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A concept note about setting up an international program for studying the effects of the emergence of biofuels on global poverty and food security. 

The recent global expansion of biofuels production is an intense topic of discussion in both the popular and academic press. Much of the debate surrounding biofuels has focused on narrow issues of energy efficiency and fossil fuel substitution, to the exclusion of broader questions concerning the effects of large-scale biofuels development on commodity markets, land use patterns, and the global poor. There is reason to think these effects will be very large. The majority of poor people living in chronic hunger are net consumers of staple food crops; poor households spend a large share of their budget on starchy staples; and as a result, price hikes for staple agricultural commodities have the largest impact on poor consumers. For example, the rapidly growing use of corn for ethanol in the U.S. has recently sent corn prices soaring, boosting farmer incomes domestically but causing riots in the streets of Mexico City over tortilla prices. Preliminary analysis suggests that such price movements, which directly threaten hundreds of millions of households around the world, could be more than a passing phenomenon. Rapid biofuels development is occurring throughout the developed and developing world, transforming commodity markets and increasingly linking food prices to a volatile energy sector. Yet there remains little understanding of how these changes will affect global poverty and food security, and an apprehension on the part of many governments as to whether and how to participate in the biofuels revolution.

We propose an international collaborative effort to:

  • Understand and quantify the effects of expanding biofuels production on agricultural commodity markets, food security, and poverty;
  • Develop training programs and policy tools to harness the benefits and mitigate the damages from such expansion on both local and global scales; and
  • Build an international network of scholars and government officials devoted to studying and managing biofuels development and its social consequences
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Scott Rozelle
Rosamond L. Naylor
Kenneth Cassman
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The Pinochet Case

Patricio Guzman's The Pinochet Case investigates the legal origins of the case against Augusto Pinochet, the general who overthrew President Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973. This documentary follows the legal cases that ultimately led to Pinochet being arrested and tried for his crimes against humanity committed over the 25 years that he ruled Chile.

Carlos Castresana received his law degree in 1979 from Complutense University, Madrid, Spain. He served as a District and Examine Judge, and Court Magistrate for a number of years, before becoming a member of the Public Prosecutors of Spain, where he worked in the Anti-drug and Anti-corruption Special Offices. In 2005, he was appointed Prosecutor of the Supreme Court. He was also a professor of criminal law at the University Carlos III, Madrid.

Mr. Castresana authored the formal complaint and subsequent reports in the Pinochet Case before the Audiencia Nacional in Spain. He has served as an expert in international legal cooperation and other issues in Europe and Latin America, under appointment of the United Nations, European Union, and Council of Europe. He received the Human Rights National Award in Spain in 1997, was awarded the Doctorate Honoris causa from the Guadalajara University, Mexico in 2003, and the Certificate of Honor from the City and County of San Francisco in 2004. Mr. Castresana teaches courses on human rights in Latin America and international criminal law and is coordinator of Project H32, in the United Nation's Office of Narcotics and Crime in Monterrey, Mexico.

Sponsored by the Stanford Law School, the Program on Global Justice, the Forum on Contemporary Europe, the Stanford Film Lab, VPUE, and the Introduction to the Humanities Program.

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Carlos Castresana Coordinator of Project H32 Speaker the United Nations' Office of Narcotics and Crime
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Santiago Levy is a Mexican economist and former General Director of the Mexican Social Security Institute. As director of the Institute, he championed pension reform and extended social security coverage to rural workers. Prior to that, Levy was Chief economist and head of the Research Department of the Inter-American Development Bank (2001 - 2002). From 1994 to 2000, he was Deputy Minister at the Ministry of Finance in Mexico, where he was the force behind Progresa-Oportunidades, Mexico's widely acclaimed incentive-based health, nutrition and education program for the poor.

Levy has taught at Boston University, where he was the Chair of the Economics Department. He has published a number of books and numerous academic and newspaper articles on economic development, budgetary and tax policy, trade policy reform, social policy, rural and regional development.

Santiago Levy obtained his, B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Boston University.

