Stanford University

International Relations

FSI researchers strive to understand how countries relate to one another, and what policies are needed to achieve global stability and prosperity. International relations experts focus on the challenging U.S.-Russian relationship, the alliance between the U.S. and Japan and the limitations of America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.

Foreign aid is also examined by scholars trying to understand whether money earmarked for health improvements reaches those who need it most. And FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center has published on the need for strong South Korean leadership in dealing with its northern neighbor.

FSI researchers also look at the citizens who drive international relations, studying the effects of migration and how borders shape people’s lives. Meanwhile FSI students are very much involved in this area, working with the United Nations in Ethiopia to rethink refugee communities.

Trade is also a key component of international relations, with FSI approaching the topic from a slew of angles and states. The economy of trade is rife for study, with an APARC event on the implications of more open trade policies in Japan, and FSI researchers making sense of who would benefit from a free trade zone between the European Union and the United States.

Wenzhang (William) Dou

Shorenstein APARC
Encina Hall E301
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 725-0121 (650) 796-8078 (650) 723-6530
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SPRIE Visiting Scholar
dou_headshot.jpg MS, PhD

Dou Wenzhang started his professional carrier as an Assistant Professor/Lecturer at Shanxi University, teaching and conducting research in Urban Planning and Economic Geography from 1988-1995. He then joined the Institute of Economics, Peking University, as a visiting scholar specializing in regional economics research projects from 1996 to 1997. From 2001 to 2002, Dr. Dou was a postdoctoral fellow in Applied Economics at the Guanghua School of Management, Peking University, with a focus on telecommunications economics. At the same time, he joined China Mobile and conducted research on 3G strategy and business development & marketing strategies.

Since August 2002, Dr. Dou has been involved in the planning and fund raising for and formation of the Software & Microelectronics School at Peking University; he assumed the position of the Deputy Chairman of the Management of Technology department (MOT) in May, 2003. Dr. Dou is also a senior advisor to several provincial and municipal governments in the area of regional development, including the strategic planning of industrial parks. In 2001 Dr. Dou founded BOYA Strategy, a consulting business entity engaged in Regional Planning and Development for municipalities around China.

Program on Evaluating International Influences on Democratic Development

Governments devote significant effort and resources to promote democracy outside their borders, but surprisingly little is known about how to bring about a good return on this investment.  The program entitled Evaluating International Influences on Democratic Development aims to fill this void by researching why democracy promotion sometimes works, but often does not.  The program investigates the effects of international programs and the roles played by specific actors.  It also examines how international conditions, such as the Cold War, change the ability of domestic actor

Globalization for Whom? Market Discipline and Corporate Subsidy in the Era of Transnational Hyper-Capitalism

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Sameer Dossani is director of "50 Years is Enough: U.S. Network for Global Economic Justice", a coalition of over 200 U.S. grassroots, women's, solidarity, faith-based, policy, social- and economic-justice, youth, labor, and development organizations dedicated to the transformation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Dossani has been campaigning against the World Bank and IMF since the early 1990s, when he was a student activist at McGill University, Canada. Most recently, he was the executive director of the NGO Forum on the Asian Development Bank, based in Manila, Philippines, where he had the opportunity to work closely with Asian NGOs and peoples movements working for economic justice.

Sponsored by the Program on Global Justice and Stanford Humanities Center.

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Sameer Dossani Director Speaker 50 Years is Enough: U.S. Network for Global Economic Justice
Workshops
Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on Global Justice

Global Inequality and Birthright Citizenship

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Ayelet Shachar is a professor of law, political science, and arts and science at the University of Toronto. She received her JSD from Yale Law School in 1997. Prior to that, she served as law clerk to former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel, Aharon Barak. She joined the University of Toronto Faculty of Law in 1999.

Shachar is the author of Multicultural Jurisdictions: Cultural Differences and Women's Rights, winner of the 2002 Best First Book Award by the American Political Science Association, Foundations of Political Theory Section. She is recipient of many academic awards and fellowships, including, most recently, Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor in Human Rights at Stanford Law School, the Connaught Research Fellowship in Social Sciences at the University of Toronto, and the Emile Noel Senior Fellow at NYU School of Law.

Her scholarship focuses on citizenship and immigration law, highly skilled migrants and transnational legal processes, as well as state and religion, family law, multilevel governance regimes, group rights, and gender equality.

Sponsored by the Program on Global Justice, Stanford Humanities Center, and Department of Political Science (Stanford Political Theory Workshop).

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Ayelet Shachar Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor in Human Rights Speaker Stanford Law School
Workshops
Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on Global Justice

Randomization and Foreign Assistance

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Abhijit Banerjee is the Ford Foundation Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, director of the Poverty Action Lab, and past president of the Bureau for Research in Economic Analysis and Development (BREAD).

Banerjee received his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1988, and has taught at Princeton and Harvard before joining the MIT faculty in 1996. In 2001, he was the recipient of the Malcolm Adeshesiah Award, and was awarded the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal in 2000. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow. He is coeditor with Roland Benabou and Dilip Mookherjee of Understanding Poverty and, with Philippe Aghion, coauthor of Volatility and Growth. His areas of research are development economics, the economics of financial markets, and the macroeconomics of developing countries.

