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.

Pyongyang under EU's wing

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Soyoung Kwon
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APARC's 2004-2005 Shorenstein Fellow, Soyoung Kwon, discusses Europe's new perspective on Pyongyang.

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- The European Union is increasingly showing a new independent stance on foreign-policy issues as the logic of its industrial and economic integration plays out in the international arena.

Already the EU has taken a distinct and independent approach to both the Israel-Palestinian conflict and the nuclear crisis in Iran. Now it has broken ranks over the Korean Peninsula, fed up and concerned with the failure to resolve the ongoing crisis over North Korea's development of nuclear arms.

Reflecting this new stance, the European Parliament this week passed a comprehensive resolution on the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and nuclear arms in North Korea and Iran:

  • It urges the resumption of the supply of heavy fuel oil (HFO) to North Korea in exchange for a verified freeze of the Yongbyong heavy-water reactor, which is capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium, to avoid a further deterioration in the situation. At the same time it is calling for the European Council and Commission to offer to pay for these HFO supplies.
  • It urges the Council of Ministers to reconsider paying 4 million Euros of the suspension costs for KEDO (the Korea Energy Development Organization) to South Korea to ensure the continued existence of an organization that could play a key role in delivering energy supplies during a settlement process.
  • It demands that the Commission and Council request EU participation in future six-party talks, making it clear that the EU will in the future adopt a "no say, no pay" principle in respect to the Korean Peninsula. Having already placed more than $650 million worth of humanitarian and development aid into the North, it is no longer willing to be seen merely as a cash cow. This view was backed in the debate by the Luxembourg presidency and follows a line initially enunciated by Javier Solana's representatives last month in the Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee.
  • It urges North Korea to rejoin the NPT, return to the six-party talks and allow the resumption of negotiations.

The EP cannot substantiate U.S. allegations that North Korea has an HEU (highly enriched uranium) program or that North Korea provided HEU to Libya. It has called for its Foreign Affairs Committee to hold a public hearing to evaluate the evidence. "Once bitten, twice shy" is the consequence of U.S. claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

The world order is changing; the EU -- like China -- is emerging as a significant global power economically with the euro challenging the dollar as the global currency (even prior to the latest enlargement from 15 to 25 member states, the EU's economy was bigger than that of the United States). Speaking at Stanford University earlier this month, former U.S. foreign policy adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski pointed out that the EU, U.S., China, Japan and India will be the major powers in the new emerging global order. Since the new Asia will have three out of the five major players, he stressed the importance of engaging with it.

How will those already in play respond? Some may claim that statements by North Korea welcoming the EU's involvement and participation are merely polite, inoffensive small talk that cannot be taken seriously. Yet there have been a spate of pro-EU articles appearing in Rodong Sinmun, the daily newspaper of the Central Committee of the Korean Workers Party, since 2001.

Of 128 EU-related articles between 2001 and 2004, a majority praised Europe's independent counter-U.S. stance, emphasized its increasing economic power and influence, and heralded its autonomous regional integration. Rodong Sinmun portrays the EU as the only superpower that can check and balance U.S. hegemony and America's unilateral exercise of military power.

North Korea's perception of the EU is well reflected in articles such as: "EU becomes new challenge to U.S. unilateralism"; "Escalating frictions (disagreements) between Europe and U.S."; "European economy (euro) dominating that of the U.S."; "Europe strongly opposing unilateral power play of U.S.," and so forth.

Concurrently, North Korea has pursued active engagement with the EU by establishing diplomatic relations with 24 of the 25 EU member states (the exception being France). It is not necessary to read between the lines to recognize North Korea's genuine commitment to engagement with the EU based on its perception of the EU's emerging role on the world stage.

The Republic of Korea has publicly welcomed the prospect of EU involvement, while China wishes to go further and engage in bilateral discussions with the EU on its new policy toward the North. Russia will follow the majority. The problem is with Japan and the U.S.

In Japan, opinion is split by hardliners in the Liberal Democratic Party who view problems with North Korea as a convenient excuse to justify the abandonment of the Peace Constitution. They don't want a quick solution until crisis has catalyzed the transformation of Japan into what advocates call a "normal" country.