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Alberto Díaz-Cayeros's book explores the politics of fiscal authority, focusing on the centralization of taxation in Latin America during the twentieth century. The book studies this issue in great detail for the case of Mexico. The political (and fiscal) fragmentation associated with civil war at the beginning of the century was eventually transformed into a highly centralized regime. The analysis shows that fiscal centralization can best be studied as the consequence of a bargain struck between self-interested regional and national politicians. Fiscal centralization was more extreme in Mexico than in most other places in the world, but the challenges and problems tackled by Mexican politicians were not unique. The book thus analyzes fiscal centralization and the origins of intergovernmental financial transfers in the other Latin American federal regimes, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela. The analysis sheds light on the factors that explain the consolidation of tax authority in developing countries. Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics
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Pamela Constable is the deputy foreign editor of The Washington Post. Previously she covered South Asia for The Washington Post for several years from April 1999, with extensive coverage of Afghanistan as well as both India and Pakistan.n She continues to visit and report from Afghanistan.

Before arriving in New Delhi in 1999, Constable worked for The Post from 1994 to 1998 covering immigration and Hispanic affairs in the Washington area, and reported from Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti and Cuba.

Prior to joining The Post, Constable worked for The Boston Globe as deputy Washington bureau chief and foreign policy reporter from June to September 1994. From 1983 until 1992, she was The Globe's roving foreign correspondent, Latin America correspondent and diplomatic correspondent. During this time she reported from Haiti, Chile, Peru, Argentina, Cuba, Colombia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Mexico, South Korea, the Philippines, the Soviet Union and Brazil, as well as in Washington.

Her latest book is Fragments of Grace: My Search For Meaning in the Strife of South Asia. She is the co-author with Arturo Valenzuela of A Nation of Enemies: Chile Under Pinochet and has written articles for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Current History and other publications. She was awarded an Alicia Patterson Fellowship in 1990 and the Maria Moors Cabot Prize for coverage of Latin America in 1993. Constable is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She received a B.A. from Brown University.

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Pamela Constable The Washington Post Speaker
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The Center for Science, Technology and Security Policy at the American Association for the Advancement of Science has assembled a panel of experts to examine the technical aspects of the Reliable Replacement Warhead program. The speaker will discuss the preliminary findings of this panel.

Benn Tannenbaum is Project Director at the Center for Science, Technology and Security Policy. Tannenbaum works on a variety of projects for CSTSP, including drafting policy briefs, tracking legislation, serving as liaison with MacArthur-funded centers and the security policy community, organizing workshops and other meetings, attending Congressional hearings and conducting topical research. He testified before the House Homeland Security Committee on radiation portal monitors. Tannenbaum also serves on the American Physical Society's Panel on Public Affairs and on the Program Committee for the Forum on Physics and Society. Prior to joining AAAS, Tannenbaum worked as a senior research analyst for the Federation of American Scientists. He worked extensively on the FAS paper "Flying Blind"; this paper explores ways to increase the quality and consistency of science advising to the federal government. Before joining FAS, Tannenbaum served as the 2002-2003 American Physical Society Congressional Science Fellow. During his fellowship, Tannenbaum worked for Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-MA) on nonproliferation issues. Before his fellowship, Tannenbaum worked as a postdoctoral rellow at the University of California, Los Angeles. At UCLA, he was involved in the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland, and the Collider Detector Facility at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago. He received his PhD in particle physics from the University of New Mexico in 1997. His dissertation involved a search for evidence of supersymmetry. None was found.

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This paper was discussed at the Global Justice workshop on October 20, 2006.

Abstract of Richard Locke's "Beyond Corporate Codes of Conduct: Work Organization and Labor Standards in Two Mexican Garment Factories":

This paper presents a matched pair case study of two factories supplying Nike, the world's largest athletic footwear and apparel company. These two factories have many similarities - both are in Mexico, both are in the apparel industry, both produce more or less the same products for Nike (and other brands) and both are subject to the same code of conduct. On the surface, both factories appear to have similar employment (i.e., recruitment, training, remuneration) practices and they receive comparable scores when audited by Nike's compliance staff. However, actual labor conditions exist between these two factories. What drives these differences in working conditions? What does this imply for traditional systems of monitoring and codes of conduct? Field research conducted at these two factories reveals that beyond the code of conduct and various monitoring efforts aimed at enforcing it, workplace conditions and labor standards are shaped by very different patterns of work organization and human resource management policies.

