Stanford University

International Development

FSI researchers consider international development from a variety of angles. They analyze ideas such as how public action and good governance are cornerstones of economic prosperity in Mexico and how investments in high school education will improve China’s economy.

They are looking at novel technological interventions to improve rural livelihoods, like the development implications of solar power-generated crop growing in Northern Benin.

FSI academics also assess which political processes yield better access to public services, particularly in developing countries. With a focus on health care, researchers have studied the political incentives to embrace UNICEF’s child survival efforts and how a well-run anti-alcohol policy in Russia affected mortality rates.

FSI’s work on international development also includes training the next generation of leaders through pre- and post-doctoral fellowships as well as the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program.

Cybersecurity talk draws business and political leaders to Stanford CISAC

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Computers and the networks that connect them are powerful storehouses of information. They're also vulnerable to sabotage, and the data they handle can be stolen, altered or erased. President Obama has called cyberattacks "one of the most serious economic and national security threats our nation faces." 

To help tackle the problem, researchers at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation are exploring issues in cybersecurity and keeping a close eye on the policy discussions. Earlier this month, CISAC brought together a group of lawmakers and industry leaders from Silicon Valley to discuss new efforts to prevent cyberespionage and related crimes. 

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) talked about a bill he’s introduced to safeguard technology. "The intelligence community believes strongly that it's just a matter of time before we have a catastrophic cyberattack," said Rogers, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. "We have admired this problem for a very long time and it's time to do something." 

Among the other speakers were Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), Intel Chief Executive Officer Paul Otellini, and security experts from Google, Cisco Systems and Oracle. 

After the invitation-only event, CISAC's Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, Otellini and Rogers discussed the future of the Internet, the scope of the cyberthreat and government's role in defending against it. Excerpts: 

 

There are core questions about where the world is going  

"Cybersecurity problems are real and they’re immediate. And the threats are probably growing and the problems we face require solutions. But it’s just as important to think about where we’re going to be 20 to 30 years from now as it is to deal with the immediate problems. That’s because the choices we make about how to secure cyberspace are going to be choices about what your identity will be online, what powers government will have, what nation states will be able to do to each other, what companies will be able to do when they deal with cyberthreats, how aggressively they will be able to respond on their own -- those are essentially choices about the architecture of the world. So it's useful for us to understand as scholars and as people engaged in policy, that choices about cybersecurity are not just technical. They’re really core questions about where is the world going."

-- Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, co-director, Center for International Security and Cooperation

 

Preventing electronic pickpockets 

"On the commercial side it's no secret that there's industrial espionage going on through cyberhacking. There are also rogue groups that are not nation states, but people who just want to steal your identity. So the ability to see those attacks coming, to see those profiles coming, and to be able to improve the quality of the computer network and the phone networks and the phones themselves will also allow us to protect our own intellectual property as companies, and protect the identity and potentially the financial assets of our collective customers. When your cell phone is your wallet -- as it will be in the not-too-distant future -- all of a sudden that's like having an electronic pickpocket. An attack is going to compromise everything you have. Beyond that, many large technology firms feel that as good corporate citizens and as good local citizens, we have a responsibility to try and make sure the world's computer networks are not disrupted. If computers aren’t trusted, we don't have much of a business. We are commercially incentivized to make all this stuff so much better."

-- Paul Otellini, chief executive officer, Intel. 

 

We can be a partner with industry 

"Individually, a company gets hacked for espionage purposes -- that's a criminal event. Collectively, it becomes a national security issue because of the sheer volume of intellectual property that would be compromised. You also have the other level: a disruptive cyberattack that shuts down certain capabilities, whether it's financial, in the energy sector or otherwise. We've fought this fight with dot-gov and dot-mil for quite a long time. Dot-com has, too, but they've been a bit on their own. This proposal has the government weighing in and saying, 'Hey, maybe we can be a partner.'"

-- Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. 

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Standards & Regulations for Yucca Mountain: What Went Wrong?

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About the topic: Standards and regulations for the management, transportation and disposal of radioactive materials have been key to the development of strategies for the handling and disposing of radioactive materials at the “back-end” of the nuclear fuel cycle.  This presentation summarizes previous U.S. experience in developing a standard and regulations for the geologic disposal of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste.  The main purpose of a standard and its implementing regulations should be to protect human health and the environment, but the structure of the standard and regulations, as well as the standard-of-proof for compliance, should not extend beyond what is scientifically possible and reasonable.  The demonstration of compliance must not only be compelling, but it must also be able to sustain scientific and public scrutiny.  We can benefit from the sobering reality of how difficult it is to project the future behavior of a geologic repository over extended spatial and temporal scales that stretch over tens of kilometers and out to a million years.

