We sat down with recipient of the FSI Global Underdevelopment Action Fund, Professor Beatriz Magaloni to learn more about her research plans and how her work will address the larger issues of poverty and governance in Latin America and beyond.

Beatriz Magaloni, associate professor of political science at Stanford, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI), and director of the Program on Poverty and Governance (PovGov) at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, was recently awarded a grant through FSI's Global Underdevelopment Action Fund. Over the past ten years, Professor Magaloni has pioneered cross-national comparative research focused primarily on Latin America and Mexico. Leading the PovGov program, Professor Magaloni launched research projects examining political incentives for heath improvements, the role of women and family-planning decisions, public goods provisions in indigenous communities, and drug-related violence in Mexico.

We sat down with Professor Magaloni to learn more about her research plans and how her work will address the larger issues of poverty and governance in Latin America and beyond.

Professor Magaloni, tell us more about the work you are conducting with the support of the FSI Global Underdevelopment Action Fund?

We are using the support of the FSI Action Fund to expand a governance project that we started in Oaxaca, Mexico in 2009 to the Chiapas region. The Oaxaca research project focused on examining the effects of political institutions on public goods provision. In 1995, the state of Oaxaca allowed indigenous communities to decide if they wanted a form of traditional indigenous governance called “Usos y Costumbres,” or party governance. Our team studied the variations in these two forms of municipal governance and how they shape the provision of welfare-enhancing public goods, such as clean water, sanitation and sewage, and roads. The findings in Oaxaca showed that traditional governance leads to higher levels of civic engagement in collective decision-making and better provision of public goods. However, one key finding revealed that women enjoyed significantly lower levels of participation in civic life and governance overall. 

Why might this be?

More traditional structures of governance in indigenous communities were disempowering for women but the research carried out in Oaxaca revealed a positive effect on social and political participation among recipients of conditional cash transfers through Oportunidades.

For those of us unfamiliar with the Oportunidades program, please tell us more.

Oportunidades is a social program funded by the Mexican federal government that provides conditional cash transfers to poor women in exchange for their direct engagement in activities related to child nutrition, health, and education.

Why are you expanding the study to Chiapas?

A policy prescription that emerged from our results in Oaxaca led us to re-evaluate the possibility of establishing “Usos y Costumbres” beyond Oaxaca, and this grant will allow us to study the state of Chiapas. The state of Chiapas is traditionally party dominated but has a strong blend of traditional forms of governance. The baseline survey will be designed in Chiapas to understand how traditional governance practices are integrated into the party governance. We will ask if poor indigenous communities are better or worse off by choosing to govern themselves through customary law and participatory democracy, versus delegating decisions concerning the provision of public goods to political parties. This will allow us to identify how governance and patterns of civic engagement differ in both of these states and the effect on provision of local goods.

Stanford graduate students and post-doctoral scholars will be integral to our efforts to administer the survey and perform subsequent analysis.

How will women be central to your study in Chiapas?

The main addition to the survey will be a substantial segment devoted to the role of women in civil society with the goal of answering a number of questions regarding civic and political participation. Conducted at the household level, it is designed to gain a fuller picture of how women in Chiapas are influenced and shaped by the Oportunidades program.

In addition, our study in Chiapas will examine the following factors pertaining to women and governance:

1. The dynamics of governance in Mexico's indigenous regions and the ways in which women participate in collective decision-making and influence the distribution and access to public goods and services in the community.

2.  The relationship between Oportunidades and women's decision-making role in the provision of public goods.

3. The effects on health and educational outcomes that may be associated both with conditional cash transfer programs and women's participation in collective decision-making.

4. The policy implications for economic development and promoting human capital.

Who are you collaborating with on this project?

Ewen Wang is the co-investigator on this project. She is an associate professor of Surgery/Emergency Medicine at the Stanford School of Medicine and will be instrumental in collecting new data on health and education for children who are recipients of the Oportunidades program. We also are engaging inter-institutional collaborators from our partner universities, including; Alberto Díaz-Cayeros, Associate Professor of International Studies at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego; and Vidal Romero, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM).