About the Author

Richard Locke is professor of political science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is also faculty director of the MIT Sloan Fellows program and co-director of the MIT Italy program. His research focuses on economic development, comparative labor relations, and political economy.

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The anticipated title from Cambridge University Press has been released in hard-cover and is available for purchase. Edited by PESD director, David Victor, Rice professor Amy Jaffe, and PESD fellow Mark Hayes, the book sheds light on the political challenges which may accompany a shift to a natural gas-fed world.

Energy is on the front burner and will stay there, so this book has special value. Read it and learn about the topic of today and tomorrow and tomorrow.

- George P. Shultz, United States Secretary of State, 1982-1989

The coming phase of energy industry development is bringing with it the rapid globalisation of the gas business. Long term take-or-pay contracts, which align supply and demand and which formed the foundation of all successful projects in the past, are coming under pressure from liberalisation. But security of supply still depends on security of demand: this timely and authoritative study demonstrates that, if gas is to

fulfil its enormous promise as an energy source, new ways must be found to establish the confidence of both sides that secure supply will be matched by reliable demand

- Frank Chapman, CEO, BG Group plc

This is a very valuable addition to the global literature on energy issues and energy policy ... Natural Gas and Geopolitics goes deep into the global gas policy issues that affect critical US energy policy, not only looking backward but helping understand what may happen as the global natural gas market develops.

- Bill Richardson, Governor of New Mexico, United States Secretary of Energy, 1998 2001

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Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
alberto_diaz-cayeros_2024.jpg MA, PhD

Alberto Díaz-Cayeros is a Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and co-director of the Democracy Action Lab (DAL), based at FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law (CDDRL). His research interests include federalism, poverty relief, indigenous governance, political economy of health, violence, and citizen security in Mexico and Latin America.

He is the author of Federalism, Fiscal Authority and Centralization in Latin America (Cambridge, reedited 2016), coauthored with Federico Estévez and Beatriz Magaloni, of The Political Logic of Poverty Relief (Cambridge, 2016), and of numerous journal articles and book chapters.

He is currently working on a project on cartography and the developmental legacies of colonial rule and governance in indigenous communities in Mexico.

From 2016 to 2023, he was the Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford University, and from 2009 to 2013, Director of the Center for US-Mexican Studies at UCSD, the University of California, San Diego.

Affiliated faculty at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Co-director, Democracy Action Lab
Director of the Center for Latin American Studies (2016 - 2023)
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Alberto Diaz-Cayeros Assistant Professor of Political Science, CDDRL Faculty Associate Speaker Stanford

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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations
Professor of Political Science
beatriz_magaloni_2024.jpg MA, PhD

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.

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Beatriz Magaloni Assistant Professor of Political Science, CDDRL faculty associate Speaker Stanford
Barry Weingast Ward C. Krebs Family Professor and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Professor, by courtesy, of Economics Speaker Stanford
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Nearly all male adults illegally crossing the US-Mexico border, most of whom are Mexicans, are seeking employment, although a few may be terrorists. We are particularly interested in the impact of immigration strategies on the probability for an OTM (Other than Mexican) terrorist to enter the country, which is based on four models: (a) Discrete Choice Model, (b) Border Apprehension Model, (c) DRO (Detention and Removal Operations) Model, and (d) Illegal Wage Model.

These four models explain the inter-relationship among four key variables -- crossing rate, apprehension probability, removal probability, and illegal wage, which are also affected by other factors, such as detention policy, DRO beds, work site enforcement and legalization policy.

Model (a) introduces a combination of the multinomial-logit model with backward recurrence; model (b) is mainly based on the data we have and the previous research work; model (c) is a 2-class priority queueing analysis with inhomogeneous incoming rate; and model (d) includes some economic theory. Numerical results and discussions are given based on the model parameters existing or estimated from the data provided.

Yifan Liu is currently a CISAC science fellow, and Ph.D. student in the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering at Stanford University. His Ph.D. dissertation, under the supervision of Lawrence Wein at the Graduate school of Business, uses operation research methods to construct mathematical models for homeland security issues, and solve these models both analytically and numerically.

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Yifan Liu CISAC Science Fellow Speaker
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