Sponsored by the Program on Global Justice, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

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Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Abhijit Banerjee Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Director of the Poverty Action Lab Speaker
Workshops
Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on Global Justice

Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid and Reform

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In the mid-1990s, North Korea experienced a famine that killed up to a million people. In this talk, Professor Haggard will examine the origins of the famine, the subsequent humanitarian aid effort, including the problems of diversion of aid, and the market reforms that followed in the famine's wake. These political economy questions have played an important backdrop to the current negotiations over a resolution to the North Korean nuclear issue.

Stephan Haggard is the Lawrence and Sallye Krause Professor at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He is the author of Pathways from the Periphery: the Political Economy of Growth in the Newly Industrializing Countries (1990), The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions (1995, with Robert Kaufman) and The Political Economy of the Asian Financial Crisis (2000). In addition to Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid and Reform (forthcoming 2006) he has completed a report on North Korean refugees for the US Committee on Human Rights in North Korea and is initiating a project with TaiMing Cheung and Barry Naughton on Chinese-North Korean economic relations.

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Philippines Conference Room

Stephan Haggard Lawrence and Sallye Krause Professor, Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies Speaker University of California, San Diego
Seminars
Korean Studies Colloquium Series
Korea Program

Rooted Networks: Equity Holding Structure of "Chaebol" Business Groups, 1997-2003

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Korea's "Chaebol" business groups built densely knitted equity crossholding ties during the 1980s and 1990s, which allowed the owner's family to exercise enormous control rights greatly exceeding their cash flow rights. This defining characteristic of "Chaebol" once made them look invincible, totally protected from outside attacks. However, the unprecedented takeover crises of Korea's best-known "Chaebol" such as Hyundai and SK force us to reconsider the traditional wisdom.

What explains the crises? In his talk, Dr. Chang will track the changes in the "Chaebol" equity network since 1997 and argue that the takeover crises are the result of constraints on the dynamics of hierarchically organized networks by the opening up of the financial market, changing state-business relations, and family circumstances.

Dukjin Chang is an assistant professor in the Sociology Department at Seoul National University. He is currently a visiting professor in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1999. He has written extensively on Chaebol business groups and social networks in the cyberspace.

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Philippines Conference Room

Dukjin Chang Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology Speaker Seoul National University
Seminars
Korean Studies Colloquium Series
Korea Program

A Lost Decade? Costs and Benefits of the Post-crisis Financial Reforms in South Korea

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Almost a decade has passed since the financial crisis in South Korea. At the time Korean banks, already under financial stress, were faced with bad loans stemming from bankruptcies in the corporate sector. To resolve the bad loan problem, the Korean government actively intervened in the financial sector. The policy of "shock therapy" worked to restructure failed or failing banks.

Myung-Koo Kang will discuss this "shock therapy" approach in Korea and look at this approach to financial restructuring in a broader comparative context. He will also explore the impact of Korea's restructuring efforts on financial intermediation and the consequences of rapid privatization on the Korean financial sector.

Myung-Koo Kang is a postdoctoral fellow of Shorenstein APARC. Kang is currently revising his dissertation for publication titled, "Growing out of the "Vortex": The Politics of Financial Restructuring in Japan and South Korea". His dissertation explores the reasons why, despite similar institutional legacies emphasizing economic development, South Korea and Japan have responded so differently to their respective banking crises. Kang received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2006. He was a visiting scholar to the Policy Research Institute of the Ministry of Finance, Japan, in 2003-4. His research focuses on comparative political economy, international relations, public administration, and East Asia.

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Philippines Conference Room

Myung-Koo Kang

Shorenstein APARC
Encina Hall, Room E301
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 723-6530
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Postdoctoral Fellow
MK_Kang1.jpg PhD

Myung-Koo Kang holds Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley (major in political science, specialty: comparative political economy, public administration, and East Asia) and M.A and B.A. from the Seoul National University (major in international relations). He was brought up in a rural area of South Korea, observing the massive social mobilization during the 1970s, and he served in the DMZ for three years before he came to the U.S. He conducted research at the Policy Research Institute of the Ministry of Finance, Japan, for a year as a visiting scholar about Japanese financial reforms.

Dr. Kang is currently conducting research on various projects: (1) preparing the dissertation for publication about the financial reforms in Japan and South Korea, and effects of financial restructuring on corporate financing and governance; (2) research on the social and historical origin of Korean power elite, and as its extension, leading research project on comparative studies on power elite in Japan, South Korea, and China; (3) the pattern of uneven regional integration in East Asia and its prospects; (4) research on the political and economic difficulties faced by North Korean refugees living in South Korea.

Myung-Koo Kang Speaker
Seminars
Korean Studies Colloquium Series
Korea Program

Georgian prime minister addresses FSI scholars, students

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On Dec. 7, 2006, Georgian Prime Minister Zurab Noghaideli met with FSI scholars and students and reported on his administration's reforms, negotiations with the breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, whether Georgia sought NATO membership, and energy security vis-à-vis Russia. Noghaideli, who became prime minister of the Republic of Georgia in February 2005, was considered a member of a team of young reformists headed by Zurab Zhvania and Mikheil Saakashvili in the years leading up to the Rose Revolution. He also discussed Russian sanctions on Georgian exports, and was optimistic about Georgia's ability to adapt to and rebound from such constraints. As an example he pointed to the success of a recent advertising campaign in neighboring Ukraine, in which billboards advertise, "Promote democracy. Drink Georgian wine."
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