Update:  In the elections held on July 21, Hirofumi Takinami was voted in as a member of the upper house.  Takinami won the Fukui District, garnering over 70 percent of the votes, which is the largest vote margin in the history of the district.  Takinami is not only the first non-incumbent to be elected in 18 years, but also the youngest candidate ever to be elected in the district.

The forthcoming Japanese upper-house election scheduled for July 21 will determine whether the ruling Liberal Democratic Party-led coalition, which returned to office last December, can gain a powerful majority in both houses of Japan’s parliament. But the election will also have a particular interest for the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. Hirofumi Takinami, one of the LDP candidates for the upper house, running in the Fukui Prefecture, is a proud alum of Shorenstein APARC. Takinami spent two years (2009-2011) at Stanford as a visiting fellow in the Corporate Affiliates Program at Shorenstein APARC while he was employed in Japan’s Ministry of Finance. During his time here, he worked closely with APARC faculty, including former Ambassador to Japan and Shorenstein Distinguished Fellow Dr. Michael Armacost and Dr. Phillip Lipscy, on research that focused on the political economy of the financial crises in Japan and the United States. Takinami also co-authored a paper with Dr. Lipscy comparing financial crisis response in Japan and the United States, which is forthcoming in the Japanese Journal of Political Science.      

Over the past few months, Takinami has been busy travelling all over Fukui Prefecture, which has received attention in recent years due to a city that shares its name with the current U.S. president, Obama. On some days Takinami might travel two hundred miles, visit more than ten different places, and meet a thousand people, but Takinami feels that the hard work will all be worthwhile. 

When asked what inspired him to run for office, Takinami replied:

Starting from 1989, the ruling party of Japan has been annoyed by its weak power in the upper house. Thus, the upper house has been the center of a “political war” in Japan, which was one of the major reasons for the delayed policies of Japan during the “two lost decades.” In order to regain a decisive and progressive Japan, I determined I would run for the election.

Should Takinami be successful in his campaign, his term as a member of the upper house, or sangi-in, will be six years.  Lipscy commented that Takinami’s chances for victory are very high: “Not only is Takinami well-qualified for the position, but the LDP is traditionally strong in Fukui and riding high on the popularity of Abenomics,” referring to the economic growth policies being pursued by the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Should Takinami win office, we hope his experience here at Stanford will help to contribute to his goals for Japan.

According to a common view in Mexico today, the attempt to transform Mexican political institutions according to liberal values since the nineteenth century has been a complete failure. On this view, the reasons for this failure are, primarily, that liberal values and ideas were “foreign” and “imported”, such that they could hardly have taken root in a society that had recently emerged from three centuries of colonial rule and was, therefore, backwards and “traditional”. Scholars often complain that liberals failed to realize the values of freedom and equality, that there is no rule of law, no public culture of toleration, and no effective enforcement of fundamental individual rights either civil or political.

Many resource dependent states have to varying degrees, failed to provide for the welfare of their own populations, could threaten global energy markets, and could pose security risks for the United States and other countries.  Many are in Africa, but also Central Asia (Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan), Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Burma, East Timor), and South America (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador) Some have only recently become – or are about to become – significant resource exporters.  Many have histories of conflict and poor governance.  The recent boom and decline in commodity prices – the largest price shock since the 1970s – will almost certainly cause them special difficulties.  The growing role of India and China, as commodity importers and investors, makes the policy landscape even more challenging.

We believe there is much the new administration can learn from both academic research, and recent global initiatives, about how to address the challenge of poorly governed states that are dependent on oil, gas, and mineral exports.  Over the last eight years there has been a wealth of new research on the special problems that resource dependence can cause in low-income countries – including violent conflict, authoritarian rule, economic volatility, and disappointing growth.  The better we understand the causes of these problems, the more we can learn about how to mitigate them.

There has also been a new set of policy initiatives to address these issues: the Kimberley Process, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, the World Bank’s new “EITI plus plus,” Norway’s Oil for Development initiative, and the incipient Resource Charter.  NGOs have played an important role in most of these initiatives; key players include Global Witness, the Publish What You Pay campaign, the Revenue Watch Institute, Oxfam America, and an extensive network of civil society organizations in the resource-rich countries themselves.

