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.

Ten years after President Bush attempted to reduce U.S. involvement in statebuilding, America and its allies are more heavily involved in it than ever before.  There simply are no viable alternatives to stabilizing fragile states. And yet the tremendous sacrifices we make to rebuild states too often produce regimes where corruption and other abuses of power prevail. In turn these undermine the legitimacy of the regimes and render stability ever more elusive.

The international community may share responsibility for creating this accountability gap. In Afghanistan, the rush to build up the power of the government and to respect its sovereignty have weakened constraints that would subject that power to the will of the Afghan people.

Amid struggles over flawed elections and corruption these past two years, practitioners on the ground have experimented with new approaches to close the accountability gap in Afghanistan. NATO military approaches to governance-led operations have been matched by parallel civilian efforts to work from the bottom-up in engaging Afghan communities and helping them seek solutions through the nascent institutions of the Afghan government. 

These efforts face an uphill challenge, but represent the best hope for closing an accountability gap that threatens all statebuilding efforts. This symposium at Stanford University will bring together practitioners and experts to share experiences and explore options to improve the contemporary practice of statebuilding.

One often forgets the battlefields that CISAC military fellows leave behind.

They come to Stanford to spend an academic year doing research and mentoring students. They throw off their uniforms and put on their jeans to engage with scholars across the campus. One rarely gets a bird’s-eye view of what life is like for them out in the field, much less in actual combat with a hostile, thinking enemy.

But one Afghanistan War documentary gives viewers a rare look at what one CISAC military fellow, U.S.  Army Col. J.B. Vowell, does in his real job: fight Taliban and al-Qaida insurgents while trying to keep his soldiers alive.

A rough cut of the “"The Hornet's Nest"” was recently screened on campus for Stanford faculty and staff, war veterans and military fellows from CISAC and the Hoover Institution. Former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, a CISAC faculty member, introduced the film and called the battle footage “remarkable.”

“The Hornet’s Nest” is about the soldiers – the survivors, their commanders, and those who lost their lives – in Operation Strong Eagle III, a battalion air assault in 2011 to seize insurgent-controlled strongholds along the Pakistan border. Their mission was to open up opportunities for local governance to reach Afghans under Taliban control.

The film is also about a father-and-son broadcast team who would document the assault, as well as the respect and shared risk between the soldiers and the embedded journalists.

Vowell is seen preparing his troops for what would become one of the deadliest confrontations with the Taliban in Afghanistan’s Kunar Province. The region is dubbed the “heart of darkness” as it’s considered the world’s most dangerous terrain for U.S. forces. Its steep mountainsides are dotted with caves used by insurgents for easy ambush.

“They don’t know what’s about to hit them,” Vowell says of the Taliban as he preps his No Slack Battalion of the 101^st Airborne. “That will teach them to shoot at my soldiers.”

It is March 29, 2011, and Vowell is conducting the final rehearsal for Operation Strong Eagle III. The mission is to clear the area of insurgents and lay the groundwork for an incoming platoon that would attempt to assassinate Taliban leader Qari Zia Rahman.

“This is his home. This is his sanctuary,” Vowell tells his men. “No one has ever dared to go in there. You think this is going to cause a ruckus? I think so.”

What follows is the largest battle the battalion has seen since Vietnam. Over nine days, Vowell’s battalion tried to fight their way into these villages – and viewers are taken along for a harrowing, 90-minute ride. The men are pinned down on rugged mountaintops and in abandoned mud-and-brick compounds, exhausted but inching forward to rescue their fallen and keep on fighting.

The footage was taken with hand-held cameras by veteran broadcast correspondent Mike Boettcher and his rookie son, Carlos. Viewers witness the first father-son team embedded with the U.S. military rekindle a relationship that had become strained.

“I was just a face in a box,” Boettcher says, referring to his more than three decades of combat work overseas, typically missing his son’s milestones as he grew up. “In the bottom of my heart I knew that Carlos was adrift and I felt that I had let Carlos down.”

When Carlos asks his father if he can join him in Afghanistan, Boettcher figures he can teach him how to work a camera under fire. You see Carlos go from a baby-faced young man to an earnest reporter practicing his on-air dispatches during his yearlong embed. He trudges up one hill as bullets whiz by and then you hear him go down and see the camera go still.

“The one thing I could not let happen was to let my son die,” Boettcher says. “I thought I had lost my son; that I had lost my chance to be a father.”

But, he adds: “We had landed in the hornet’s nest; this was command and control for the Taliban right there in that valley. And they were going to make us pay.”

Carlos survives, eventually goes back to ABC News headquarters in New York and becomes a producer for the broadcast network. The two would winner an Emmy for their coverage.

Viewers also get to know the soldiers of Strong Eagle III, making it particularly hard when you learn six of them have been killed. You see one soldier with a beautiful smile joking with his buddies before he is killed; the soldier who had tried to save him laments he should have run faster down the hill toward the fallen man.

The film ends with sorrowful coverage of the memorial devoted to the six that was conducted in Afghanistan days after the battle.  Soldiers kiss the helmets of the fallen; officers kneel, bow their heads and cry.

CISAC military fellow and U.S. Army Col. J.B. Vowell in Kunar Province, Afghanistan, 2011. Photo Credit: Justin Roberts

“Everything has a cost in combat and it’s hard to know that the orders you gave cost some men their lives,” Vowell says when asked by an audience member at the Stanford screening how he deals with the death of his own men.

Regardless of one’s political beliefs about the second-longest war in American history, after Vietnam, the footage reminds viewers that this largely forgotten war has been fought – and covered – with tremendous bravery.

