Isabella Garcia-Camargo is a former research analyst and special projects manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory. She served as project manager for the Election Integrity Partnership and the Virality Project. She holds a B.S. in computer science from Stanford University.
In October, the Justice Department sued Google for violating antitrust laws.These antitrust concerns are motivated by the potential economic harms caused by the tech giants’ monopoly positions, but there might be greater reason to worry about the political harms that the platforms pose to American democracy because of their control over the modern information ecosystem. If the antitrust laws are designed to address economic harms, how should policymakers confront the political harms from dominant digital platforms?
Join us on November 18th at 10 a.m. PST to discuss recommendations from the new White Paper of the Stanford Working Group on Platform Scale, where we will assess how today’s digital platforms pose threats to American democracy and a proposal for how creative technological interventions might mitigate the platform’s growing power. Panelists include Francis Fukuyama, Mosbacher Director of Stanford University’s Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and a leader at the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet, Ashish Goel, Professor of Management Science and Engineering and (by courtesy) Computer Science at Stanford University, Barak D. Richman, Professor of Law and Business Administration at Duke University, Luigi Zingales, Professor of Economics at the Chicago Booth School of Business and Co-host of the podcast Capitalisn't, and Dick Costolo, former CEO of Twitter, founder and CEO of multiple startups, and now a Managing Partner at 01 Advisors, in conversation with Kelly Born, Executive Director of the Cyber Policy Center as they discuss new ideas in antitrust.
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)
The internet is now the most common source of political news for almost half of Americans, and social media is now the primary source of news for those under 30. Yet today’s youth have little capacity to evaluate the credibility of digital sources, with colleges across the country often relying on severely outdated guidelines supporting digital literacy education. Join Stanford’s Sam Wineburg, Washington State University’s Mike Caulfield, and Rowan University’s Andrea Baer and Dan Kipnis, in conversation with the Cyber Center’s Kelly Born, about the many challenges and opportunities facing media literacy.
The Racial Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Task Force (REDI) invites you to the third event in the "Critical Conversations: Race and Global Affairs" series. This panel will examine the relationship of policing and racism in liberal democracies and interrogate how police brutality erodes democracy and rule of law. The panel presentation will be followed by a Q&A.
About the Speakers
Didi Kuo is the Associate Director for Research at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law and a Senior Research Scholar at FSI.
Beatriz Magaloni is Professor in the Department of Political Science and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University, where she directs the Poverty, Violence and Governance Lab.
Vesla Weaver is Bloomberg Distinguished Associate Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the Johns Hopkins University, and a scholar of policing, surveillance, and racial inequality.
Yanilda Gonzalez is Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School; she works on policing, state violence, and citizenship in democracy, examining how race, class, and other forms of inequality shape these processes.
Please register in advance here: https://stanford.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMkd-yvrjsiH9VmeXKmg9-JSxq6k…
Online, via Zoom: Registration Required
Encina Hall, C150
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305
Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.
Dept. of Political Science
Encina Hall, Room 436
Stanford University,
Stanford, CA
Beatriz Magaloni Magaloni is the Graham Stuart Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science. Magaloni is also a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, where she holds affiliations with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She is also a Stanford’s King Center for Global Development faculty affiliate. Magaloni has taught at Stanford University for over two decades.
She leads the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (Povgov). Founded by Magaloni in 2010, Povgov is one of Stanford University’s leading impact-driven knowledge production laboratories in the social sciences. Under her leadership, Povgov has innovated and advanced a host of cutting-edge research agendas to reduce violence and poverty and promote peace, security, and human rights.
Magaloni’s work has contributed to the study of authoritarian politics, poverty alleviation, indigenous governance, and, more recently, violence, crime, security institutions, and human rights. Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006) is widely recognized as a seminal study in the field of comparative politics. It received the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations, as well as the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section. Her second book The Politics of Poverty Relief: Strategies of Vote Buying and Social Policies in Mexico (with Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estevez) (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores how politics shapes poverty alleviation.
Magaloni’s work was published in leading journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Criminology & Public Policy, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, Latin American Research Review, and others.
