Francis Fukuyama, one of the world's most prominent experts on democracy, development, and governance has joined Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) as the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow, effective July 2010.  He will reside in FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, and fully engage in the center's research, teaching, and policy missions, CDDRL Director Larry Diamond announced.

I am thrilled to be joining Larry Diamond, Stephen D. Krasner, Kathryn Stoner and other colleagues in CDDRL's research, teaching, and policy engagement," said Fukuyama.  "CDDRL is world renowned for its interdisciplinary programs which bridge academic research and policy analysis - and we need break-through thinking in both to advance political and economic development."
- Francis Fukuyama

Fukuyama comes to FSI from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University, where he was the Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy and director of the International Development Program at SAIS.

"We are thrilled that Frank is joining CDDRL and our quest to understand how countries advance politically and economically and the role governance plays in these interrelated challenges," said Diamond. "His path-breaking work on democracy, governance, and state building, his probing intellect, and his passionate commitment to advance theoretical and practical understanding of development - in all its dimensions - will be wonderful assets to our center and students, to the Freeman Spogli Institute, and to Stanford University."

Fukuyama has written widely on political and economic development. His best-known book, The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press, 1992) made the bestseller lists in the United States, France, Japan, and Italy and was awarded the Los Angeles Times' Book Critics Award and the Premio Capri for the Italian edition.  Fukuyama is also the author of America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (2006), State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21^st Century (2004), Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002), The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order (1999) and Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (1995).  His new book The Origins of Political Order will be published in March 2011.

"We are delighted to welcome Frank Fukuyama at this dynamic time for FSI, particularly as we launch a new Global Underdevelopment Action Fund, to seed action-oriented, multidisciplinary faculty research projects in support of global development," said FSI Director Coit D. Blacker. "Frank's exemplary scholarship and teaching, and his dedication to the expansion of democracy and development, are an inspiration to Stanford faculty and students, and to leaders in transitioning countries the world over."

Dr. Fukuyama served as a member of the President's Council on Bioethics from 2001-2005. He holds an honorary doctorate from Connecticut College, Doane College, and Doshisha University (Japan). He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, and sits on the editorial or advisory boards of The American Interest, the Journal of Democracy, the Inter-American Dialogue, and the New America Foundation.

Fukuyama received a BA in classics from Cornell University and a PhD in political science from Harvard. He was a member of the political science department of the Rand Corporation in 1979-80, from 1983 to 1989 and in 1995-96. In 1981-82 and again in 1989, Fukuyama was a member of the Policy Planning Staff of the U.S. Department of State, specializing first in Middle East affairs and then as Deputy Director for European political-military affairs. From 1996-2000, Fukuyama was the Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University.

"I am thrilled to be joining Larry Diamond, Stephen D. Krasner, Kathryn Stoner and other colleagues in CDDRL's research, teaching, and policy engagement," said Fukuyama.  "CDDRL is world renowned for its interdisciplinary programs which bridge academic research and policy analysis - and we need break-through thinking in both to advance political and economic development."

President Barack Obama announced his intent to appoint CISAC's Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, an expert on federal regulatory policy, public safety, and international security, to the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), an independent agency of the United States government charged with improving the efficiency and fairness of federal agencies.

Professor Cuéllar, who is both a CISAC faculty member and the Deane F. Johnson Faculty Scholar at Stanford Law School, recently returned from a leave of absence he took to serve as Special Assistant to the President for Justice and Regulatory Policy at the White House Domestic Policy Council. Among other issues, Cuéllar worked on improving food safety and public health policy, expanding support to state and local law enforcement, enhancing transparency in the regulatory process, and strengthening border coordination and immigrant integration. He negotiated key provisions of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act and represented the Domestic Policy Council in the development of the first-ever Quadrennial Homeland Security Review. Earlier, Cuéllar co-chaired the Obama Transition's Immigration Policy Committee and served as a Treasury official in the Clinton Administration.

