“The one bright light in this darkening landscape is that Poles remain committed to democracy,” writes Anna Grzymala-Busse in Current History. Read the full article here.
Please join visiting scholar Sviatoslav Vakarchuk and Mosbacher Director of CDDRL Francis Fukuyama for a conversation on Ukraine's future success.
Encina Hall, C148
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305
Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a faculty member of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also Director of Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy, and a professor (by courtesy) of Political Science.
Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His book In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir will be published in fall 2026.
Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation, and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004. He is editor-in-chief of American Purpose, an online journal.
Dr. Fukuyama holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), Aarhus University (Denmark), the Pardee Rand Graduate School, and Adam Mickiewicz University (Poland). He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Trustees of Freedom House, and the Board of the Volcker Alliance. He is a fellow of the National Academy for Public Administration, a member of the American Political Science Association, and of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.
(October 2025)
Vakarchuk is a Ukrainian civic activist, musician and the lead vocalist and founder of the band “Okean Elzy.“ He will be in residence at CDDRL this fall to attend courses and study with some of the leading intellectuals and academics at CDDRL. He holds a doctorate degree in theoretical physics from the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv.
Vakarchuk is also the founder of a charity fund called “Lyudi Maybutnyogo” (People of the Future) and co-founder of the Center for Economic Strategy, an independent policy think tank dedicated to supporting reforms and sustainable economic growth in Ukraine. He served as a Yale World Fellow in 2015.
The development community has increased its focus on higher education over the past two decades, recognizing that education can contribute to building up a country’s capacity for participation in an increasingly knowledge-based world economy and accelerate economic growth. The value added by higher education to economies—job creation, innovation, enhanced entrepreneurship, and research, a core higher education activity—has been highlighted by an important body of literature.
Yet experts remain concerned that investing in higher education in less-developed countries may lead to a “brain drain”--highly educated students and professionals permanently leaving their home countries. In the 2016 Kauffman report on international science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) students in the United States, for instance, 48 percent among a randomly sampled survey of 2,322 foreign doctoral students in the United States wished to stay there after graduation, with only 12 percent wanting to leave and 40.5 percent being undecided. In fact, high percentages of foreign students in the United States with doctorates in science and engineering continue to stay in the United States, creating a brain drain problem for the sending countries.
Because students tend to move from developing to developed countries to study, brain drain is more problematic for developing countries. In addition, given accelerated talent flows around the world and the increasing integration of less-developed countries into global value chains, the negative impact of brain drain could be further amplified. As demonstrated by the studies reviewed in this paper, the migration of high-skilled professionals from developing countries may indeed create brain drain for them, but at the same time can significantly enhance the social and economic development of their home countries, regardless of whether or not they decide to return home, thus complicating what used to be seen as a straightforward case of brain drain.
From Brain Drain to Brain Circulation and Linkage examines how brain drain can contribute to development for the sending countries through brain circulation and linkage. It provides an overview of the conceptual framework to map out high-skilled labor flows, identifies empirical cases and policies in Asia that demonstrate high-skilled migrant professionals actually make significant contributions to their home countries (beyond monetary remittances), summarizes key social and economic enabling factors that are important in attracting and motivating migrant high-skilled professionals to return or engage with their home countries, and concludes with policy implications and suggestions for further research based on these findings.
Axel Polleres is currently a visiting professor at Stanford under the Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair Professors program hosted by The Europe Center in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
Jonathan Rodden started his academic career at MIT, and joined the Stanford political science faculty in 2007. In 2012, he founded the Stanford Spatial Social Science Lab, which is a center for research and teaching dedicated to the use of geo-spatial data in the social sciences. Jonathan’s recent work focuses on the geography of economic production and political competition, especially in industrialized societies. He has written a number of journal articles examining the spatial arrangement of voting behavior in Europe, North America, and Australasia since the industrial revolution. He has also written a series of related papers on redistricting and partisan gerrymandering.
Jonathan is currently completing a book manuscript, tentatively titled Why Cities Lose, which is scheduled for publication by Basic Books in early 2019. He argues that ever since the rise of manufacturing in the late 19th century and the accompanying construction of dense working-class housing, the support base of left parties has been primarily urban. Over time, these parties came to adopt a variety of additional policy platforms having less to do with the rights of manufacturing workers, and more to do with the interests of urban groups including social progressives and more recently, educated workers in knowledge-intensive industries. Along the way, urban-rural political polarization has grown, not just in the United States but also in countries like the United Kingdom and Canada.