The U.S. expects an EU financial commitment, but not EU participation. The neocons believe that EU participation would change the balance of forces within the talks inexorably toward critical engagement rather than confrontation.

The question is whether the EU's offer will point the U.S. into a corner or trigger a breakthrough. Will U.S. fundamentalists outmaneuver the realists who favor a diplomatic rather than military solution? Only time will tell.

Glyn Ford, a Labour Party member of the European Parliament (representing South West England), belongs to the EP's Korean Peninsula Delegation. Soyoung Kwon is a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University's Asia-Pacific Research Center.

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Barracks and Brothels: Peacekeepers and Human Trafficking in the Balkans

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Dr. Sarah Mendelson is a senior fellow with the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Before joining CSIS in 2001, she taught international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. Dr. Mendelson received her B.A. in history from Yale University, and her Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University. She also earned a certificate from the Harriman Institute.

At CSIS, she manages several projects that explore the links between security and human rights. Her current research includes collaborative work on public opinion surveys of Russian attitudes on democracy, human rights, Chechnya and the military. She directed a collaborative study evaluating the impact of Western democracy assistance to Eastern Europe and Eurasia. In addition, she has served on the staff of the National Democratic Institute's Moscow office, and was a resident associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She has also been a fellow at CISAC and at Princeton University's Center of International Studies.

Dr. Mendelson serves on the steering committee of Human Rights Watch, the editorial board of International Security, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Program on New Approaches to Russian Security.

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Sarah Mendelson Senior Fellow Russia and Eurasia Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies
Seminars
Human Trafficking

The Politics, Ethics, and Law of Racially- Targeted Biological Weapons

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Tonya Putnam has a J.D. from Harvard Law School and received her Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at Stanford University in March 2005. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC, but will be moving to the Center on Globalization and Governance at Princeton University for a postdoctoral fellowship next academic year. Her dissertation, Courts Without Borders? The Politics and Law of Extraterritorial Regulation, explores the extraterritorial reach of U.S. federal courts and regulatory institutions, and implications for the development of de facto international regulatory frameworks. Other research areas have included human rights in peace implementation missions, comparative legal responses to the threat of cybercrime and cyberterrorism, risk communication in the context of radiological terrorism (dirty bombs), and obstacles to military reform in Russia.

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Tonya Putnam

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Affiliate
Tonya Lee Putnam

Tonya L. Putnam (J.D./Ph.D) is a Research Scholar at the Arnold A. Salzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. From 2007 to 2020 she was a member of the Political Science at Columbia University. Tonya’s work engages a variety of topics related to international relations and international law with emphasis on issues related to jurisdiction and jurisdictional overlaps in international regulatory and security matters. She is the author of Courts Without Borders: Law, Politics, and U.S. Extraterritoriality along with several articles in International Organization, International Security, and the Human Rights Review. She is also a member (inactive) of the California State Bar.

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Tonya L. Putnam
Seminars

Homeland Security vs. the Madisonian Impulse: State Building and Anti-Statism After September 11

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Has the Bush administration used the War on Terror to consolidate power in the executive branch? Is the United States in danger of undermining civil liberties and laying the foundation for an American police state? Arguing against conventional wisdom the authors answer these questions with an emphatic No. Drawing on evidence from the USA Patriot Act, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the Transportation Security Administration, intelligence reform, and the detention of enemy combatants, the authors argue that what is most striking about US homeland security policy in the wake of 9-11 is just how weak the response of the American state has been. This outcome is contrary to both conventional wisdom and theoretical expectation. The authors argue that this puzzle is best explained by focusing on the institutional structure of US domestic politics.

Jay Stowsky is an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS) and is the executive drector of UC Berkeley's Services Science Program. Previously, he directed UC Berkeley's program on Information Technology and Homeland Security at the Goldman School of Public Policy and served in the Clinton administration as senior economist for science and technology policy on the staff of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Stowsky has also served as associate dean at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and as director of research policy for the University of California system. He has authored several studies of U.S. technology policy, including "Secrets to Share or Shield: New Dilemmas for Military R&D in the Digital Age," in Research Policy (Vol. 33, No. 2, March 2004) and "The Dual-Use Dilemma," in Issues in Science and Technology (Winter 1996). He is co-author, with Wayne Sandholtz, et al., of The Highest Stakes: The Economic Foundations of the Next Security System (Cambridge Oxford University Press, 1992).

