This two-day symposium will bring together lawyers who are litigating human rights cases in international tribunals, lawyers who deploying international human rights frameworks to advance legal reform goals in their respective countries and public policy advocates who are pressing for legal reforms that are more protective of individual rights
This year’s symposium will focus, as a case study, on achieving gender equality through strategic use of both international and domestic strategies.
Goals:
To learn about successes with respect to using international human rights mechanisms to mobilize domestic law reform
To evaluate the extent to which international human rights mechanisms have had an impact on justice on the ground
To strategize on how human rights litigators, domestic public interest attorneys and domestic public policy advocates can more effectively coordinate their work in order to impact justice on the ground through international human rights mechanisms
To examine in-depth how the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and monitoring mechanisms are shaped by local activists and how local activists use the international documents and mechanisms to press for change on the ground.
To examine the impact of local norms and practices on whether a global consensus is reached on international human rights standards and whether the standards are adopted in a domestic context
Content:
Panels will address :
What is the power of human rights ideas for transnational and local social movements and how have these ideas contributed to a rethinking of gender equality around the world?
Using gender equality and CEDAW as a case study, have human rights created a political space for reform in particular countries and what have been the key challenges?
What key successes have lawyers and advocates had in using international human rights mechanisms to ensure gender equality with respect to organizing, litigation and public policy?
What are the lessons learned from the global gender equality movement for other human rights struggles?
Looking forward, what are the key challenges and opportunities for more strategic collaboration between the movement for gender equality and other aspects of the human rights movement?
Keynotes will include Christopher Stone, the President of Open Society Foundation and The Honorable Judge Patricia Wald. Panelists are Executive Directors or Presidents of innovative human rights and international justice organizations and public interest attorneys from leading public interest legal organizations in Kenya, Nigeria, China, South Africa, Malaysia, Palestinian Territories, China and Chile.
The Program on Human Rights at CDDRL is proud to co-sponsor this event and hopes you take advantage of this wonderful opportunity.
The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University is pleased to announce the 2013 class of undergraduate senior honors students.
Honors students will spend four quarters participating in research seminars to refine their proposed thesis topic, while working in consultation with a CDDRL faculty advisor to supervise their project. In September, the group will travel to Washington, D.C. for honors college where they will visit leading government and development organizations to witness policymaking in practice and consult with key decision-makers.
Please join CDDRL in congratulating the 2013 Senior Honors students and welcoming them to the Center.
Below are profiles of the nine honors students highlighting their academic interests, why they applied to CDDRL, and some fun facts.
Keith Calix
Keith Calix
Major: International Relations
Hometown: Astoria, NY
Thesis topic: What is the relationship between the coloured experience and youth involvement in gangsterism in Cape Town, South Africa?
Why is this topic important to the field of democracy, development, and the rule of law? Schools are one of the principal generators, justifiers and vehicles of radicalized thoughts, actions and identities. The challenge in a post-apartheid South Africa continues to be whether and how the roles, rules, social character and functioning of schools can reform to challenge the retrograde aspects of such formation and stimulate new forms of acknowledgement, social practice and acceptance. Ultimately, I hope my research will provide insight about how education reform can be used as a tool to promote democracy and improve human rights conditions.
What attracted you to the CDDRL undergrad honors program? In many ways my personal and academic experiences have led me from a more general interest in education development to a more specific interest in post-apartheid education reform as a form of retrospective justice, the institutional, social and economic barriers to education reform, and understanding education reform as a means of promoting democracy and respect for human rights. Pursuing this in the work in the CDDRL community alongside talented and experienced faculty and students from a wide array of disciplines, interests, and experiences will ultimately enhance my understanding of development and one day, I can hopefully use these insights and experiences as a practitioner.
Future aspiration post-Stanford: Human rights lawyer/fieldwork in education development.
What are your summer research plans: During the summer I will be working on my thesis in Cape Town, South Africa.
Fun fact about yourself: I’ve recently appeared on Italian television for an interview, bungee jumped from the world’s highest commercial bridge, and rode an ostrich.
Vincent Chen
Vincent Chen
Major: Earth Systems & Economics
Hometown: Taipei, Taiwan
Thesis topic: How democratic and autocratic systems affect the formation and efficacy of their environmental policies.