What are the expected results or outcomes of this study?

The outcomes of this work have both theoretical and policy-relevant implications. The data we collect on the effect of participatory governance in indigenous regions in Mexico and how conditional cash transfer programs enable civic participation of women will have much broader application beyond Mexico's borders. A lot of other governments are experimenting with the use of conditional cash transfer programs and the result of this study should help inform public policy.

In Mexico, a policy brief highlighting the results of the survey will be prepared and presented to policymakers to describe the effects of local governance, civic engagement, and their impact on economic development. Policy recommendations will be presented to advise Chiapas (as well as other states in southern Mexico with a high prevalence of indigenous populations) on constitutional reform that gives autonomy to indigenous communities with respect to municipal collective decision-making.

Finally, a book-length project will be under development that describes how traditional governance in indigenous regions of Mexico shapes civic engagement, participation of women, and impacts the provision of public goods and services. The new data generated by this study will present new findings on how governance shapes the status of maternal and child health services in Chiapas, having much broader implications in the field of health policy.

World War Two, the most violent period in the modern history of Europe and Asia (1937–1945), left deep scars still evident on both continents. Numerous and often conflicting narratives exist about the wartime era, ranging from personal memoirs to official accounts of wartime actions. Many issues, from collaboration to responsibility for war crimes, remain unresolved. In Europe some issues that have been buried for decades, such as the record of collaboration with Nazi occupiers, are now resurfacing. In Northeast Asia, World War Two’s complex, painful legacy continues to impact popular culture, education, diplomacy, and even economic relations.

While differences exist in the wartime circumstances and reconciliation processes of Europe and Asia, many valuable lessons can be gained through a study of the experiences on both continents. The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) facilitated a comparative dialogue on World War Two, bringing together 15 noted experts for the Colonialism, Collaboration, and Criminality conference, held June 16 to 17 at Stanford. Each of the event’s five panels paired an Asia and a Europe scholar addressing a common theme.

The debate over remembrance of World War Two

Asia’s relative lack of progress in achieving reconciliation of the painful legacies of the war in Asia and the Pacific continues to bedevil current relations in the region. This is a consequence of the way the Cold War interrupted the resolution of wartime issues and blocked dialogue over the past, particularly between Japan, China, and South Korea, suggested Daniel C. Sneider, associate director for research at Shorenstein APARC. The widely held image of an unrepentant Japan ignores the fierce debate within Japan over wartime memory, often obscured by the prominence of rightwing nationalist views. Meanwhile, within China and Korea, wartime memory is also increasingly contested ground, from the issue of collaboration to the emergence of a more nationalist narrative in China, further complicating relations among those Asian neighbors.

Daniel Chirot, a professor of international studies at the University of Washington, emphasized that immediate postwar economic and security needs, including the growth of Communism, accelerated West Germany’s willingness to reconcile with its Western neighbors. He concurred with Sneider, saying that no such imperative existed in Northeast Asia until the need for economic cooperation three decades after the war. He suggested that the growth of regional integration might, as in Europe, drive Northeast Asia toward greater reconciliation.

Divided memories

Justice for sensitive historical human rights issues, such as World War Two atrocities, bears increasing importance in today’s ever-globalized economic and political climate, stated Thomas Berger, a professor of international relations at Boston University. Berger noted the challenge that Japan’s factional politics poses to a revision of the country’s official wartime narrative, and suggested that a strong regional structure, such as the European Union, could effectively facilitate reconciliation in Northeast Asia.

Frances Gouda, a professor of political science at the University of Amsterdam, examined the use of Anne Frank and former Indonesian president Sukarno as “icons of memory” in Dutch interpretations of World War Two. She asserted that Frank’s victimization allows people to come to terms with Nazi war crimes, but that Sukarno’s vilification as a Japanese collaborator oversimplifies history and allows the Netherlands to avoid confronting its own colonial past.