As a result of this process, Rodden shows that votes for left parties have become highly concentrated in city centers, while votes for right parties are more evenly distributed in space. Rodden explains that when winner-take-all electoral districts are drawn, as in Britain and its former colonies, this geography leads to a substantial advantage for parties of the right in achieving legislative representation. He demonstrates that urban-rural polarization—and a bias against urban parties—is less likely to emerge in multi-party systems like those of Continental Europe. His book concludes by exploring implications for policy, as well as for debates about redistricting and electoral reform.
Jonathan has also been working for two decades on a set of issues related to political and fiscal federalism. While some of his ongoing work focuses on fiscal decentralization in developing countries, he has also been involved in debates about the European debt crisis and reforms to the Eurozone, and recently presented the Pierre Werner Chair lecture at the European University Institute in Florence as part of a project called “A Dynamic Economic and Monetary Union” (ADEMU). In this lecture and an accompanying policy paper written for the European Parliament, Rodden extracts broad lessons from other federations, including the United States and Canada, for some of the design challenges facing the European Monetary Union.
This conference examines the history of state arts patronage in Europe and its ramifications in the present. Presentations on literature, music, theater, and the visual arts will provide an interdisciplinary examination of the origins and the tensions underlying the European model of state arts funding, along with a contemporary perspective on how and why European governments seek to support the arts today by the Cultural Counselor of the French Embassy in the United States. The panels will address questions such as: How have the arts been used to secure domestic political legitimacy or project power internationally at different times? What kinds of art are deemed worthy of support, and what artistic forms have been excluded from such patronage? What are the different historical genealogies of this state patronage, and what do they tell us about why European governments remain committed to funding the arts when such support is controversial in the United States?
RSVP to andreip@stanford.edu
Conference schedule
Breakfast served at 8:45am
Introduction: 9am (Dan Edelstein)
Panel 1: Representations of Power in the Old Regime (9:15-10:45am)
Coffee break (10:45-11am)
Panel 2: Patronage, Circulation, and Institutions (11am-12:30pm)
Lunch (12:30pm-2pm)
Art and Power Today: France’s Cultural Policy. Presentation and Discussion (2-3:00pm)
Coffee break (3-3:15pm)
Panel 3: After the Revolution: Rethinking Art and Power in the New Regime (3:15-4:45pm)
Conference Organizers: Dan Edelstein and Andrei Pesic
Sponsored by The Europe Center of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Stanford Department of French and Italian, and the Stanford Humanities Center.
Levinthal Hall
Stanford Humanities Center
"There is growing consensus that populism constitutes a grave threat to liberal democracy, and to the liberal international order on which peace and prosperity have rested for the past two generations," writes Francis Fukuyama in the World Economic Forum. The fate of the global liberal order could be jeopardized due to rising populist powers and movements. Read the full article here.
Globally, demand for food animal products is rising. At the same time, we face mounting, related pressures including limited natural resources, negative environmental externalities, climate disruption, and population growth. Governments and other stakeholders are seeking strategies to boost food production efficiency and food system resiliency, and aquaculture (farmed seafood) is commonly viewed as having a major role in improving global food security based on longstanding measures of animal production efficiency. The most widely used measurement is called the 'feed conversion ratio' (FCR), which is the weight of feed administered over the lifetime of an animal divided by weight gained. By this measure, fed aquaculture and chickens are similarly efficient at converting feed into animal biomass, and both are more efficient compared to pigs and cattle. FCR does not account for differences in feed content, edible portion of an animal, or nutritional quality of the final product. Given these limitations, we searched the literature for alternative efficiency measures and identified 'nutrient retention', which can be used to compare protein and calories in feed (inputs) and edible portions of animals (outputs). Protein and calorie retention have not been calculated for most aquaculture species. Focusing on commercial production, we collected data on feed composition, feed conversion ratios, edible portions (i.e. yield), and nutritional content of edible flesh for nine aquatic and three terrestrial farmed animal species. We estimate that 19% of protein and 10% of calories in feed for aquatic species are ultimately made available in the human food supply, with significant variation between species. Comparing all terrestrial and aquatic animals in the study, chickens are most efficient using these measures, followed by Atlantic salmon. Despite lower FCRs in aquaculture, protein and calorie retention for aquaculture production is comparable to livestock production. This is, in part, due to farmed fish and shrimp requiring higher levels of protein and calories in feed compared to chickens, pigs, and cattle. Strategies to address global food security should consider these alternative efficiency measures.
"For those who believe that liberal democracy constitutes the best form of government, the rise of populist nationalism is a very worrying phenomenon," writes Francis Fukuyama in Credit Suisse Research Institute's "The Future of Politics." Read the full article here.