Matthew Kroenig is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley and a Public Policy and Nuclear Threats Fellow at the Institute of Global Conflict and Cooperation. Kroenig's dissertation research explains the conditions under which states provide sensitive nuclear assistance to nonnuclear weapons states. Previously, he was a research associate with the Information Technology and Homeland Security Project and has also served in government as an intelligence analyst.

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Matt Kroenig PhD Candidate Speaker Department of Political Science, UC Berkeley
Jay Stowsky Adjunct Professor Speaker School of Information Management and Systems, UC Berkeley
Seminars

The Greedy Terrorist: Inefficiencies and Vulneralbilities in Terrorist Organizations

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Shapiro presents research he conducted with David A. Siegel, a student in Stanford's Graduate School of Business:

A review of international terrorist activity reveals a recurring pattern of financially strapped operatives working for terrorist organizations that seem to have plenty of money. This observation is hard to square with traditional accounts of terrorist financial and logistical systems, accounts that stress the efficiency with which terrorist financial networks distribute funds while operating through a variety of covert channels. In order to explain the observed inefficiencies, we present a hierarchical model of terror organizations in which leaders must delegate financial and logistical tasks to middlemen for security reasons; however, these middlemen do not always share their leaders' interests. In particular, the temptation always exists to skim funds from any financial transaction. To counteract this problem, leaders can threaten to punish the middlemen. Because logisticians in international terrorist organizations are often geographically separated from leaders, and because they can defect to the government if threatened, violence is rarely the effective threat it is for localized groups such as the IRA. Therefore leaders must rely on more prosaic strategies to solve this agency problem; we focus on leaders' ability to remove middlemen from the network, denying them the rewards of future participation. We find that when the middlemen are sufficiently greedy, and when the organization suffers from a sufficiently strong budget constraint, that leaders will choose not to fund attacks in equilibrium because the costs of skimming are too great. Further, we show there can be important non-linearities in terrorists' response to government counter-terrorism. Specifically, we find that given constrained funding for terrorists, government efforts will yield few results until they reach a certain threshold, at which point cooperation between leaders and middlemen in terrorist groups breaks down leading to a dramatic drop in the probability of terrorist success.

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Jacob N. Shapiro
Seminars

Oxford Chancellor Christopher Patten Spoke at Stanford Institute for International Studies

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On April 7, The Rt. Hon. Lord Christopher Patten of Barnes delivered the Spring 2005 Payne Lecture before a large audience in the Bechtel Conference Center.

Lord Patten's address - The Transatlantic Family: Counseling, Mediation, or Divorce - although focused on American-European relations, extended to a myriad of global issues facing the transatlantic partnership. The lecture drew on Patten's exceptional public service experience, notably as the last British Governor of Hong Kong (1992-1997), EU Commissioner for External Relations (1999-2004) and Chancellor of Oxford University (2003-present).

Patten began by rebutting the notion that the U.S. is or should be an imperial power. Speaking about America, Patten observed: "You bucked what some historians going back to Thucydides believed to be almost a dictate of natural law, and refused to translate power into territorial aggrandizement and conquest. There is no real American settlement abroad. Most Americans who live overseas inhabit rich countries, not poor ones. Your universities do not, unlike Milner's Oxford, train an imperial cast of administrators. You don't seize territory though you're concerned about military bases and energy sources." America has pursued the most successful great power strategy since Augustus's Rome, Patten argued, not through imperialism, but by a tri-part policy of building institutions of global governance, persuading Europe to turn its back on xenophobic nationalism, and using American economic power and development assistance to foster market-based prosperity abroad. "That was the world in which I grew up, a world where there was stability, peace and growing prosperity year after year, but there wasn't much gratitude for the superpower."