About the Speaker: Rodney Ewing is the Edward H. Kraus Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan.  He was appointed to the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board by President Obama on July 28, 2011.

He has faculty appointments in the departments of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Nuclear Engineering & Radiological Sciences and Materials Science & Engineering and is an Emeritus Regents' Professor at the University of New Mexico, where he was a member of the faculty from 1974 to 1997.  He is a fellow of the Geological Society of America, the Mineralogical Society of America, the American Geophysical Union, the Geochemical Society, the American Ceramic Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Materials Research Society. 

CISAC Conference Room

Rodney C. Ewing

CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, E203
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

(650) 725-8641
0
1946-2024
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Frank Stanton Professor in Nuclear Security
Professor of Geological Sciences
rodewingheadshot2014.jpg MS, PhD

      Rod Ewing was the Frank Stanton Professor in Nuclear Security and Co-Director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a Professor in the Department of Geological Sciences in the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences at Stanford University. He was also the Edward H. Kraus Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, where he had faculty appointments in the Departments of Earth & Environmental Sciences, Nuclear Engineering & Radiological Sciences and Materials Science & Engineering.  He was a Regents' Professor Emeritus at the University of New Mexico, where he was a member of the faculty from 1974 to 1997. Ewing received a B.S. degree in geology from Texas Christian University (1968, summa cum laude) and M.S. (l972) and Ph.D. (l974, with distinction) degrees from Stanford University where he held an NSF Fellowship.    His graduate studies focused on an esoteric group of minerals, metamict Nb-Ta-Ti oxides, which are unusual because they have become amorphous due to radiation damage caused by the presence of radioactive elements. Over the past thirty years, the early study of these unusual minerals has blossomed into a broadly-based research program on radiation effects in complex ceramic materials.  In 2001, the work on radiation-resistant ceramics was recognized by the DOE, Office of Science – Decades of Discovery as one of the top 101 innovations during the previous 25 years. This has led to the development of techniques to predict the long-term behavior of materials, such as those used in radioactive waste disposal.

      He was the author or co-author of over 750 research publications and the editor or co-editor of 18 monographs, proceedings volumes or special issues of journals. He had published widely in mineralogy, geochemistry, materials science, nuclear materials, physics and chemistry in over 100 different ISI journals. He was granted a patent for the development of a highly durable material for the immobilization of excess weapons plutonium.  He was a Founding Editor of the magazine, Elements, which is now supported by 17 earth science societies. He was a Principal Editor for Nano LIFE, an interdisciplinary journal focused on collaboration between physical and medical scientists. In 2014, he was named a Founding Executive Editor of Geochemical Perspective Letters and appointed to the Editorial Advisory Board of Applied Physics Reviews.

      Ewing had received the Hawley Medal of the Mineralogical Association of Canada in 1997 and 2002, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, the Dana Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America in 2006, the Lomonosov Gold Medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2006, a Honorary Doctorate from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in 2007, the Roebling Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America in 2015, Ian Campbell Medal of the American Geoscience Institute, 2015, the Medal of Excellence in Mineralogical Sciences from the International Mineralogical Association in 2015, the Distinguished Public Service Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America in 2019, and was a foreign Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He was also a fellow of the Geological Society of America, Mineralogical Society of America, Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland, American Geophysical Union, Geochemical Society, American Ceramic Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Materials Research Society. He was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Engineering in 2017.

      He was president of the Mineralogical Society of America (2002) and the International Union of Materials Research Societies (1997-1998). He was the President of the American Geoscience Institute (2018). Ewing had served on the Board of Directors of the Geochemical Society, the Board of Governors of the Gemological Institute of America and the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

      He was co-editor of and a contributing author of Radioactive Waste Forms for the Future (North-Holland Physics, Amsterdam, 1988) and Uncertainty Underground – Yucca Mountain and the Nation’s High-Level Nuclear Waste (MIT Press, 2006).  Professor Ewing had served on thirteen National Research Council committees and board for the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine that have reviewed issues related to nuclear waste and nuclear weapons. In 2012, he was appointed by President Obama to serve as the Chair of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, which is responsible for ongoing and integrated technical review of DOE activities related to transporting, packaging, storing and disposing of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste; he stepped down from the Board in 2017.