Why is this topic important to the field of democracy, development, and the rule of law? As the importance of climate and energy issues continue to rise in the global political agenda, both developed and developing nations are in dire need to identify individually tailored policy routes for sustainable development. With a wide array of political systems across countries, my research aims to shed light on the difference of environmental policy creation between democratic and autocratic governments and hopefully provide real world applications for policy makers in charting the most appropriate development route. In particular, I hope to provide insights for developing democracies to leapfrog the environmental impacts associated with democratization and avoid mistakes mature democracies have committed in the past.
What attracted you to the CDDRL undergrad honors program? My studies in environmental science ultimately manifested the important role social sciences play in solving our environmental challenges. In the center of this challenge lies the tricky balance between development and environmental stewardship. The CDDRL program serves as a great opportunity for me to explore the complex relationship between these concepts.
Future aspiration post-Stanford: Although I am interested in opportunities that span public, private and social sectors, I will definitely be working on issues pertaining to our environment.
What are your summer research plans: I will be spending my summer in Washington, DC with the climate and energy team of the United Nations Foundation, as well as conducting interviews for my research back home in Taiwan.
Fun fact about yourself: Spent five weeks on a uninhabited island the size of four square miles in the middle of the Pacific Ocean during my sophomore summer.
Holly Fetter
Holly Fetter
Major: Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (B.A.), Sociology (M.A.)
Hometown: Dallas, TX
Thesis topic: The influence of U.S. funding on the development of China's civil society
Why is this topic important to the field of democracy, development, and the rule of law? Organizations and individuals from the U.S. are eager to support democracy, development, and the rule of law in foreign countries. Through my research on the U.S. presence in China, I hope to understand how we can do this work more ethically and effectively. How can we avoid imposing our values and priorities onto a nation's bourgeoning civil society? How can we promote indigenous modes of fundraising and management training, thus avoiding any potential expressions of neo-imperialism?
What attracted you to the CDDRL undergrad honors program? I wanted a challenge, and I knew that writing an honors thesis in a foreign discipline would be a rewarding intellectual experience. The apparent support from faculty as well as the connections to experts on my topic were also enticing. And I'm looking forward to the big D.C. trip.
Future aspiration post-Stanford: I'd like to practice community lawyering in the U.S.
What are your summer research plans: I'll be in Beijing, China, interviewing folks at NGOs and grant-giving organizations, reading lots of books and articles, and eating good food.
Fun fact about yourself: I like to write and cause a ruckus, so I started a blog for Stanford activists called STATIC. You should check it out!
Imani Franklin
Imani Franklin
Major: International Relations
Hometown: Atlanta, GA
Thesis topic: How Western beauty standards impact the preference for lighter skin in the developing world, with case-studies of India, Nigeria, and Thailand
Why is this topic important to the field of democracy, development, and the rule of law? This question matters for global development, in part, because it is an issue of public health. Researchers have long associated high rates of eating disorders and other mental health issues among American women with their continuous exposure to Western media’s narrow image of beauty. Given the unprecedented globalization of this image of beauty throughout much of the developing world, are non-Western women experiencing similar psychological health problems? From findings on skin bleaching cream in Tanzania to the rise of bulimia in Fiji in the late 1990s, a growing body of research attributes harmful body-altering practices to increased exposure to American consumerist media. I want to assess whether this causal link stands under empirical scrutiny, and whether this relationship shifts in different regional contexts of the world.
What attracted you to the CDDRL undergrad honors program? I am drawn to CDDRL’s honors program because of the intimate scholarly community of peers and mentors it provides. I believe this program will empower me to think more critically and scientifically about how one social issue impacts another.
Future aspiration post-Stanford: In the future, I hope to work with international policy to improve human rights protections in the Middle East and North Africa.
What are your summer research plans: I am currently studying Arabic in Jordan and will conduct primary research for my honors thesis in Amman.
Fun fact about yourself: In my free time, I enjoy learning the dance moves from High School Musical movies and attempting to make peach cobbler from scratch.
