Rising leaders from a diverse group of nations in transition, including China, Russia, Ukraine, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Egypt, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Nigeria arrived on campus on July 25 for a three-week seminar as Draper Hills Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development. Initiated by FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) six years ago, the program has created a network of some 139 leaders from 62 transitioning countries.  This year's exceptional class of  23 fellows includes a deputy minister of Ukraine, current and former members of parliament (including a deputy speaker), leading attorneys and rule of law experts, civic activists, journalists, international development practitioners, and founders of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). (One fellow needed to withdraw because he was named to the Cabinet of the new Philippine president, Noynoy Aquino).

Draper Hills Summer Fellows are innovative, courageous, and committed leaders, who strive to improve governance, enhance civic participation, and invigorate development under very challenging circumstances"
- Larry Diamond"Draper Hills Summer Fellows are innovative, courageous, and committed leaders, who strive to improve governance, enhance civic participation, and invigorate development under very challenging circumstances," says CDDRL Director Larry Diamond. "This year's fellows are an inspiring group. They have come here to learn from us, but even more so from one another. And we will learn much from them, about the progress they are making and the obstacles they confront as they work to build democracy, improve government accountability, strengthen the rule of law, energize civil society, and enhance the institutional environment for broadly shared economic growth."

The three-week seminar is taught by an interdisciplinary team of leading Stanford faculty. In addition to Diamond, faculty include FSI Senior Fellow and CDDRL Deputy Director Kathryn Stoner; Stanford President Emeritus Gerhard Casper; FSI Deputy Director and political science Professor Stephen D. Krasner; Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow Francis Fukuyama; professor of political science, philosophy, and law Joshua Cohen; professor of pediatrics and Stanford Health Policy core faculty Paul H. Wise; visiting associate professor Beth van Schaack; FSI Senior Fellow Helen Stacy; Walter P. Falcon, deputy director, Program on Food Security and the Environment; Erik Jensen, co-director of the Stanford Law School's Rule of Law Program; Avner Greif, professor of economics; Rick Aubry, lecturer in management, Stanford Graduate School of Business; and Nicholas Hope, director, Stanford Center on International Development.

Other leading experts who will engage the fellows include President of the National Endowment for Democracy Carl Gershman, United States Court of Appeals Judge Pamela Rymer, International Center on Nonviolent Conflict founding chair Peter Ackerman, Omidyar Network partner Matt Halprin, Conservation International's Olivier Langrand, executives of leading Silicon Valley companies, such as Google and Facebook, and media and nonprofit organizations in the Bay Area.  Michael McFaul, a Stanford political science professor and former CDDRL director, who now serves on the National Security Council as President Obama's chief advisor on Russia, will come to campus to teach a session on U.S. foreign policy in the Obama administration.

The demanding, but compelling curriculum will devote the first week of the seminar to defining the fundamentals of democracy, good governance, economic development, and the rule of law.  In the second week, faculty will turn to democratic and economic transitions and the feedback mechanisms between democracy, development, and a predictable rule of law. This week will include offerings on liberation technology, social entrepreneurship, and issues raised by development and the environment.  The third week will turn to the critical - and often controversial - role of international assistance to foster and support democracy, judicial reform, and economic development, including the proper role of foreign aid.

Our program helps to create a broader community of global activists and practitioners, intent on sharing experiences to bring positive change to some of the world's most troubled countries and regions"
- Kathryn Stoner-Weiss The fellows themselves also lead discussions, focused on the concrete challenges they face in their ongoing work in political and economic development. "Fellows come to realize that they are often engaged in solving similar problems - such as endemic corruption in different country contexts," says Kathryn Stoner-Weiss. "Our program helps to create a broader community of global activists and practitioners, intent on sharing experiences to bring positive change to some of the world's most troubled countries and regions."

The program has received generous gifts from donors William Draper III and Ingrid Hills.  Bill Draper made his gift in honor of his father, Maj. Gen. William H. Draper, Jr., a chief advisor to Gen. George Marshall and chief diplomatic administrator of the Marshall Plan in Germany, who confronted challenges comparable to those faced by Draper Hills Summer Fellows in building democracy, a market economy, and a rule of law, often in post-conflict conditions. Ingrid von Mangoldt Hills, made her gift in honor of her husband, Reuben Hills, president and chairman of Hills Bros. Coffee and a leading philanthropist. The Hills project they ran for 12 years improved the lives of inner city children and Ingrid saw in the Summer Fellows Program a promising opportunity to improve the lives of so many people in developing countries.