https://profiles.stanford.edu/rodney-ewing

Co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation
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Rodney Ewing Edward H. Kraus Distinguished University Professor, University of Michigan; Member, Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board; Affiliate, CISAC Speaker
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Stanford publications contextualize China's development

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After 10 years of rapid growth, China will undergo a major leadership transition later this year. Two recent Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center edited volumes -- Going Private in China and Growing Pains -- put China’s development into context as the country prepares for the next decade of its future.
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Democratic Transition and Development in the Arab World

The third ARD annual conference examineي the challenges, key issues, and ways forward for social and economic development in the Arab world during this period of democratic transition. 

Day One - April 26, 2012

9:15-10:45am       Opening Panel – International & Domestic Frameworks for                                       Development

 

Welcoming Remarks: Larry Diamond and Lina Khatib, Stanford University

 

George Kossaifi, Dar Al-Tanmiyah:

Towards an Integrated Social Policy of the Arab Youth

10:45-11:00am Break

11:00-12:30am     Session 1: Political Economy of Reform

 

Chair: Hicham Ben Abdallah, Stanford University

Mongi Boughzala, University of Tunis El-Manar:

Economic Reforms in Egypt and Tunisia: Revolutionary Change and an Uncertain Agenda

Abdulwahab Alkebsi, Center for International Private Enterprise:

Answering Calls for Economic Dignity 

12:30-1:30pm Lunch

1:30-3:00pm         Session 2: Oil-Dependent Economies and Social and Political                                     Development

 

Chair: Larry Diamond, Stanford University

Hedi Larbi, World Bank:

Development and Democracy in Transition Oil-rich Countries in MENA

Ibrahim Saif, Carnegie Middle East Center:

Lessons from the Gulf's Twin Shocks

3:00-3:30pm Break

3:30-5:00pm         Session 3: Youth, ICTs, and Development Opportunities

 

Chair: Ayca Alemdaroglu, Stanford University

Loubna Skalli-Hanna, American University:

Youth and ICTs in MENA: Development Alternatives and Possibilities

Hatoon Ajwad Al-Fassi, King Saud University:

Social Media in Saudi Arabia, an era of youth social representation

 

Day Two - April 27, 2012

9:00-10:30am             Session 1: Civil Society Development

 

Chair: Sean Yom, Temple University

Laryssa Chomiak, Centre d’Etudes Maghrebines à Tunis (CEMAT):

Civic Resistance to Civil Society: Institutionalizing Dissent in Post-Revolutionary Tunisia

Rihab Elhaj, New Libya Foundation:

Building Libyan Civil Society 

10:30-11:00am Break

11:00-12:30pm           Session 2: Democratic Transition and the Political                                                     Development of Women

 

Chair: Katie Zoglin, Human Rights Lawyer 

Valentine Moghadam, Northeastern University:

The Gender of Democracy: Why It Matters

Amaney Jamal, Princeton University:

Reforms in Personal Status Laws and Women’s Rights in the Arab World

12:30-1:30pm Lunch

1:30-3:00pm               Session 3: Minority Rights as a Key Component of                                                       Development

 

Chair: Lina Khatib, Stanford University

Mona Makram-Ebeid, American University in Cairo:

Challenges Facing Minority Rights in Democratic Transition (title TBC)

Nadim Shehadi, Chatham House:

The Other Turkish Model: Power Sharing and Minority Rights in the Arab Transitions 

3:00-3:30pm Break

3:30-4:45pm               Session 4: Towards Integrated Development in the Arab                                           World

 

Chair: Larry Diamond, Stanford University 

Closing roundtable discussion: Scenarios for integrated development

 

4:45-5:45pm Reception

 



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Emerging Land Issues in African Agriculture: Implications for food security and poverty reduction strategies

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Despite the fact that sub-Saharan Africa in 2012 contains much of the world’s unutilized and underutilized arable land, a significant and growing share of Africa’s farm households live in densely populated areas. Based on two alternative spatial databases capable of estimating populations at the level of one square kilometer and distinguishing between arable and non-arable land, we find that in at least five of the 10 countries analyzed, 25 percent of the rural population resides in areas exceeding 500 persons per square kilometer, estimated by secondary sources as an indicative maximum carrying capacity for areas of rain-fed agriculture in the region. The apparent paradox of a large proportion of Africa’s rural population living in densely populated conditions amidst a situation of massive unutilized land is resolved when the unit of observation is changed from land units to people.