Mariah Halperin
Mariah Halperin
Major: History
Hometown: San Francisco, CA
Thesis topic: The development of democracy in Turkey under the Justice and Development Party (AKP)
Why is this topic important to the field of democracy, development, and the rule of law? Turkey has taken a unique path to democracy, beginning with Ataturk, yet many scholars worldwide have presented Turkey as a model for the rest of the Islamic world. The AKP, the party in power for the last decade, has in many ways changed the path Turkey had been on previously. With these changes and the recent uprisings in the Middle East, my thesis will hopefully speak to the viability of other countries following Turkey's example.
What attracted you to the CDDRL undergrad honors program? The CDDRL undergraduate honors program is an amazing opportunity to deepen my studies of a topic that interests me so much. Working with a small group of dedicated, like-minded students will be a great way get feedback to develop and strengthen my thesis. Additionally, the outstanding faculty (and staff!) of the CDDRL are so supportive and eager to help students pursue their interests in any way they can.
Future aspiration post-Stanford: Either diplomacy or journalism in Turkey and the Middle East.
What are your summer research plans: I will be in Turkey for over two months this summer, conducting interviews with a wide range of people who can lend their perspective on my topic.
Fun fact about yourself: I am an extreme San Francisco Giants baseball fan.
Thomas Alan Hendee
Thomas Alan Hendee
Major: Human Biology
Hometown: Sao Paulo, Brazil / Grand Rapids, Michigan
Thesis topic: I will be looking at the social determinants of health in Brazilian informal settlements and how they affect child health.
Why is this topic important to the field of democracy, development, and the rule of law? By 2050, seventy-percent of the world will be living in cities, and the World Bank estimates that 32.7% of urban dwellers in developing regions will be living in slums. These informal urban settlements pose a significant problem for economic development, governance, and public health.
What attracted you to the CDDRL undergrad honors program? This program will allow me to spend my last year engrossed in a topic of interest, and put my Brazilian heritage and Portuguese language skills to academic use by adding to the dialogue of a field that I hope to enter. I look forward to being surrounded by a group of peers from whom I can learn, and at the same time have the chance to be mentored by some of Stanford’s most renowned faculty.
Future aspiration post-Stanford: I am still debating if medical school is a part of my future; however, I am confident that I will be involved with some kind of internationally focused health work.
What are your summer research plans: I will be doing a tremendous amount of reading in order to get a better understanding of what has already been said; furthermore, I plan to perform as many Skype interviews as possible with involved individuals in Brazil.
Fun fact about yourself: In the summer of 2011, I spent one-week on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) participating in an ecotourism consulting job.
Lina Hidalgo
Lina Hidalgo
Major: Political Science
Hometown: Bogotá, Colombia
Thesis topic: What allowed citizen resistance to turn against the state in Egypt in 2011, but not in China.
Why is this topic important to the field of democracy, development, and the rule of law? I hope that my project will offer some hints as to why citizens faced with economic and social grievances fail to challenge - through their protests - the state structure that perpetrates those grievances. This can provide a lens through which to study other developing societies that fail to rise against oppression.
What attracted you to the CDDRL undergrad honors program? I have been able to see development challenges firsthand growing up and am honored to have the opportunity to learn from experts in the Center about the ideas and approaches taken to tackle these issues.
Future aspiration post-Stanford: I hope to learn more about development challenges globally by working in the Middle East or Asia, and eventually help implement better development policy worldwide through an international organizations, government work, or activism.
What are your summer research plans: I will be in China interviewing factory workers about their perceptions of inequality and speak with scholars about the broader issues I plan to address in my thesis. I will then travel to Egypt to interview political party leaders about how they saw long-standing grievances translated into the political sphere.
Fun fact about yourself: I've broken my two front teeth.
Kabir Sawhney
Kabir Sawhney
Major: Management Science and Engineering
Hometown: Morristown, NJ
Thesis topic: The effect of regime type on a country’s propensity to default on its sovereign debt obligations.
Why is this topic important to the field of democracy, development, and the rule of law? The link between a country’s regime type and its sovereign debt is crucial to further understanding the differences in the choices democracies and autocracies make in regards to their sovereign debt. Debt itself is important, because sovereign debt crises can have many negative consequences, including setting economic development back many years in some countries.
What attracted you to the CDDRL undergrad honors program? I took Professor Diamond and Professor Stoner-Weiss’ class in my sophomore year, and I really loved the course content and wanted to engage more with these topics. For my honors thesis, I really wanted to have an interdisciplinary experience, combining my interests in democracy and development with my academic focus in finance and financial markets, and the CDDRL program was a great place to do that.