Thanking the program's benefactors, Larry Diamond says, "The benefit to CDDRL faculty and researchers is incalculable, and we are deeply grateful for the vision and generosity of Bill Draper and Ingrid Hills." As he and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss state, "The Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program allows us to interact with a highly, talented group of emerging leaders in political and economic development from diverse countries and regions. They benefit from exposure to the faculty's cutting edge work, while we benefit from a cycle of feedback on whether these ideas work in the field."  Like CDDRL, which bridges academic theory and policy, the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program, they note, "is an ideal marriage between democratic and development theory and practice."

For additional details on the program or to request permission to attend a session, please contact program coordinator Audrey McGowan, audrey.mcgowan@stanford.edu.

By the end of the year, scholars of security studies will be able to use a new website to learn how terrorist and militant organizations evolve over time and how they collaborate with--and compete against--one another.

"Mapping Terrorist Organizations," an interdisciplinary online project headed by CISAC Senior Fellow Martha Crenshaw, will focus initially on providing detailed, annotated information on militant and terrorist groups operating in Iraq since 2003, Pakistan and Afghanistan--areas of current policy concern for the United States. Future plans involve expanding research to include groups in Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and the United States and, if time and resources permit, to include major historical groups such as the Russian revolutionary movement.

The three-year project is funded by a $500,000 grant awarded to Crenshaw last fall by the National Science Foundation. It is part of the Department of Defense's Minerva Initiative launched in 2008 to support "research related to basic social and behavioral science of strategic importance to U.S. national security policy."

"No such study exists in the literature of terrorism," Crenshaw wrote in a report on the project. "Evolutionary mapping can enhance our understanding of how terrorist groups develop and interact with each other and with the government, how strategies of violence and non-violence are related, why groups appear and disappear, and how opportunities and constraints in the environment change organizational behavior over time." Furthermore, Crenshaw noted that visual mapping of highly complex, shifting information is likely to stimulate new observations that might otherwise have been overlooked."

Student involvement

Daniel Cassman, a 2010 CISAC honors graduate in political science and computer science, is building the site, which will contain interactive timelines, family trees and detailed group profiles. Cassman's programming--developed specifically for the website--will allow scholars to better understand and analyze patterns and structures of violent and non-violent opposition groups in multiple contexts.

At a June 1 meeting of a half dozen students working on the project, Crenshaw said one of the most challenging problems facing researchers is documenting how terrorist organizations evolve over time. With no official sources to rely on, Crenshaw's team spent the last year combing through government documents and academic research, autobiographies, newspaper reports and even jihadist websites-many of which disappear as quickly as they pop up. Crenshaw acknowledges that "precision in this field is elusive" even though the project emphasizes using documented primary sources. Students working on the project include Christy Abizaid and Sadika Hameed, 2010 graduates of the International Policy Studies master's program, and undergraduates Rob Conroy, Asfandyar Mir and Ari Weiss. CISAC staff member Julia McKinnon is assisting Crenshaw as well.

"We're keenly interested in changes in the sizes of groups," Crenshaw said. "That's one of the hardest things to figure out." It also is difficult to know when a group dissolves, becomes dormant or morphs into something else, she said. To obtain as complete a profile as possible, the website will include information about failed and foiled plots, as well as successful attacks, she said.

Charles Nicas, a student in International Policy Studies and Public Policy, said he joined Crenshaw's project to learn more about militancy and terrorism in South Asia. "The U.S. presence in Afghanistan and the fact that Pakistan is a nuclear-armed country mean that the U.S. will be involved in this region...for a long time," he wrote in an email. "The complexity of the situation takes a lot of research to understand."

Nicas's area of work focuses on sectarian groups in Pakistan, mainly Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) and its offshoot Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), both virulently anti-Shia groups. Nicas said SSP was founded in 1985 with state support and spawned LeJ in the mid-1990s. The groups are based in Punjab province in eastern Pakistan but had a significant presence in neighboring Afghanistan during Taliban rule. Both have become increasingly allied with militant groups in the border region, including al-Qa'ida, and are part of an umbrella group known as the Punjabi Taliban. "I've been surprised to learn how far back the roots of this problem go, which makes the challenge of effectively countering it especially daunting," Nicas said.