Nearly 3,000 American and allied troops have been killed in the war, launched to avenge the deaths of nearly 3,000 civilians in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. As many as 17,500 Afghan civilians have lost their lives; two dozen journalists have been killed covering the conflict.

“We felt like we needed to leave behind some kind of historical document … and great commanders like JB embraced having the cameras there,” Boettcher says, sitting on Stanford’s Cemex Auditorium stage with Vowell and co-director David Salzberg. “They wanted the stories of their men and women told. Americans must know that there is a cost to be paid; it’s being paid every day.”

An audience member asks Vowell if his men resented having to protect the journalists.

He says his troops took no more precautions to protect the father-son team than they did one another. It took time for the soldiers to embrace the Boettchers, but once they realized they had not just parachuted in for one or two stories, they became part of the battalion.

“Folks like me in uniform just have a visceral reaction against the media, as it’s usually a bad story when they show up,” he says. “The journalists who are better are the ones who share the risk with soldiers. It’s not a camaraderie thing; it’s a respect thing. And if they’re willing to be in there, not just be there for a day or two, but to really be there – that gains respect of soldiers and they trusted Mike to tell their story.”

Vowell spent the academic year making recommendations for the strategy, mission and force structure in Afghanistan after combat troops are withdrawn next year. His project was submitted to the U. S. Army War College and Perry served as his faculty adviser.

CISAC’s other military fellows this academic year were U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Mark Pye and U.S. Army Col. Daniel S. Hurlbut.

“It has been a tremendous opportunity for me to spend a year with CISAC and focus on strategic and policy issues relevant to U.S. national security”, says Vowell.  “I had the opportunity to tell the Army’s story of the last 12 years in Afghanistan as well as research the best policy recommendation for our way ahead in the region. Only CISAC could afford me that opportunity to combine my experiences with the best cross-disciplined faculty in the nation to further my research. I know I will be better able to serve my command in the future with the 101^st Airborne Division as a result.”

Vowell assumes command of the 3^rd Brigade Combat Team, 101^st Airborne Division on Aug. 1 and is likely to do another tour in Afghanistan next year.

Co-director Salzberg spends much of his time traveling the country organizing private screenings for Gold Star families – those who have lost service members on the battlefield – and preparing the documentary for a nationwide release on Veteran’s Day.

“I’ve been in this business for a long time and have worked on a lot of different films,” says Salzberg, a veteran documentary and feature film director and producer of such films as “The Perfect Game” and “La Source.”

“Sometimes you have an opportunity to do something that is more important than a film,” Salzberg said. “If you talk to these young men and women who serve, they really just want the public to know what they’re going through. They don’t want a parade or a medal. We wanted to show that – and we are honored that these guys let us into their lives.”

Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is pleased to announce that undergraduate senior honors student, Anna Barrett Schickele, received the Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research. This university award is given to the top ten percent of honors theses in social science, science, and engineering.

Schickele's thesis entitled, "One Drop At A Time," examines the factors that inform farmers' decisions to use modern irrigation systems in the Lurín Valley of Peru, where she spent several months conducting fieldwork with a Lima-based NGO. Schickele — a public policy major —was able to collect primary data through interviews with farmers and fieldworkers to inform her research study that includes policy recommendations to the NGO community and government officials.

Anna Schickele (center) with Francis Fukuyama (left) and Larry Diamond (right).

Martin Carnoy, the Vida Jacks Professor of Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, served as Schickele's thesis advisor together with Rosamond L. Naylor, the director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment at FSI.

"Ana's thesis is an important contribution to our understanding of the barriers and openings for stimulating agricultural development among subsistence farmers," said Carnoy. "Her original insights make the thesis particularly valuable for those addressing development issues in the world’s poorest regions."

In August, Schickele will begin a research position at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

CDDRL's best thesis award was given to Kabir Sawhney, a management science and engineering major, who wrote his thesis on the effect of regime type and the propensity to default on sovereign debt. Advised by Professor of Political Science Gary Cox, Swahney cited the cases of Romania in the 1980s and more recently of Greece to conclude that the quality of government — rather than regime type alone — determines whether a country chooses to default. 

After graduation. Sawhney will join the consulting firm Accenture as an analyst in their San Francisco office.  

Three honors students' received fellowships from Stanford's Haas Center of Public Service to pursue public service-related work after graduation. Keith Calix and Imani Franklin both received the Tom Ford Fellowship in Philanthropy and will be working in New York for grant-making foundations, and Lina Hidalgo received the Omidyar Network Postgraduate Fellowship to work with an international organization.     

The CDDRL Undergraduate Senior Honors Program is an interdisciplinary honors program led by Francis Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at FSI. The program recruits a diverse group of talented students interested in writing original theses on topics impacting the field of democracy, development, and the rule of law. During the year-long program, students write their thesis in consultation with a CDDRL faculty member, participate in research workshops, and travel to Washington, D.C. for "honors college."

The nine members of the graduating class of 2013 CDDRL undergraduate honors students include:

Climate change is already affecting crop production around the world through rising temperatures, changes in rainfall patterns and increasing CO2 in the atmosphere. A new Stanford study published June 14 in Environmental Research Letters examines extreme heat effects on crops during the flowering period and finds the world's staple crops are increasingly at risk.

We are beginning to see exposure to reproductive extreme heat for wheat in Central & South Asia and for rice in South Asia. Maize (corn) harvested area exposed to extreme heat is projected to grow from 15% in the 2000s to 44% by 2050. By 2050, all crops will see increased exposure, especially in tropical areas. For rice, the primary growing areas in South, Southeast and East Asia will become increasingly risky, whereas for wheat, Russia, Central Asia, and the Middle East will continue to be problematic.