As part of the ACUS Council, Cuéllar will join leading lawyers such as former U.S. court of appeals judge Patricia Wald and former solicitor general Ted Olson in overseeing the work of ACUS and setting its priorities. With the appointment to the ACUS Council, Cuéllar will draw upon his scholarly expertise in how institutions manage complex regulatory challenges as well as his experience in government.

"At a time when our country faces such enormous challenges, it is especially important for agencies to safeguard the rights of the public, cut waste, and deliver value to the American people," said Cuéllar. "I am honored by this appointment and by the chance to work on these critical issues."

Established by statute in 1964, the Administrative Conference of the United States has played an important role in promoting improvements in the efficiency and fairness in the way federal agencies conduct regulatory programs. ACUS has been on hiatus for the past 14 years, but has been revived by Congress with support from a broad range of lawyers, scholars, and judges, including Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Stephen Breyer.

The hardest evidence for a link so far comes from a team led by Marshall Burke of the University of California and FSE Research Associate, and co-authored with FSE Fellow David Lobell. They studied African wars from 1980 to 2002 and found that rising temperatures are indeed associated with crop failure, economic decline and a sharp rise in the likelihood of war. It predicted a “50% increase” in the chance of civil war in Africa by 2030.

The Southeast Asia Forum experienced an embarrassment of riches in 2009-2010.  In no previous academic year had the Forum enjoyed the intellectual company of so many first-rate scholars working on Southeast Asia at Stanford.  They were six in all—Marshall Clark (Australia), James Hoesterey (US), Juliet Pietsch (Australia), Thitinan Pongsudhirak (Thailand), Sudarno Sumarto (Indonesia), and Christian von Luebke (Germany)—three for the full academic year and three for two months apiece.  All six visitors shared their findings and thoughts on Southeast Asia in talks hosted by SEAF.  Not least among the pleasures of having them at Stanford was a Spring 2010 seminar in which they read each other’s work in progress and shared ideas as to how it might be improved.  These conversations gave specific, heuristic, and collegial meaning to the abstract notion of “a community of scholars.”

Here are brief updates on all six as of the end of June 2010:  

Marshall Clark

A lecturer in Indonesian studies at Deakin University in Australia, Dr. Clark came to Stanford on sabbatical to spend two months at Stanford in Spring 2010 writing up and sharing his research findings with US-based colleagues.  Publications associated with his stay at APARC include two books, Maskulinitas:  Culture, Gender and Politics in Indonesia (Monash University Press, 2010) and Indonesia-Malaysia Relations:  Media Politics and Regionalism (co-authored with Juliet Pietsch and forthcoming in 2011), and two articles, “The Ramayana in Southeast Asia: Fostering Regionalism or the State?” in Ramayana in Focus, and (with Dr. Pietsch) “Generational Change:  Regional Security and Australian Engagement with Asia,” The Pacific Review  During his time with SEAF he presented papers at venues including the Association for Asian Studies convention in Philadelphia in March 2010.  In April at the University of California-Berkeley at the Islam Today Film Festival he moderated a discussion of the ins and outs of making movies in Indonesia and Malaysia. (2010).

He returns to his position on the faculty of Deakin University.

James Hoesterey

Dr. Hoesterey was awarded the Walter H. Shorenstein Fellowship to spend the academic year at APARC working on several projects, including revising his University of Wisconsin-Madison doctoral dissertation into a book.  Based on anthropological research in Indonesia on media-savvy Muslim preachers, Sufi Gurus and Celebrity Scandal:  Islamic Piety on the Public Stage should be under review in 2010 for possible publication in 2011.  Also in the pipeline are an essay, “Shaming the State: Pop Preachers and the Politics of Pornography in Indonesia,” to appear in a volume he is co-editing with political scientist Michael Buehler, and chapters in Muslim Cosmopolitanisms and Digital Subjectivities:  Anthropology in the Age of Mass Media.  During his fellowship he spoke to audiences at several US universities.  In March 2010 he was elected incoming chair of the Indonesian and East-Timor Studies Committee of the Association for Asian Studies.