Magaloni received wide international acclaim for identifying innovative solutions for salient societal problems through impact-driven research. In 2023, she was named winner of the world-renowned Stockholm Prize in Criminology, considered an equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of criminology. The award recognized her extensive research on crime, policing, and human rights in Mexico and Brazil. Magaloni’s research production in this area was also recognized by the American Political Science Association, which named her recipient of the 2021 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review, the leading journal in the discipline.
She received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University and holds a law degree from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.
Graham Webster leads the DigiChina Project, which translates and explains Chinese technology policy for an English-language audience so that debates and decisions regarding cyber policy are factual and based on primary sources of information.
Housed within Stanford’s Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance (GTG) and in partnership with New America, DigiChina and its community of experts have already published more than 80 translations and analyses of public policy documents, laws, regulations and political speeches and are creating an open-access knowledge base for policy-makers, academics, and members of the tech industry who need insight into the choices China makes regarding technology.
Q. Why is this work important?
A lot of tech is produced in China so it’s important to understand their policies. And in Washington, D.C., you hear a lot of people say, “Well, you can’t know what China’s doing on tech policy. It’s all a secret.” But while China’s political system is often opaque, if you happen to read Chinese, there’s a lot that’s publicly available and can explain what the Chinese government is thinking and planning.
With our network of experts, DigiChina works at the intersection of two policy challenges. One is how do we deal with high technology, and the questions around economic competitiveness, personal autonomy and the security risks that our dependence on tech creates.
The other challenge is, from a US government, business or values perspective, what needs to be done about the increased prominence and power of the Chinese government and its economic, technological and military capabilities.
These questions cut across tech sectors from IT infrastructure to data-driven automation, and cutting-edge developments in quantum technology, biotech, and other fields of research.
Q: How was DigiChina started?
A number of us were working at different organizations, think tanks, consultancies and universities and we all had an interest in explaining the laws and the bureaucratic language to others who aren’t Chinese policy specialists or don’t have the language skills.
We started working informally at first and then reached out to New America, which is an innovative type of think tank combining research, innovation, and policy thinking on challenges arising during this time of rapid technological and social change. Under the New America umbrella, and through partnerships with the Leiden Asia Centre, a leading European research center based at the University of Leiden, and the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Initiative at Harvard and MIT, we were able to build out the program and increase the number of experts in our network.
Q: Who is involved in DigiChina and what types of expertise do you and others bring to the project?
More than 40 people have contributed to DigiChina publications so far, and it’s a pretty diverse group. There are professors and think tank scholars, students and early-career professionals, and experienced government and industry analysts. Everyone has a different part of the picture they can contribute, and we reach out to other experts both in China and around the world when we need more context.
As for me, I was working at Yale Law School’s China Center when I was roped into what would become DigiChina and had spent several years in Beijing and New Haven working more generally on US-China relations and Track 2 dialogues, where experts and former officials from the two countries meet to take on tough problems. As a journalist and graduate student, I had long studied technology and politics in China, and I took on a coordinating role with DigiChina as I turned back to that pursuit full time.
Q. Are there other organizations involved as well?
We have a strong tie to the Leiden Asia Centre at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, where one of DigiChina’s cofounders, Rogier Creemers, is a professor, and where staff and student researchers have contributed to existing and forthcoming work. We coordinate with a number of other groups on translations, and the project benefits greatly from the time and knowledge contributed by employees of various institutions. I hope that network will increasingly be a resource for contributors and their colleagues.
The project is currently supported by the Ford Foundation, which works to strengthen democratic values, promote international cooperation and advance human achievement around the world. A generous grant from Ford will keep the lights on for two years, giving us the ability to build our open-access resource and, with further fundraising, the potential to bring on more in-house editorial and research staff.
Q. Do you have plans to grow the project?
We are working to build an accessible online database so researchers and scholars can review primary source documents in both the original Chinese and in English. And we are working toward a knowledge base with background entries on key institutions, legal concepts, and phrases so that a broader audience can situate things like Chinese legal language in their actual context. Providing access to this information is especially important now and in the near future, whether we have a second Trump Administration or a Biden Administration in the United States.
