants to negotiate a process of political reform and put the political system on the foundations of greater legitimacy, she’s one of the first people they’d need to reach out to.”

But until they do, Midekssa will wait patiently. Studying. Retooling. Sharing her experiences. And repeating the promise she made to her daughter years ago:

“I’ll be back.”

Resilient citizens in times of crisis

Resilience involves the capacity to deal with change and to recover. It is the potential of  a system, of organisations or individuals to adapt to changing circumstances in the face of risk and adversity. Just as importantly, it is the ability to recover after a disaster or a crisis. As such, it is both about resisting shocks and using such events to trigger renewal, innovation and address the ensuing challenges and difficulties through creative solutions. 

It has been increasingly evident over the past couple of years that Europe is undergoing its deepest existentialist crisis since the project of European integration kicked off in the early 1950s. The crisis is deep and does not only concern Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy or Ireland. It goes well beyond the confines of the Eurozone and presents a resilience challenge that has to be addressed well and truly at the European level. It is just as important however that this resilience challenge is also met at the local, societal level.

Crises are transformative; along with the risk of deterioration and disintegration, they also offer an opportunity for growth. The challenge that is therefore posed by the current crisis is not only how much we can expect the European system to be able to absorb before it transforms into something fundamentally different, but also who will be the driving force of change or the game changer in these conditions? Identifying the factors that will be able to drive change and demonstrate resilience to the crisis is necessary for the EU and it is even more fundamental for Greece.

As the crisis has been unraveling in Greece, the focus has been on the negative effects it has been having on citizens’ life, on the country’s public services, on the welfare state, on the political system and on expectations for the future. Without a shadow of a doubt, these negative effects have been tragic and painful. In a country of approximately 10.1 million people, 350,000 jobs have been lost in the past year alone. Unemployment has risen over 23% in the general population, while youth unemployment in particular has soared to over 52%. GDP has declined by 20%, and austerity measures have wrung the middle class dry. In Athens, there was up to 60% fall in revenue for businesses directly associated with the Indignados sit–ins and the consecutive riots during 2011-2012; the commercial centre of Athens has become increasingly derelict, shops are closing, buildings on main streets are no longer repairing their facades from the damages incurred in weekly demonstrations. Suicide rates have increased, along with violent criminality and homelessness, while soup kitchens have made their appearance again - and the lines are growing longer every day. Public hospitals are lacking in many cases even the most basic supplies while public schools and universities are preparing for a tough academic year ahead expecting to have even less of a possibility to afford the heating bills than they did last year.

There exists a sense of pervasive breakdown. There is a feeling of disorientation and lost identity that comes with the collapse of the assumptions people lived by until just a couple of years ago and the expectations they had for their future. The grim picture does not end here. Young Greeks are emigrating in increasing numbers as this crisis’ harshest toll has been on their dreams of a better tomorrow in their home country that until recently appeared consolidated within what the EU jargon referred to as ‘core Europe’. Greece’s democratic institutions are being systematically undermined: the media are more often than not mouthpieces of the political parties; the judiciary is distrusted and degraded; the Parliament and the party system are discredited.

Yet in all this, encouraging signs must be sought out, emphasized and supported. They are necessary if the resilience challenge is to be met.

The Greek state with all its failures, weaknesses and mishaps is retreating, and as it retreats it is leaving a number of voids. Rather than see this as a zero-sum game, it can be seized as an opportunity by new forms of civil society. Greek civil society has traditionally been significantly under-developed, poorly organized with limited influence and even more limited independence. Yet it is maybe this sector that has the widest scope for independent action at present. As the state and private sectors are being hammered by the economic and political crises the country is undergoing, the non-governmental and not-for-profit sectors that have been long under-performing, have perhaps the best opportunity to be creative and offer novel solutions and be a true agent of change in the present conjuncture of circumstances.

As economic conditions have severely deteriorated, there has been an unprecedented mushrooming of initiatives and efforts to cater to the needs of society’s most vulnerable groups. Radio stations have paired up with supermarket chains and civil society organizations to collect donations and contributions in kind; medical networks such as ‘Medecins du Monde’ and ‘Medecins Sans Frontiers’ have dynamically responded to the health needs of migrant minorities and homeless citizens particularly in downtown Athens; voluntarism has bounced back (the Athens 2004 Olympic Games had constituted a unique eruption of voluntarism that fizzled out shortly after the games ended) and is becoming the last level of support that many humanitarian and philanthropic NGOs can count on given that the state has not only frozen all funding to NGOs but has also cut back on basic social services. New networks bringing together young Greeks rely on the internet and social media platforms to mobilize citizens in environmental protection initiatives. Similarly, media outlets and artists are mobilized to support events aimed at promoting human rights, tolerance, and respect for cultural and religious diversity in a vibrant effort to fight back against the electoral rise of the neo-nazi Golden Dawn party.

Tuesday, July 24th marked the 38th anniversary of the restoration of democracy in Greece after a seven-year military dictatorship (1967-1974). If this anniversary constitutes an opportunity to reflect on why the post-dictatorship era, known as the metapolitefsi, is ending in such socio-political anxiety and anger, it should also be approached as a milestone from which to spark a fundamental shift in public mentality in Greece and for citizens to express their democratic resilience.

As has been often argued, social innovation tends to thrive in the most challenging, unsettled times and seemingly restrictive conditions. In effect, in times of crises, the ability of citizens to develop resilience is fundamental for their country’s democratic life. This social activism may become the platform upon which Greek civil society can develop and strengthen its credibility as a socially responsible sector that will seize this momentum to contribute dynamically and creatively to addressing the weaknesses that characterize democracy in Greece. The scope for action is wide: multiculturalism, religious diversity, racism and xenophobia, gender equality, anti-discrimination, protection of the most vulnerable and marginalized sections of society, protection of the environment, governmental accountability are but a few of the core sectors that urgently need to be addressed.