Future aspiration post-Stanford: I’d like to work in financial markets; my long-term career goal is to one day run my own hedge fund with a mix of investment strategies.
What are your summer research plans: Since my thesis doesn’t require any field work, I’ll be working on refining my quantitative analysis and gathering relevant data from databases and other sources, to be able to carry out my analysis in earnest starting in fall quarter.
Fun fact about yourself: Cooking is one of my favorite hobbies! I like making all sorts of different kinds of foods, but my favorites have to be Thai, Indian and Chinese.
Anna Schickele
Anna Schickele
Major: Public Policy and Economics
Hometown: Davis, CA
Thesis topic: Determinants of farmer participation in agricultural development projects in rural Peru.
Why is this topic important to the field of democracy, development, and the rule of law? If non-governmental organizations are to implement successful development projects, they must figure out how to effectively engage would-be participants.
What attracted you to the CDDRL undergrad honors program? I'm attracted to the academic community. Though writing a thesis is a solitary activity, I hope the other students and I will support each other and form friendships as we go through the process together.
Future aspiration post-Stanford: I'd like to find a way to perfect my Spanish, improve my French, and maybe learn Arabic.
What are your summer research plans: I'll be in Peru at the end of August. If all goes well, I plan to make a second trip in December.
Fun fact about yourself: I've eaten alpaca, camel, guinea pig, and snails.
A Wake-up Call for America: We Must Connect with the World
Former U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold, currently the Mimi and Peter E. Haas Distinguished Visitor at Stanford’s Haas Center for Public Service, uses an anecdote in his new book, While America Sleeps: A Wake-up Call for the Post-9/11 Era, to illustrate his concern that Americans have become too insular as a result of the 2001 terrorist attacks. While teaching at Marquette University Law School during the Arab Spring of last year, an undergraduate penned a column lamenting that so many students not only could not find Tunisia on the map – they could spell Kardashian before Kazakhstan.
Feingold writes that he admired this student for his confession about his lack of knowledge on global affairs, then quotes the final thought of the young columnist: “We are connected to the rest of the world in ways few of us can fully fathom, from the shoes we wear and coffee we drink to the cell phones we carry and the tweets we post.”
In a recent interview, CISAC Co-Director Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar and Feingold discuss steps to be taken to ensure that all Americans – young and old, inside the Washington beltway and out on the farm in Wisconsin – take a patriotic stand by engaging with the world to restore our national unity and regain global respect.
Senator Feingold, what prompted you to write this book now?
Feingold: For me, as for many Americans, 9/11 was a life-changing event, the wake-up call in which we all understood that we no longer could be safe just assuming the world would take care of itself. We got misdirected with things like Iraq and we developed this sort of invade-one-country-at-a-time approach. There was also exploitation of the fears from 9/11 for domestic agendas, from the Patriot Act to the way that Muslims and Arabs are treated in this country. And then, finally, with the rise of the tea party, I feel like we went back to sleep. But there are signals all over the place, of the continued presence of al-Qaida and the continued potency of al-Qaida, not to mention so many other trends from the Chinese influence in Africa to the Iranian influence in Latin America. We aren’t connecting as a government or as a people in a way that I think is commensurate with our place in the 21st century. I’m trying to issue a warning that we’re going to get fooled or surprised again if we think we can just go back to being just sort of safely over here across the oceans. That’s just not the world anymore.
So how do you wake up Americans and make them realize we cannot, as you say, survive as a nation without being active and aware of global events and trends?
Feingold: It’s at all levels. I happen to think we have a good president and I think he’s going to be a great president by the end of his second term. And I think he’s started the process of alerting Americans to the need to connect to all places in the world; he’s leading us toward a global vision of the kind that I think we have to have to be safe and to be competitively successful and to be well perceived by the rest of the world. The president and other leaders should call on each of us to try and become citizen diplomats. Three hundred million people should be urged as part of their patriotic duty not just to go to the moon as we once were, but go to the rest of the world. This isn’t Pollyanna; this is about being safe. I don’t think this country is geared up to make that connection and I think it’s a fatal flaw. The Russians, the Chinese and the Iranians, they’re all over the world and they have a plan for what they’re doing. We don’t.
