The fourth annual conference of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy (ARD) organized in collaboration with the University of Tunis, El Manar and the Centre d'études maghrébines à Tunis (CEMAT), will take place in Tunis on March 28 and 29, 2013.

This year's conference theme 'Building Bridges: Towards Viable Democracies in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya' examines the cornerstones of democratic transition in those countries.

The conference aims to engage leading scholars, policymakers, and practitioners from all three countries, as well as international experts, to reflect on the process of democratization in those countries from a comparative perspective. The key issues the conference will address are:

- Constitution drafting
- National dialogues and civil society
- Political coalitions and Islamism
- Political participation and pluralism
- Economic policy
- Arab relations with the USA and Europe

The full conference agenda can be found on our website through the link below, where those interested in attending can also register for the event.

He broke the news to the world that North Korea had built a modern uranium enrichment plant. He’s helped the Russians secure their vast stockpile of ex-Soviet fissile materials. And Stanford students routinely rank him as one of their favorite professors. 

Siegfried Hecker, one of he world’s top nuclear scientists and co-teacher of the popular course, “Technology and National Security,” has completed his five-year tenure as co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).

Though Hecker is stepping down from the leadership role, he’s not walking away.

“He’s not going anywhere,” emphasized his successor, Stanford microbiologist and biosecurity specialist, David Relman, as he opened a seminar in Hecker’s honor on Feb. 25. The panel discussion, “Three Hard Cases: Iran, North Korea and Pakistan” featured Scott Sagan, Malfrid Braut-Hegghammer, Abbas Milani, Robert Carlin and Feroz Khan.

“He’ll be back this summer with his infectious energy and unswerving dedication for which he is so well known,” Relman said.

Hecker, 69, is taking a sabbatical in New Mexico – where he was director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory for more than a decade before coming to Stanford – and then at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, run by the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He’ll continue work on his book about his historic efforts to foster collaboration between U.S.-Russian nuclear labs and do some travel to meet his nonproliferation counterparts in other parts of the world.

“CISAC is part of my heart and soul now,” Hecker told a reception in his honor after the seminar. “Los Alamos was in my blood and bones. Today, Stanford is part of that too.”

Hecker will return to CISAC this summer to resume his writing and research projects as a senior fellow at CISAC and its umbrella, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). He’ll head back to the classroom as well.

“What I found out is that teaching is so much harder than just giving a lecture, because you really have to pay attention to what the students have actually absorbed,” Hecker said. “You need to be able to communicate with each and every one of them.”

Among the many national honors that Hecker has received over the years, the one he treasures most is the 2010 Eugene L. Grant Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, an honor voted on by the students.

Lauren Cipriano, a Ph.D. candidate in Mechanical Science and Engineering, has been Hecker’s teaching assistant for four years. She noted his class co-taught with former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry – also a senior FSI fellow and CISAC faculty member – is routinely attended by hundreds of students and rated among the best.

“He shares his own stories of how developing personal relationships with Russian nuclear scientists in the wake of the Cold War helped overcome diplomatic challenges, and how he continues those efforts today in Russia and North Korea to make the world a safer place,” she said in her reception toast. “Sig also has a scary ability to predict the future. Several times our policy paper assignments have nearly come true.”

One of those dramatic examples unfolded in 2010. While the students were writing a paper about how they would respond to the discovery that North Korea had established a uranium enrichment facility, Sig was traveling to Pyongyang.

“Our students were some of the first to hear the stunning news of the uranium enrichment facilities the North Koreans revealed to him on his trip,” she said. “The students couldn’t have been more excited to feel like insiders in the national security policy arena.”

Hecker said he is particularly proud of the bright young scientists who have come through as CISAC fellows during his tenure.

“I think we’ve been able to build a really strong science component to support CISAC’s mission of building a safer world,” Hecker said. “We’ve been able to attract a lot of very good young scientists and then send them on to good careers from here.”

He said that working with these pre- and postdoctoral fellows and visiting faculty and scholars from the life sciences and political sciences “has helped me to better understand how important it is to bring the technical and social sciences together when looking at problems of international security.”

Hecker, who moved to the United States with his family from Austria when he was a boy, received his Ph.D. in metallurgy from Case Western Reserve University and began his professional career as a senior research metallurgist with the General Motors Research Laboratories in 1970. He joined the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1973, became its director in 1986 and served for more than a decade.

Hecker came to CISAC in 2005 as a visiting professor, having been recruited by Sagan, who was then the social science co-director of CISAC.

“Sig first became involved with CISAC when he was still at Los Alamos, through participating in our Track II nuclear diplomacy efforts with John Lewis in North Korea and with me in a Five Nations project meeting in Thailand,” recalled Sagan. The Five Nations Project on Asian Regional Security and Economic Development focused on new challenges to nuclear nonproliferation by the U.S., China, Russia, India and Pakistan.

“I first broached the possibility of his coming to Stanford as a visiting professor when he and I were in the back seat of a taxi in Bangkok after giving a joint lecture at the Royal Thai Military Academy,” in July 2004, Sagan said. “He has been a stellar leader and now that he is stepping down from administrative responsibilities, he will have even more time to be involved in CISAC’s nuclear nonproliferation activities around the globe."

CISAC co-director, Tino Cuéllar, called himself a “charter member of the national federation of the Sig Hecker fan club.”

“In his eventful, five-year tenure, Sig has been an extraordinary leader,” Cuéllar said. “He’s been a visionary about its future, an endlessly enthusiastic supporter of its varied missions and a role model of excellence combined with the collegiality that CISAC prizes so dearly.

The Program on Arab Reform and Democracy is pleased to launch “Entrepreneurship after the Arab Spring”, a new project led by Dr. Amr Adly.

The project addresses a number of questions on the entrepreneurship ecosystem that comprises the legal, institutional, regulatory, and policy frameworks governing the private sector and entrepreneurial activity in Tunisia and Egypt. The research project aims at raising awareness about the ecosystem among those designing international assistance programs as well as informing local stakeholders in Tunisia and Egypt. Key issues affecting businesses in those countries are primarily tackled; how they are more widely affecting the economy and the constituents; and the areas of potential reform.

The principal questions are: What are the barriers to entry and growth that face entrepreneurs in the two countries? How are these barriers related to the institutional, legal and regulatory, and policy mechanisms at work in each country? What changes can be made in the ecosystem that would enable entrepreneurship? What are the policy areas that need to be addressed to support reform?

To answer those questions, the project will address specific research topics such as the process of starting businesses, property rights protection, access to credit and finance, bankruptcy and market exit, corruption and cronyism, public policy quality, education and vocational training together with access to infrastructure, labor and taxation policies and regulations.

The project will primarily rely on fieldwork through conducting surveys via questionnaires, in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with a hundred entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs in Egypt and Tunisia, mainly owner-managers of small-and medium-sized enterprises within both the formal and informal sectors. Such an area has been traditionally under-researched in the Middle East if not in developing countries by and large.

The project aims at the production of action-oriented research, in the form of two country reports with clear policy recommendation that can be used later on for advocacy, campaigning and stakeholder mobilization. This objective implies that the research project maintain dense and dynamic connectedness with the ongoing changes in the two observed countries. Hence, stakeholders in Egypt and Tunisia shall be included in every stage of the development of the policy papers. This will take place through the organization of four roundtables in parallel with the ongoing research—two roundtables will be held in each country. At the final stage, policy reports will be released through holding a conference in Tunisia and Egypt each in January 2014, with the presence of attendants representing different stakeholders within the state, private sector and, civil society, as well as the scholarly community.