A review of nationally representative farm surveys shows a tendency of (1) declining mean farm size over time within densely populated smallholder farming areas; (2) great disparities in landholding size within smallholder farming areas, leading to highly concentrated and skewed patterns of farm production and marketed surplus; (3) half or more of rural farm households are either buyers of grain or go hungry because they are too poor to afford to buy food; most households in this category control less than one hectare of land; and (4) a high proportion of farmers in densely populated areas perceive that it is not possible for them to acquire more land through customary land allocation procedures, even in areas where a significant portion of land appears to be unutilized.

Ironically, there has been little recognition of the potential challenges associated with increasingly densely populated and land-constrained areas of rural Africa, despite the fact that a sizeable and increasing share of its rural population live in such areas. Inadequate access to land and inability to exploit available unutilized land are issues that almost never feature in national development plans or poverty reduction strategies. In fact, since the rise of world food prices after the mid-2000s, many African governments have made concerted efforts to transfer land out of customary tenure systems (where the majority of rural people reside) to the state or to private individuals who, it is argued, can more effectively exploit the productive potential of the land to meet national food security objectives. Such efforts have nurtured the growth of a relatively well-capitalized class of “emergent” African farmers. The growing focus on how best to exploit unutilized land in Africa has arguably diverted attention from the more central and enduring challenge of implementing agricultural development strategies that effectively address the continent’s massive rural poverty and food insecurity problems, which require recognizing the growing land constraints faced by much of its still agrarian-based population. The final section of the paper considers research and policy options for addressing these problems.

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Global Nuclear Security Governance Building through the Nuclear Security Summit Meeting

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About the topic: Given the increased threat of nuclear terrorism by non-state actors, current global mechanisms addressing nuclear security have revealed serious limitations. As a result, after President Obama’s speech in 2009 at Prague, the first Nuclear Security Summit Meeting was successfully held in Washington D.C. Based on its success, the second Nuclear Security Summit Meeting is scheduled to be held in March 2012 in Seoul, Korea. In addition to the ongoing issues, the Seoul Meeting will deal with new issues such as nuclear safety in reflection of the recent Fukushima accident. The meeting may also take on other issues such as the framework agreement, further institutionalization of the Nuclear Security Summit Meeting and sustainable financing. Ultimately, this process should reinforce the effectiveness of global efforts to tackle nuclear terrorism and related issues.

About the Speaker: Professor Suh-Yong Chung is an international expert on international governance and institution building. His recent research interests include governance building in global climate change, Northeast Asian environmental cooperation institution building and nuclear security governance building. Dr. Chung has recently participated in various national and international conferences and seminars on nuclear security, such as the ROK-US Nuclear Security Experts Dialogue, and the WMD Study Group Meeting of the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific (CSCAP).

Dr. Chung is the Associate Professor of Division of International Studies of Korea University, an Adjunct Professor of The Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security of Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the General Secretary of CSCAP Korea. Dr. Suh-Yong Chung holds degrees in law and international relations from Seoul National University, the London School of Economics and Stanford Law School.

CISAC Conference Room

Suh-Yong Chung Associate Professor of Division of International Studies of Korea University Speaker
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Regional Conflict and Cooperation

Fangcheng Yuan

Walter. H. Shorenstein
Asia-Pacific Research Center
616 Serra St C332
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 725-0938 (650) 723-6530
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Visiting Associate Professor
YuanFangchen_WEB.jpg MA, PhD

Fangcheng Yuan joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) during the 2011–12 academic year from the Institute of Political Science at Central China Normal University where he serves as an associate professor.

His research interests encompass Sino-foreign local governance; current reforms and innovations in contemporary rural China; and a comparative study of rural governance in Mainland China and Taiwan. During his time at Shorenstein APARC, Yuan will conduct research on community reconstruction: current reforms and innovations in China’s rural primary-level management system. He will contribute to a forthcoming research report on the subject.

Yuan is an editor of the Journal of Socialist Research, and contributes articles regularly to publications including CASS Journal of Political Science and Journal of Public Administration. He is also the author of Making Service Work (2008); Breakthrough: Xian’an Reform and the Transformation of China's Rural Grass-roots Governance (2009); and Working in Grass-Roots: A Close Observation of the Reforming of Rural China (2011).