From the very beginning many Europeans showed ingratitude and demonstrated "a particular European condescension masquerading as sophistication" Patten remarked. France in particular has displayed "petulant ingratitude". Even during the Clinton presidency, he added, there were some rows, though on the whole it was a storm-free relationship. Since 2001 however Americans and Europeans have perceived a growing gap between them on several issues, including the Middle East Peace Process, changes in US policy over North Korea, and abrogation of the ABM Treaty. The Bush administration's position on the Kyoto Protocol, in particular, impacted European public opinion negatively. By the time the Iraq crisis unfolded, Patten asserted, it appeared to confirm for many Europeans that America has turned to unilateralism. Patten emphasized that unlike President Bush who, he argued, won the 2004 Presidential election as a war President, in Britain Tony Blair, if he wins the general elections on May 5th this year, will do so not because of the war but despite it. Patten also expressed the fear that the Iraq experience will make it far more difficult to secure public support for any course of action, which will involve asking the public to put their trust in governments, and in the intelligence community in particular. About the wider Middle East he stated: What is a geostrategic issue for the United States is Europe's backyard.

Turning to what should be done to prevent the fracturing of the Transatlantic Alliance, Patten stressed that a rupture would be bad for Europe, the United States and the world at large "because whether you are talking about matters political or economic, the world is best served when transatlantic relations are in good shape". To prevent the relationship from deteriorating Americans and Europeans should first manage the relationship better. "We shouldn't take one another by surprise", he observed. Europe should also spend more on security, especially on better airlift capacity and special forces. "If we're going to be treated seriously as a partner, we have to be able to punch a little closer to our economic weight from time to time", Patten said; "too often Europeans are reluctant to accept that the maintenance of the international rule of law does sometimes require the use of force", he added. America and Europe should also spend more on development assistance, and the promotion of democracy, the rule of law and good governance. The objective of spreading democracy to the countries of the Arab League is not an impossible one. More broadly, Patten observed that "We need to identify those areas where it's imperative that we work together". Europe is never likely to be a significant contributor to a political settlement in Korea, he argues, but it can play a big role in Africa, the Balkans, in the Middle East, in Iran, and in dealing with Russia. On the latter, Patten was decisive: "If we want peace and stability in Moldova, in the south Caucuses, in the Ukraine, then Russia is going to have to stop creating trouble. It's got to abandon its present attitude to spheres of influence, and this is a point which we should put pretty bluntly, in my judgment, to President Putin. We talk in Europe regularly about a strategic relationship with Russia based on shared values. I have to say I don't see much evidence of the shared values."

The approach to global governance since World War II has been remarkably successful, Patten concluded. Recent surveys about attitudes in international affairs show that the majority of Americans, even after the Iraq war, want Europe to play a larger part in sharing world leadership. Patten expressed hope that that is a challenge Europeans will live up to. Europeans should be America's "super partners", Patten concluded, rather than its "supine followers" or "super snipers".

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Dangling by a Thread: Southeast Asia Since the End of Apparel Export Quotas

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Apparel export quotas that defined the worldwide garment trade for four decades ended on 1 January 2005. Trade data since then suggest that production has shifted from Southeast Asia to China. For the most developed countries in Southeast Asia, the loss of the garment industry will be a tolerable inconvenience. But it will devastate countries whose economies depend on such exports. An extreme example is Cambodia, three-fourths of whose exports are apparel. Are the threads from which these poor economies hang about to break? Is this industrys migration out of Southeast Asia inevitable and irrevocable? What, if anything, can governments and companies in the region do?

Geoffrey Stafford earned his PhD in political science (1998) and an MA in Southeast Asian studies (1996) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After completing his dissertation, Globalization Amid Diversity: Economic Development Policy in Multi-Ethnic Malaysia 1987-1997, he joined a large retailer to work on issues of corporate social responsibility in the global garment-manufacturing arena. In that capacity he is now analyzing the effects of quota termination on the world apparel industry. He has taught the politics of Southeast Asia at the University of San Francisco.

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Geoffrey Stafford Political scientist and global procurement strategist in the apparel industry
Seminars
Southeast Asia Program

Geography and the Human Experience

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This unit introduces students to a range of topics and activities that are essential to the study of geography such as map analysis and comparison, migration and perceptions of regions, interactions between humans and the environment and their implications, and urban growth and energy consumption.
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