Collaboration and resistance

France’s Vichy regime, responsible both for collaborating with the Nazis and acting independently to persecute Jewish citizens, remains a painful and unresolved subject in the country’s contemporary quest for national identity, said Julian Jackson, a professor of history at Queen Mary, University of London. He pointed to French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s act of making a national martyr out of Guy Môquet, a young communist who died resisting the German Occupation, as a key example of the complexities involved in trying to come to terms with France’s past.

Ongoing territorial disputes over islands located between Japan and its neighbors in China and Korea are a product of the unresolved legacy of the wartime era in Asia. Sovereignty over those islands was left deliberately unresolved by the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty which formally ended the war, suggested Alexis Dudden, a professor of history from the University of Connecticut. As a result, the territorial disputes have become a battleground on which larger questions of historical memory about the war are contested, not only by Japanese conservatives but also by Koreans and Chinese, she said.

Former Japanese Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru’s press statement at the San Francisco Peace Treaty.

(U.S. National Archives)

Paths to reconciliation

Gi-Wook Shin, director of Shorenstein APARC and a professor of sociology, suggested that while Europe’s experience with war and reconciliation offers lessons for Asia, significant differences exist between the wartime and post-war situations of the two continents, and that reconciliation in Asia requires time. Increased economic interaction between the countries in Northeast Asia serves less to foster reconciliation, he said, than to spur competition for regional dominance. Shin emphasized that the United States, which has greatly impacted the region’s post-war history, can play a critical role as a facilitator in establishing lasting regional accord.

The Nazi regime’s systematic attempt to completely wipe out all traces of Jewish history and culture in Europe, even as closely bound as it was with Germany’s own traditions, is a unique case, stated Fania Oz-Salzberger, a professor of history at Haifa and Monash Universities. She explored universal elements in the German-Jewish reconciliation experience, noting, like Shin and Chirot, the important element of time that is needed to reflect upon painful events of the past. Oz-Salzberger especially spoke of the healing that takes place at the level of society and culture, sometimes even before governments are ready to reconcile with one another.

Continuing political impacts

Gilbert Rozman, a professor of sociology at Princeton University, suggested that Northeast Asia’s wartime history debates will continue to complicate regional relations unless China, Japan, and Korea reach a point of mutual reconciliation. He noted the role that Japan’s government, in the 1980s during its financial heyday, and more recently, China’s leaders during a similarly strong economic era, have played in prolonging the debate. 

Memories of war are transmitted across the years through a complex process involving multiple actors and they can later influence political behavior, explained MIT political science professor Roger Petersen. He described the process within the context of the Lithuania’s successful declaration of independence from the former Soviet Union in January 1991. Petersen stated that Lithuanian émigrés, in part, helped keep the narrative of Soviet aggression and Lithuanian martyrdom alive until the conditions were right for action many decades later.

The Colonialism, Collaboration, and Criminality conference grew out of Shorenstein APARC’s Divided Memories and Reconciliation project, which for the past three years has examined the legacy of war-era memories in Northeast Asia and the United States and explored possible means of reconciliation. Shorenstein APARC has already published the first in a series of four books based on the project, and an edited volume of papers from the June 2011 conference is forthcoming next year.

Did the youthful rioters who roamed the streets of London, Manchester and other British cities expect to see their photos scrutinized by angry Internet users, keen to identify the miscreants? In the immediate aftermath of the riots, many cyber-vigilantes turned to Facebook, Flickr and other social networking sites to study pictures of the violence. Some computer-savvy members even volunteered to automate the process by using software to compare rioters' faces with faces pictured elsewhere on the Internet.

The rioting youths were not exactly Luddites either. They used BlackBerrys to send their messages, avoiding more visible platforms like Facebook and Twitter. It's telling that they looted many stores selling fancy electronics. The path is short, it would seem, from "digital natives" to "digital restives."

As social media's role in the London riots is explored, British politicians are considering whether temporarily banning or censoring sites like Twitter and Facebook would quell or enflame the tensions, Cassell Bryan-Low reports from London.