Yuan holds a PhD and an MA in Chinese and foreign political systems from the Institute of Political Science at Central China Normal University, and a BA in political science from Wuhan University.

2012 Robert G. Wesson Lecture - Michael Manley: Decolonization and the International Politics of Sovereignty

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Anthony Bogues is currently the Harmon Family Professor of Africana Studies and affiliated Professor of Political Science and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, and a Visiting Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. He is also a Honorary Professor at the Center for African Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa  and Visiting Professor of the Humanities at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia.

His books are: Caliban’s Freedom: The Early Political Thought of C.L.R. James (1997); Black Heretics and Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals (2003); and Empire of Liberty: Power, Freedom and Desire ( 2010).  He is the editor of two volumes of Caribbean intellectual history, After Man - The Human: Critical Essays on the Thought of Sylvia Wynter (2006); and The George Lamming Reader: The Aesthetics of Decolonization (2011). He has published over 60 essays in the fields of intellectual history, political theory, cultural and literary history and is an associate editor of the journal Small Axe and member of the editorial collective of the journal Boundary 2.

He recently co-curated a national exhibition on Haitian Art, titled, Reframing Haiti –Art, History and Performativity.  He is currently working on three major projects, a political/philosophical project on questions of the human, freedom, human emancipation and the black intellectual tradition; co-curating a major exhibition on Haitian art for 2014 in Paris and Cape Town, South Africa; and an intellectual/political biography of Michael Manley and Jamaican postcolonial politics.

Professor Bogues served as chief of staff to then Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley.

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Anthony Bogues Harmon Family Professor, Professor of Africana Studies, Brown University Speaker
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Robert G. Wesson Lecture Series in International Relations Theory and Practice

“Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain”

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Co-sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies (CREEES), the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), The Europe Center and the German Studies department

About the topic:  This talk presents an unconventional look at the creation of a deadly barrier between East and West Germany.  It reveals how the Iron Curtain was not simply imposed by communism, but had been emerging haphazardly in both East and West long before the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961.  From the end of the Third Reich, ad hoc enforcement of the tenuous border between the two Germanys led to the creation of difference where there was no difference, institutionalization of violence among neighbors, popular participation in a system that was deeply unpopular--and people normalizing a monstrosity in their midst.

About the Speaker: Edith Sheffer is assistant professor of Modern European History at Stanford. Edith Sheffer came to Stanford as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities in 2008 and joined the History Department faculty in 2010.  She recently completed Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain, and was the winner of the 2011 Fraenkel Prize, awarded by the Wiener Library Institute of Contemporary History, London. 

Her future research will also examine the intersection of public events and private choices, from Germans’ “zero Hour” diaries in 1945 to the development and dissemination of corporate cultures.  Research and teaching interests span modern Europe and Germany, especially the social and cultural history of the twentieth century.

CISAC Conference Room

Edith Sheffer

Department of History 200-120

(650) 724-0074
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Former Assistant Professor of Modern European History
Former Assistant Professor, by courtesy, of German Studies
edith_sheffer_-_1.jpg PhD

Edith Sheffer joined the History Department faculty in 2010, having come to Stanford as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities in 2008.  Her first book, Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (Oxford University Press, 2011), challenges the moral myth of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War’s central symbol. It reveals how the barrier between East and West did not simply arise overnight from communism in Berlin in 1961, but that a longer, lethal 1,393 kilometer fence had been developing haphazardly between the two Germanys since 1945.

Her current book, Soulless Children of the Reich: Hans Asperger and the Nazi Origins of Autism, investigates Hans Asperger’s creation of the autism diagnosis in Nazi Vienna, examining Nazi psychiatry's emphasis on social spirit and Asperger's involvement in the euthanasia program that murdered disabled children. A related project through Stanford's Spatial History Lab, "Forming Selves: The Creation of Child Psychiatry from Red Vienna to the Third Reich and Abroad," maps the transnational development of child psychiatry as a discipline, tracing linkages among its pioneers in Vienna in the 1930s through their emigration from the Third Reich and establishment of different practices in the 1940s in England and the United States. Sheffer's next book project, Hidden Front: Switzerland and World War Two, tells an in-depth history of a nation whose pivotal role remains unexposed--yet was decisive in the course of the Second World War.

Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
Edith Sheffer Assistant Professor of Modern European History, The Europe Center Research Affiliate Speaker
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