What do you see as the most pressing global security issues today?
Cuéllar: The United States is confronting a changing world, where countries like India, Brazil, and China are evolving and assuming greater importance. Engaging these countries to address problems like nuclear proliferation will be critical in the years ahead. The world also faces a persistent problem involving failed or failing states. In places like Somalia, piracy is not only a regional problem in the Gulf of Aden. The problem is an example of how threats can affect multiple countries and impact flows of commodities, disrupting the rule of law, highlighting the challenges of governing common resources such as international sea lanes. Another challenge is the enormous potential of technology to change people’s lives for the better, coupled with risks that arise which we are only in a very imperfect and incomplete way managing; risks of vulnerabilities in our infrastructure; risks of theft of intellectual property, risks of disruption of organizations.
Feingold: I like this answer because Prof. Cuéllar did not just say, “Well, it’s Russia and Iran and Colombia.” There’s this tendency to just speak of countries. We’re just trained to say, “OK what’s the hot spot and let’s just worry about that.” Like right now it’s Iran; a few months ago it was Yemen. In my book what I’m trying to point out is that you have to look at trends and overall tendencies around the world and somehow we have to have the capacity to deal with more than one thing at a time.
Senator Feingold, you called the Bush Administration’s terrorist surveillance program – the wiretapping and surveillance of emails and financial records without court approval – one of the worst assaults on the Constitution in American history. How does the government protect our constitutional rights to privacy and probable cause while monitoring criminal and terrorist networks in a digital age?
Feingold: The assault on the Constitutional by the administration was not about whether we could do those things, its whether or not the president would basically make up his own laws just because we’re in a crisis. That to me is completely unconstitutional. We understand that a president might have to take emergency action and he may have to come to Congress and say, you know I did this, it may be beyond the law, would you please pass a law to approve it, or I’ll stop doing it. That’s not what Bush did. Bush hid it. Bush hid what he was doing on torture; Bush hid what he was doing on wiretapping. That’s a very dangerous thing that completely saps our strength from within and is completely unnecessary to stop the terrorists.
Cuéllar: The challenge of living up to our constitutional values while we secure the country is always critical. It requires organizations that can learn from their mistakes to be honest with each other enough and recognize when they have overstepped their bounds, that make good use of entities like inspectors-general, that leverage the ability of Congress to do oversight. These are all elements of making our constitutional values relevant. So me the challenge has always been how to you leverage all the information technology and all our ability to make smart, thoughtful, careful decisions – including decisions that do permit appropriate degrees of surveillance and intelligence – in order to avoid superficial reactions against individuals who simply appear threatening.
What key steps should the U.S. government take to improve its counter-terrorism efforts both at home and abroad?
Feingold: The first thing is to recognize the nature of the threat. One of the chapters in the book is called A Game of Risk, where we seem to think the way to counter terrorism is to invade a country and stay there forever and say we have to stay there or the terrorist are going to come back. But this isn’t the nature of al-Qaida or similar organizations. President Bush used to say there were 60 countries where al-Qaida was operating and, of course, one thing that was embarrassing about it was that Iraq wasn’t one of them. But we’re still in this place today. Al-Shabab in Somalia; al-Qaida and the Islamic Maghreb in northern Africa; a group called Boko Haram in Nigeria, which looks very much like an al-Qaida group, has pulled off some 70 attacks in the last year. So this is an international organization that communicates with each other and they’re not done just because Osama bin Laden is gone. So let’s not get caught unawares again.
Senator Feingold, what was your most memorable, defining challenge in Congress and how did that change the way you see yourself and the world around you?
It had to do with recognizing when 9/11 occurred that there really was a group of people out there who would love to kill all of us and, despite the fact that I’m progressive and I voted against most military interventions, just saying to myself: look, there are times when threats are real. And it caused me to actually seek to be on the Intelligence Committee which is something I never wanted to do; I was not sure of the importance of intelligence in the post Cold War era and it was a real change for me. I remember having an emotional response, saying, “You know what? This is real; what these folks did was real and they have intimidated an entire country if not the world.” I wanted to know everything I could about how they came to be and what they were planning next, and to be a person who could try to think ahead for other kinds of threats so we as Americans can get ahead of threats instead of being the people who are reacting.