Technology has empowered all sides in this skirmish: the rioters, the vigilantes, the government and even the ordinary citizens eager to help. But it has empowered all of them to different degrees. As the British police, armed with the latest facial-recognition technology, go through the footage captured by their numerous closed-circuit TV cameras and study chat transcripts and geolocation data, they are likely to identify many of the culprits.

Such regimes are eager to see what kind of precedents will be set by Western officials as they wrestle with these evolving technologiesAuthoritarian states are monitoring these developments closely. Chinese state media, for one, blamed the riots on a lack of Chinese-style controls over social media. Such regimes are eager to see what kind of precedents will be set by Western officials as they wrestle with these evolving technologies. They hope for at least partial vindication of their own repressive policies.

Some British politicians quickly called on the BlackBerry maker Research in Motion to suspend its messaging service to avoid an escalation of the riots. On Thursday, Prime Minister David Cameron said that the government should consider blocking access to social media for people who plot violence or disorder.

After the recent massacre in Norway, many European politicians voiced their concern that anonymous anti-immigrant comments on the Web were inciting extremism. They are now debating ways to limit online anonymity.

Does the Internet really need an overhaul of norms, laws and technologies that gives more control to governments? When the Egyptian secret police can purchase Western technology that allows them to eavesdrop on the Skype calls of dissidents, it seems unlikely that American and European intelligence agencies have no means of listening the calls of, say, a loner in Norway.

We tolerate such drastic proposals only because acts of terror briefly deprive us of the ability to think straight. We are also distracted by the universal tendency to imagine technology as a liberating force; it keeps us from noticing that governments already have more power than is healthy.

The domestic challenges posed by the Internet demand a measured, cautious response in the West. Leaders in Beijing, Tehran and elsewhere are awaiting our wrong-headed moves, which would allow them to claim an international license for dealing with their own protests. The yare also looking for tools and strategies that might improve their own digital surveillance.

After violent riots in 2009, Chinese officials had no qualms about cutting off the Xinjiang region's Internet access for 10 months. Still, they would surely welcome a formal excuse for such drastic measures if the West should decide to take similar measures in dealing with disorder. Likewise, any plan in the U.S. or Europe to engage in online behavioral profiling—trying to identify future terrorists based on their tweets, gaming habits or social networking activity—is likely to boost the already booming data-mining industry. It would not take long for such tools to find their way to repressive states.

But something even more important is at stake here. To the rest of the world, the efforts of Western nations, and especially the U.S., to promote democracy abroad have often smacked of hypocrisy. How could the West lecture others while struggling to cope with its own internal social contradictions? Other countries could live with this hypocrisy as long as the West held firm in promoting its ideals abroad. But this double game is harder to maintain in the Internet era.

In their concern to stop not just mob violence but commercial crimes like piracy and file-sharing, Western politicians have proposed new tools for examining Web traffic and changes in the basic architecture of the Internet to simplify surveillance. What they fail to see is that such measures can also affect the fate of dissidents in places like China and Iran. Likewise, how European politicians handle online anonymity will influence the policies of sites like Facebook, which, in turn, will affect the political behavior of those who use social media in the Middle East.

Should America and Europe abandon any pretense of even wanting to promote democracy abroad? Or should they try to figure out how to increase the resilience of their political institutions in the face of the Internet? As much as our leaders might congratulate themselves for embracing the revolutionary potential of these new technologies, they have shown little evidence of being able to think about them in a nuanced and principled way.

Beyond North Korea, co-edited by Byung Kwan Kim, Gi-Wook Shin, and David Straub, is the first in a new series of policy-related studies on contemporary South Korea sponsored by the Koret Foundation of San Francisco. In this volume, top American and Korean academics and officials offer a fresh and timely perspective on traditional and non-traditional threats to South Korea's security and provide authoritative advice for meeting them. The book is based on research findings from the first Koret conference, Enhancing South Korea's Security: The U.S. Alliance and Beyond, held March 2009.