On any number of policy challenges, effective measures are going to depend on going beyond caricatures like an “AI arms race,” “cyber authoritarianism,” or “decoupling,” which provide useful frameworks for debate but can tend to prejudge the outcomes of a huge number of developments. We hope researchers and policy thinkers, regardless of their approaches or ideologies, can use this work to engage with the real and messy evolution of Chinese tech policy.
Webster explains how DigiChina makes Chinese tech policy accessible for English speakers
On September 29, the APARC China Program hosted Thomas Fingar and Stephen Stedman for the program “Rebuilding International Institutions.” The program, which was moderated by China Program Director Jean Oi, examined the future of international institutions such as the United Nations (UN), World Trade Organization (WTO), and World Health Organization (WHO) in our evolving global political landscape. While Fingar and Stedman acknowledged that such institutions facilitated attainment of unprecedented peace and prosperity after WWII, they also asked difficult questions: Are these institutions still adequate? And if not, how will we change them?
Shorenstein APARC Fellow Thomas Fingar kicked off the session by asking whether or not US-China tensions would impede cooperation on major global challenges, or if those challenges were so serious as to render such rivalries immaterial. Perhaps the most obvious example of such a crisis is the current COVID-19 pandemic. The efforts to curb the virus’ spread not only by individual countries, but also by international organizations like the WHO, have proven largely inadequate. According to Fingar, our existing institutions need to be reformed or supplemented to deal with these types of threats. However, such an overhaul of our international systems will be difficult, he says.
How, then, will we go about such a massive project? Stephen Stedman, Deputy Director at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), responded by explaining that the current failure of international cooperation makes such undertakings tough. Globalization has been a double-edged sword: On one hand, more contact, perhaps inherently, leads to increased tension. The resurgence of traditional notions of sovereignty in 2010, kickstarted by the opposition of countries like Russia and China to what was seen as UN overreaching, has led to a reduction of international cooperation overall. On the other hand, Fingar posits that our interconnectedness may force us toward cooperation despite rivalries as we face more and more transnational threats. International institutions create rules to organize and manage our many interconnected relationships so that we can deal with our problems effectively and reduce friction.
Stedman also pointed to the upcoming US elections and the major impact their outcome will have on how these problems are addressed—or not. In the last four year, the United States has pulled back significantly from international institutions and agreements, leaving a gap that China has started to fill. Furthermore, despite the US’s retreat from international responsibility, the country still remains a critical actor in global initiatives. China’s embrace of a global leadership role is not inherently negative, but its future relationship with the US will need to be “managed in a way that you get greater cooperation and not just paralysis.” Stedman says that it is likely that progress will need to be made on a bilateral front in order to have productive conversations about international issues with China.
Concluding on an optimistic note, Fingar voiced his hope that the current tensions and negative perceptions between rivals might ultimately “be mitigated by success in dealing with a common problem,” because “experience does shape perceptions.”
A video recording of this program is available upon request. Please contact Callista Wells, China Program Coordinator at cvwells@stanford.edu with any inquiries.
Fingar and Stedman spoke as part of the APARC program “Rebuilding International Institutions,” which examined the future of international institutions such as the United Nations (UN), World Trade Organization (WTO), and World Health Organization (WHO) in our evolving global political landscape.
The New Europe Center, a Ukraine-based think tank, asked six American experts to comment on the implications of the U.S. presidential election for Ukraine. The following is Steven Pifer's contribution.
For Americans, the November 3 presidential election will be the most significant vote in many decades. The election also will have consequences for Ukraine: Whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden sits in the White House at the end of the day on January 20, 2021 will matter greatly for U.S. policy toward Ukraine and Europe.
Since Ukraine regained its independence in 1991, the United States has proven a strong and supportive partner. Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama each saw a stable, independent, democratic Ukrainian state with a robust market economy as in the U.S. interest, including in contributing to a more stable and secure Europe. Washington thus has provided substantial political, economic and—particularly since 2014—military support to Kyiv. It has sanctioned Russia for its aggression in Crimea and Donbas and sought to bolster NATO in the face of a growing Kremlin challenge to Western security.