Some of these initiatives have been remarkably successful.  The campaign against ‘blood diamonds,’ through the Kimberley Process, has reduced the trade in illicit diamonds to a fraction of its former level, and may have helped curtail conflicts in Angola, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.  Many other initiatives are so new they have not been have not been carefully evaluated.

This workshop is designed to bring together people in the academic and policy worlds to identify lessons from this research, and from these policy initiatives, that can inform US policy towards resource-dependent poorly states in the new administration.

On May 10-11, 2010 the Program on Good Governance and Political Reform in the Arab World at CDDRL held its international inaugural conference. In line with the Arab Reform Program's vision, the conference featured internationally renowned scholars, activists, and practitioners from the Arab world, Europe and the United States. Over the two days, conference participants engaged in multidisciplinary debates addressing hard politics as well as soft politics, and analyzing political reform from different angles, with panels on the economy, state systems, the media, civil society, political opposition, youth politics, and the role of international actors. Problems facing political reform in the Arab world today were discussed and scrutinized, as were possible paths forward. The conference debates unearthed the need for a deep understanding of the problems facing political reform in the region that is driven by an analysis of long-term and often ignored issues that are at the core of political developments. The debates also highlighted that problems and prospects for reform are different in each Arab country because each country has its own unique set of issues and because within each country different ethnic groups, classes, and locales have different takes on and stakes in political developments. The conference closed with a speech by Dr. Saad Eddin Ibrahim.

Egyptian activists made history in February 2011 when they overturned a thirty-year dictatorship, in part thanks to their mastery of social media.

On April 4, the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University together with the Cloud to Street Initiative, will be holding a Digital Townhall meeting to connect activists who were leading the protest movement in Cairo with researchers at Stanford, Harvard, and the University of British Columbia. This will be an opportunity to hear directly from activists about their experiences leading protests, using social media to influence events, and what assistance they could use to increase their influence going forward. 

The format will include a panel of four activists speaking by live video feed, with participants in North America sending questions by chat. You may log in to the conversation from any internet connection, or you may join us in person from the CISAC conference room in Encina Hall.

Early in the Supreme Court oral arguments in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., Justice Kennedy alerted the plaintiffs' lawyer that, for him, "the case turns on this:... 'No other nation in the world permits its court to exercise universal civil jurisdiction over alleged extraterritorial human rights abuses to which the nation has no connection." That statement, quoting an amicus brief filed for one of the defendants, is true when taken literally, but is misleading inasmuch as it fails to take into account that analogous suits are allowed in teh civil-law world of Continental Europe if one knows how to go beyond the literal, as transposing from one legal system into another requies. Universal jurisdiction for jus cogens violations has found a fooring in the criminal law of civilian States for reasons tied to deep systemic attributes not shared by the United States legal order.

Turkey redefined its geographical security environment over the last decade by deepening its engagement with neighboring regions, especially with the Middle East. The Arab spring, however, challenged not only the authoritarian regimes in the region but also Turkish foreign policy strategy. This strategy was based on cooperation with the existing regimes and did not prioritize the democracy promotion dimension of the issue. The upheavals in the Arab world, therefore, created a dilemma between ethics and self-interest in Turkish foreign policy. Amid the flux of geopolitical shifts in one of the world’s most unstable regions, Turkish foreign policy-making elites are attempting to reformulate their strategies to overcome this inherent dilemma. The central argument of the present paper is that Turkey could make a bigger and more constructive impact in the region by trying to take a more detached stand and through controlled activism. Thus, Turkey could take action through the formation of coalitions and in close alignments with the United States and Europe rather than basing its policies on a self-attributed unilateral pro-activism.

Why have militarized crackdowns on drug cartels had wildly divergent outcomes, sometimes exacerbating cartel-state conflict, as in Mexico and, for decades, in Brazil, but sometimes reducing violence, as with Rio de Janeiro's new 'Pacification' (UPP) strategy?  CDDRL-CISAC Post Doctoral Fellow Benjamin Lessing will distinguish key logics of violence, focusing on violent corruption--cartels' use of coercive force in the negotiation of bribes. Through this channel, crackdowns can lead to increased fighting unless the intensity of state repression is made conditional on cartels' use of violence--a key difference between Mexico and Brazil.