Systemic corruption undermines state capacity, imperils socio-economic development, and diminishes democracy. In his Nairobi speech as a U.S. senator in August 2006, Barack Obama described the struggle to reduce corruption as "the fight of our time". An international conference in Lagos, Nigeria, in September 2011 was devoted to Richard Joseph's influential 1987 book, Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria: The Rise and Fall of the Second Republic.Transforming prebendalist systems must be at the center of strategies to strengthen democracy and achieve poverty-reducing economic growth in Africa and other regions.
Speaker Bio:
Richard Joseph is John Evans Professor of International History and Politics at Northwestern University and Non resident Senior Fellow in Global Economy and Development at the Brookings Institution. As a Fellow of The Carter Center, he participated in democracy and peace initiatives in Ghana, Zambia, Ethiopia, Liberiaand Sudan. He has written extensively on issues of democracy, governance and political economy. His books include Radical Nationalism in Cameroun (1977), Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria (1987) and edited books, Gaullist Africa: Cameroon under Ahmadu Ahidjo (1978), State, Conflict and Democracy in Africa (1999), and (with Alexandra Gillies), Smart Aid for African Development (2009). He served as Principal Investigator of the Research Alliance to Combat HIV/AIDS (REACH), a collaborative program in Nigeria, 2006–2011. His current writing and policy projects concern growth, democracy and security. To address these issues, he is designing a collaborative project, AfricaPlus (http://africaplus.wordpress.com/), whose first focus country is Nigeria.
Here is the link to Richard Joseph remarks and the PowerPoint for the talk.
The Stanford Association for International Development (SAID) and partners present the 2012 SAID Annual Conference entitled, Rethinking Reform: Innovations in Improving Governance. The keynote address will be given by John Githongo, CEO of Inuka Kenya Trust and the former permanent secretary for government and ethics to the president of Kenya. The conference features leading practitioners and academics at the forefront of working to improve governance outcomes worldwide. Panels will explore the following topics; transparency and accountability to fight corruption, grassroots institutional development, ICT for governance, and leadership to build accountable states.
The complete agenda with list of panelists can be found below.
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ldiamond@stanford.edu
Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and Sociology
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MA, PhD
Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.
Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad. A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has edited or coedited more than fifty books, including China’s Influence and American Interests(2019, with Orville Schell), Silicon Triangle: The United States, China, Taiwan the Global Semiconductor Security (2023, with James O. Ellis Jr. and Orville Schell), and The Troubling State of India’s Democracy(2024, with Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha Mistree).
During 2002–03, Diamond served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other organizations dealing with governance and development. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq.
Among Diamond’s other edited books are Democracy in Decline?; Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab World; Will China Democratize?; and Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, all edited with Marc F. Plattner; and Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran, with Abbas Milani. With Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, he edited the series, Democracy in Developing Countries, which helped to shape a new generation of comparative study of democratic development.
Former Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Faculty Chair, Jan Koum Israel Studies Program
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Ugandan Journalist
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f.fukuyama@stanford.edu
Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy
Research Affiliate at The Europe Center
Professor by Courtesy, Department of Political Science
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Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a faculty member of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also Director of Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy, and a professor (by courtesy) of Political Science.
Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His book In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir will be published in fall 2026.
Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation, and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004. He is editor-in-chief of American Purpose, an online journal.
Dr. Fukuyama holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), Aarhus University (Denmark), the Pardee Rand Graduate School, and Adam Mickiewicz University (Poland). He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Trustees of Freedom House, and the Board of the Volcker Alliance. He is a fellow of the National Academy for Public Administration, a member of the American Political Science Association, and of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.
(October 2025)
Global Populisms
A new project examining the global surge in populist movements and what it means for established democratic rules and institutions.
Mobile phone coverage and adoption has grown substantially over the past decade, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa. In the absence of public goods infrastructure in many countries, mobile phone technology has the potential to reduce communication and transaction costs and improve access to information, goods and services, particularly for remote rural populations. Research suggests that mobile phone coverage has had positive impacts on agricultural and labor market efficiency in certain countries, but empirical microeconomic evidence is still limited. This paper presents the results of several mobile phone-related field experiments in sub-Saharan Africa, whereby mobile phones have been used for learning, money transfers and civic education programs. These experiments suggest that mobile phone technology can result in reductions in communication and transaction costs, as well as welfare gains, in particular contexts. Nevertheless, mobile phone technology cannot serve as the “silver bullet” for development, and careful impact evaluations of mobile phone development projects are required. In addition, mobile phone technology must work in partnership with other public good provision and investment to achieve optimal development outcomes.