In Fall 2010 the BBC-Discovery Channel series “Human Planet” will feature Dr. Hoesterey’s work as a cultural consultant with documentary-film makers in West Papua.  He will spend AY 2010-11 in Illinois as the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Islamic Studies at Lake Forest College.  

Juliet Pietsch

Dr. Pietsch is a senior lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at the Australian National University.  During her two-month sabbatical at Stanford in Spring 2010 she worked on two books:  Indonesia-Malaysia Relations: Media, Politics and Regionalism (with Dr. Clark) and (with two other co-authors) Dimensions of Australian Society (3rd ed., Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).  In April, jointly with Dr. Clark, she spoke at the Berkeley APEC Study Center on “Indonesia-Malaysia Relations and Southeast Asian Regional Identity.”

Dr. Pietsch returns to her faculty position at the Australian National University.

Thitinan Pongsudhirak

Dr. Pongsudhirak is an associate professor in the Department of International Relations in the Faculty of Political Science at Chulalongkorn University, whose Institute of Security and International Studies he also heads.  He was selected to spend a month at Stanford in Spring 2010 as an FSI-Humanities Center international scholar, and was supported for a second month by FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.  During his time on campus he focused on the turbulent politics of Thailand—in an article drafted for the Journal of Democracy, in a number of shorter pieces, in lectures at various venues, and in interviews with media around the world.  (For a filmed interview on 4 June 2010, see http://absolutelybangkok.com/thitinan-on-continuity-change/.)

Dr. Pongsudhirak will briefly rejoin some of his Stanford colleagues at a conference on Asian regionalism to be hosted by APARC in Kyoto in September 2010.  Meanwhile he continues his scholarship and teaching at Chulalongkorn.

Sudarno Sumarto

An Indonesian economist specializing on poverty reduction, Dr. Sumarto spent AY 2009-2010 at APARC as an Asia Foundation fellow writing up research, lecturing on and off campus, and advising Indonesian officials on anti-poverty policy.  Notable among the publications resulting from his residence at Stanford is a book, Poverty and Social Protection in Indonesia (Singapore / Jakarta:  ISEAS / Smeru Institute, May 2010), which he co-edited and most of whose chapters he co-wrote.  Noteworthy, too, is a co-authored essay, “Targeting Social Protection Programs:  The Experience of Indonesia,” in Deficits and Trajectories: Rethinking Social Protection as Development Policy in the Asia Region (forthcoming, 2010).  Indonesia-related subjects of writing in progress include lessons from the cash transfer program, how such transfers have affected political participation, and the impacts of violent conflict on economic growth.  During his stay at Stanford, Dr. Sumarto was chosen to co-convene the September 2010 Indonesia Update conference in Canberra on “Employment, Living Standards, and Poverty in Contemporary Indonesia” and to co-edit the resulting book. 

Dr. Sumarto returns to Jakarta to become a senior research fellow at the Smeru Institute, which he co-founded and directed, and to continue his work on poverty alleviation in Indonesia.

Christian von Luebke

Former Shorenstein fellow Dr. von Luebke completed the first year of a two-year German Research Foundation fellowship at Stanford writing a book on democracy and governance in Southeast Asia.  Before the end of 2010, Gauging Governance:  The Mesopolitics of Democratic Change in Indonesia should be in the pipeline toward publication.  Other relevant work includes “Politics of Reform:  Political Scandals, Elite Resistance, and Presidential Leadership in Indonesia,” Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs (2010), and a co-authored piece on current economics and politics in the Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies (2010).  Pending revision and resubmission is an article on the political economy of investment climates in Indonesia.  In the course of the year he spoke on his research before audiences in North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia, and co-organized a panel on Southeast Asian politics to be held at the annual conference of Oxford Analytica in the UK in September 2010.

Dr. von Luebke’s plans for AY 2010-11 at Stanford include research and writing on Indonesia and the Philippines and teaching a course on Southeast Asian politics