The Trump administration has largely continued these policies. It has provided Kyiv reform and military aid, including lethal military assistance. It has applied additional sanctions on Russia, albeit under pressure from Congress. And it has taken steps to strengthen the U.S. military presence in NATO, at least until recently.
However, it has never been clear that Mr. Trump himself supports these policies. His principal engagement on Ukraine was his attempted extortion of Kyiv to advance his personal political prospects, an effort that led to his impeachment. While his administration has taken a tough line on Russia, Mr. Trump seems incapable of criticizing Vladimir Putin or Russian misdeeds. He apparently thinks that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, ignoring the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community, the Mueller investigation and the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee.
Mr. Trump’s disdain for NATO has long been clear, going back to the 1980s. In June, he decided to withdraw 10,000 U.S. troops from Germany, apparently out of pique at Chancellor Merkel’s refusal to attend a G7 summit at Camp David. Senior Pentagon officials scrambled for weeks to offer military justifications for the drawdown, but those that they provided did not survive serious scrutiny.
If Mr. Trump is re-elected, he will not have to worry about facing the voters in another election campaign. He will cement his control of the Republican Party, leaving Republicans in the Senate and House of Representatives less able to block his bad instincts. What accommodations would he make with Mr. Putin? Would he be inclined, as he suggested in 2016, to recognize Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and lift economic sanctions? Would he withdraw the United States from NATO, as many former U.S. officials fear? The Alliance’s collapse would be a huge gift to Mr. Putin and leave Ukraine in a precarious geopolitical position.
It will be different if Mr. Biden is elected (full transparency: the author fervently hopes for this). The United States would have a president who understands the U.S. interest in a successful Ukraine and who knows the country well from his time as vice president. He would be the kind of friend that Ukraine needs, supportive but also ready to press the Ukrainian leadership to take necessary reform steps. He recognizes the security challenge that Russia presents to Ukraine and the West, and he realizes the importance of a strong trans-Atlantic relationship with a robust NATO at its core. And Mr. Biden might prove a president who could bind some of the differences that so badly divide Americans today. An America more unified at home would be a stronger international actor.
Whether Mr. Trump or Mr. Biden wins the elections will mean very different things for U.S. policies affecting Ukraine. That said, the American electorate will decide the next president largely on domestic issues, such as the Trump administration’s handling of COVID19 and the economy. Ukraine has no role to play in this, and Ukrainian officials should continue to do all that they can to avoid their country becoming a political football in the U.S. campaign.
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Steven Pifer is a William Perry Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.
For Americans, the November 3 presidential election will be the most significant vote in many decades. The election also will have consequences for Ukraine: Whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden sits in the White House at the end of the day on January 20, 2021 will matter greatly for U.S. policy toward Ukraine and Europe.
The Racial Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (REDI) Task Force invites you to the second event in the "Critical Conversations: Race and Global Affairs" series. This panel discussion and Q&A will explore the resonance of Black internationalist research, past and present, to offer new insights on the Black Lives Matter movement .
Please register in advance here: https://stanford.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0ld-upqD4pGNIpEJJMBq-D2JQO_7J1GC62
Online, via Zoom: REGISTER
THE EMERGENCE OF A DIGITAL SPHERE where public debate takes place raises profound questions about the connection between online information and polarization, echo chambers, and filter bubbles. Does the information ecosystem created by social media companies support the conditions necessary for a healthy democracy? Is it different from other media? These are particularly urgent questions as the United States approaches a contentious 2020 election during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The influence of technology and AI-curated information on America’s democratic process is being examined in the eight-week Stanford University course, “Technology and the 2020 Election: How Silicon Valley Technologies Affect Elections and Shape Democracy.” This issue brief focuses on the class session on “Echo Chambers, Filter Bubbles, and Polarization,” with guest experts Joan Donovan and Joshua Tucker.