Speaker Bio:
Jenny C. Aker is an assistant professor of economics at the Fletcher School and department of economics at Tufts University. She is also a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development and a member of the Advisory Board for Frontline SMS.
After working for Catholic Relief Services as Deputy Regional Director in West and Central Africa between 1998 and 2003, Jenny returned to complete her PhD in agricultural economics at the University of California-Berkeley. Jenny works on economic development in Africa, with a primary focus on the impact of information and information technology on development outcomes, particularly in the areas of agriculture, agricultural marketing and education; the relationship between shocks and agricultural food market performance; the determinants of agricultural technology adoption; and impact evaluations of NGO and World Bank projects. Jenny has conducted field work in many countries in West and Central Africa, including Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, DRC, The Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Sudan, as well as Haiti and Guatemala.
National oil companies (NOCs) produce most of the world’s oil and natural gas and bankroll governments across the globe. Although NOCs superficially resemble private-sector companies, they often behave in very different ways. To understand these pivotal state-owned enterprises and the long shadow they cast on world energy markets, the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) at Stanford University commissioned Oil and Governance: State-owned Enterprises and the World Energy Supply. The 1000-page volume, edited by David Victor, David Hults, and Mark Thurber, explains the variation in the performance and strategy of NOCs, and provides fresh insights into the future of the oil industry as well as the politics of the oil-rich countries where NOCs dominate. It comprises fifteen case studies, each following a common research design, of NOCs based in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe. The book also includes cross-cutting pieces on the industrial structure of the oil industry and the politics and administration of NOCs.
NOCs are distinguished from private companies by their need to respond to state goals beyond profit maximization. Governments seeking to retain their hold on power use NOCs to deliver benefits to influential elites (“private goods”) or to the broader population (“social goods”). Oil and Governance finds a strong correlation between such non-hydrocarbon burdens on the NOC—which include providing employment, subsidizing fuel, or handing out plum jobs to the politically connected—and deficiencies in oil and gas performance. The highest-performing NOCs, like Norway’s Statoil and Brazil’s Petrobras, face relatively circumscribed non-oil demands from their governments.
How governments administer their oil sectors also proves to be a crucial determinant of NOC performance. Democracies (e.g., Norway, Brazil) and autocracies (e.g., Saudi Arabia, Angola) alike are capable of grooming successful NOCs. What matters most for outcomes is not regime type per se but rather that governance systems provide unified signals to the NOC. (By contrast, regime type is observed to be an important driver of whether governments nationalize their oil sectors in the first place, or privatize existing NOCs.) Fragmented governance, in which multiple government actors assert their interests but no one assumes strategic responsibility, appears uniformly fatal to NOC performance. Nascent democracies like Mexico’s can be particularly vulnerable to oil sector dysfunction stemming from fragmentation. Governance systems must also be matched to a country’s institutional and political realities. Nigeria has arguably set back its progress in oil through attempts to slavishly imitate Norway’s forms of oil organization in the absence of Norway’s mature political and civil service institutions.
The close ties between the NOC and its government can have a detrimental effect on the ability of the NOC to manage the risks that are so characteristic of the oil and gas industry. Whereas private companies are forced to hone their geological knowledge and skills through global competition for capital and hydrocarbon licenses, NOCs for the most part are comfortably sheltered from competitive threats at home. They therefore fail to develop the global reach that helps private players (the international oil companies, or IOCs) manage risk by means of a diversified global portfolio and the ability to link resources to customers around the world. (Some NOCs have begun to internationalize in recent years, but it is striking that none of the NOCs studied in Oil and Governance went down this path until forced to by domestic resource scarcity, or at least of the perception of future scarcity.) The soft budget constraint faced by the NOC also discourages the cost efficiencies that help mitigate risk.