Terrorist organizations profiled

In addition to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Crenshaw's website will feature profiles of the following groups:

• 1920s Revolution Brigades
• Mujahideen Army
• Islamic Army in Iraq
• Ansar al-Islam
• Al-Qa'ida in Iraq

Group profiles include the following attributes:

• The group's name, including pseudonyms and name changes
• A history with a timeline, including whether the group is active, dormant or disbanded
• The group's goals/ideology
• Key leaders
• Group size (by date)
• Resources in the form of money and weapons
• Outside intervention and influence
• Dates of first and last known attacks
• Targets
• Area of Operations
• Tactics
• Political activities (by date)
• Key operational experiences (by date)
• Known splinter groups (by date)
• Relationship to other groups (by date)
• Relationship with surrounding population/popular support
• Defining characteristics/Major events

"In terms of geo-politics, the most difficult and most challenging part of the world in this era, particularly in the aftermath of 9/11, is the broader Middle East," said Zalmay Khalilzad, in a 2010 Payne Distinguished Lecture, "The Struggle for the Broader Middle East: Where We Are and Where We Need to Go." A native of Afghanistan, Khalilzad served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and as a senior White House, Defense, and State Department Advisor.

Tracing the dynamic interplay of national, regional, and international forces, he set out five major issues likely to shape the future of the region:

1. The challenge of militant Islam, resulting from an ongoing crisis of civilization within a once powerful, innovative, and dynamic Islamic world.
2. Regional disputes, including the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Afghanistan-Pakistan border dispute, and ongoing Indian-Pakistani disputes.  Terming the Arab-Israeli conflict an important shaping factor, Khalilzad said that circumstances were not ready for a settlement.  "Israel wants a process without an outcome and the Palestinians want an outcome without a process," he said.
3. Rivalry for regional hegemony, including the rivalry between Shia and Sunni Islam and Iran's quest to obtain a nuclear weapon.  In the struggle over Iran's nuclear program, he said, is the potential for a wider regional conflict. Israel could attack Iran's facilities, destabilizing the region, and over the long term, a nuclear Iran would threaten Israel and provoke both state and sub-state proliferation.
4. Broader political and economic development and democratization efforts. The region's population is growing rapidly, but the educational system prepares the young poorly for the modern world and job prospects are limited, creating discontent and the danger of internal instability.
5. Extra regional factors, including U.S. policy. Setting a July 2011 timeline to withdraw troops from Afghanistan has had unintended consequences, he said, including increased corruption, as people seek to maximize access to resources now. In Iraq, institution building has been effective, the resource base is there for a power-sharing formula, and Iraq can do quite well. The pledge of U.S. troop withdrawals this summer, however, has led Iraqis to think "we are on our way out" and led them to look to regional actors for support, adding to polarization.

The region remains vitally important, he concluded, given the challenges emanating from it.  "A civilization crisis takes a long time to work itself out," he said, "and although the world is affected by it, we can influence it to a degree, but we have to do so without undermining the more moderate and secular forces for the good."

Hendrik Hertzberg writes that the end of the Cold War and the coming of global warming have brought about increased support for nuclear power, even among some environmentalists (The Talk of the Town, March 22nd). But many of us who work on nuclear-proliferation issues are dismayed by the growth of nuclear energy. Expanded nuclear power in industrial countries will inevitably mean expanded nuclear exports to less developed countries as manufacturers try to recoup their investments in a limited domestic market by selling abroad. It can be shown statistically that countries that receive nuclear assistance are more likely to build nuclear weapons, especially when they perceive threats to their security. India, Pakistan, and Israel started their nuclear programs with the importation of research reactors carrying peaceful-use requirements; with help from other countries, they were able to then realize their desire for weapons. Iran appears to be heading in the same direction. Given the documented interest in nuclear materials of terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda, and given the questionable assumptions that nuclear-energy economics is fraught with, it makes little sense to push nuclear power at a time when protections against proliferation are still so problematic. Improved energy efficiency is a safer, greener, and cheaper alternative.