This gulf in risk management capabilities between IOCs and most NOCs suggests that the resource dominance of NOCs does not pose an existential threat to private oil companies. Private players will continue to play a key role in the frontiers of oil and gas development—frontiers like shale gas, oil sands, and the remote Arctic. NOCs will continue to control low-cost oil around the world, while a select few of the most focused and unencumbered among them start to build up their own risk management skills through partnerships with IOCs.
NOC control over resources has important implications for the world oil price. The NOCs studied in the book produce their reserves at half the rate of the major IOCs—whether due to lower performance or a deliberate attempt to preserve resources for the future. Moreover, governments tend to rely most heavily on the risk management skills of IOCs when prices are low and then swing back towards NOCs in high price periods when they can afford to focus on delivering benefits to favored constituencies. The result of this dynamic, which is observed in the case studies of Oil and Governance, can be “backward bending supply curves” that exaggerate price volatility in the world oil market.
This effect of NOCs on global oil supply and price appears to be much more important than any geopolitical fallout from NOC primacy around the world. Oil and Governance finds very little evidence that NOCs act as effective foreign policy weapons on behalf of their host states. Even where politicians may desire to employ NOCs in this way, the incentives of the NOC itself are usually strongly opposed to such an exercise of power. As one example, Europe’s Gazprom depends overwhelmingly on revenues from gas exports to Europe because gas is so heavily subsidized in Russia. When NOCs do venture abroad, as in the case of China’s CNPC, they are often motivated to do so precisely by the desire to achieve more autonomy from their political masters at home.
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Journal Articles
June 2011
Exporting the 'Norwegian Model': The effect of administrative design on oil sector performance
Survival to old ages is increasing in many African countries. While demographic tools for estimating mortality up to age 60 have improved greatly, mortality patterns above age 60 rely on models based on little or no demographic data. These estimates are important for social planning and demographic projections. We provide direct estimations of older-age mortality using survey data.
Methods
Since 2005, nationally representative household surveys in ten sub-Saharan countries record counts of living and recently deceased household members: Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Ethiopia, Namibia, Nigeria, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. After accounting for age heaping using multiple imputation, we use this information to estimate probability of death in 5-year intervals (5qx). We then compare our 5qx estimates to those provided by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Population Division (UNPD) to estimate the differences in mortality estimates, especially among individuals older than 60 years old.
Findings
We obtained information on 505,827 individuals (18.4% over age 60, 1.64% deceased). WHO and UNPD mortality models match our estimates closely up to age 60 (mean difference in probability of death -1.1%). However, mortality probabilities above age 60 are lower using our estimations than either WHO or UNPD. The mean difference between our sample and the WHO is 5.9% (95% CI 3.8–7.9%) and between our sample is UNPD is 13.5% (95% CI 11.6–15.5%). Regardless of the comparator, the difference in mortality estimations rises monotonically above age 60.
Interpretation
Mortality estimations above age 60 in ten African countries exhibit large variations depending on the method of estimation. The observed patterns suggest the possibility that survival in some African countries among adults older than age 60 is better than previously thought. Improving the quality and coverage of vital information in developing countries will become increasingly important with future reductions in mortality.
Norway has administered its petroleum resources using three distinct government bodies: a national oil company engaged in commercial hydrocarbon operations; a government ministry to direct policy; and a regulatory body to provide oversight and technical expertise. Norway's relative success in managing its hydrocarbons has prompted development institutions to consider whether this “Norwegian Model” of separated government functions should be recommended to other oil-producing countries.
By studying ten countries that have used widely different approaches in administering their hydrocarbon sectors, we conclude that separation of functions is not a prerequisite to successful oil sector development. Countries where separation of functions has worked are characterized by the combination of high institutional capacity and robust political competition. Unchallenged leaders often appear able to adequately discharge commercial and policy/regulatory functions using the same entity, although this approach may not be robust against political changes. Where institutional capacity is lacking, better outcomes may result from consolidating commercial, policy, and regulatory functions until such capacity has further developed. Countries with vibrant political competition but limited institutional capacity pose the most significant challenge for oil sector reform: Unitary control over the sector is impossible but separation of functions is often difficult to implement.
Keith Calix
Vincent Chen
Holly Fetter
Imani Franklin
Mariah Halperin
Thomas Alan Hendee
Lina Hidalgo
Kabir Sawhney
Anna Schickele
