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.
Understanding Stability and Dissent in the Kingdom: The Double-edged Role of Islamic Networks in Saudi Politics
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
Defeating Islamist Radicalism: Building a Global Counter-extremism Network
C. Holland Taylor is an expert on Islam and the process of Islamization in Southeast Asia, having lived, studied and worked in the Muslim world, from Iran to Indonesia, over a period of more than four decades.
Mr. Taylor established LibForAll Foundation (www.libforall.org) in 2003, together with former Indonesian president Kyai Haji Abdurrahman Wahid, whom the Wall Street Journal has called "the single most influential religious leader in the Muslim world" and "easily the most important ally the West has in the ideological struggle against Islamic radicalism." Under their leadership, LibForAll has grown into the leading NGO developing and operationalizing successful counter-extremism strategies worldwide.
Their inspiration lay in the heroic example of President Wahid's own 16th century Javanese ancestors, whose deft use of soft and hard power defeated Muslim extremists, and guaranteed freedom of religion for all Javanese, two centuries before the Bill of Rights led to the separation of church and state in the U.S.
Based on lessons derived from this struggle, LibForAll is forging a Global Rahmatan lil ‘Alamin ("Blessing for All Creation") Counter-Extremism Network of top Muslim opinion leaders in the fields of religion, education, pop culture, government, business and the media, who are joining to proclaim, with one voice, that radical Islam has no theological validity, and thereby mobilize the "great silent majority" of moderate, peace-loving Muslims to reject the extremists' ideology of hatred and violence.
This strategy has resulted in a number of world-class achievements, causing Wall Street Journal foreign columnist Bret Stephens to proclaim: "LibForAll is a model of what a competent public diplomacy effort in the Muslim world should look like."
In his presentation, Mr. Taylor will explain key elements of LibForAll's ground-breaking strategy and present examples of world class achievements, including: a "musical jihad" against religious hatred and terrorism; development of the first part of a unique 26-episode counter-extremism television/video series (Ocean of Revelation); and convening an historic religious summit where top Muslim leaders condemned the evils of Holocaust denial - generating worldwide publicity that effectively countered the December 2006 Holocaust denial conference in Tehran.
Mr. Taylor's work with LibForAll follows a career as a successful entrepreneur and global telecom executive, during which he served as CEO of USA Global Link, and was credited by numerous leading publications as one of the essential catalysts in the deregulation of the global telecommunications industry.
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
Mark Thompson
Shorenstein APARC
Stanford University
Encina Hall E301
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Professor Thompson builds on Barrington Moore's insight that there are different "paths to the modern" world. Thompson's manuscript explores alternatives to the familiar South Korean-and Taiwan-based model of "late democratization." According to that model, political pluralism follows a formative period of economic growth during which labor is demobilized and big business, religious leaders, and professionals depend upon and are co-opted by the state.
Thompson argues that even when these preconditions are in place, democratization need not follow. Singapore is an illuminating case in point. The autocratic growth model pays insufficient attention to politics, including the sometimes crucial role of student activists in challenging developmental authoritarianism and triggering a democratic transition, as in Indonesia. As political actors, students (rather than a progressive bourgeoisie) may fill the oppositional vacuum created by the preconditions that characterized predemocratic South Korean and Taiwan.
In his critique of Northeast Asian-style, post-authoritarian "late democratization" and its emphasis on economic growth as the driver of political change, Professor Thompson uses evidence drawn from paired comparisons of Vietnam with China, Hong Kong with Singapore, and between South Korea and Taiwan on the one hand and other major Southeast Asian cases on the other.
Mark R. Thompson is a professor of political science at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. A Chicago native, he took his first degree in religious studies at Brown University followed by postgraduate work at Cambridge University and the University of the Philippines. Fascinated by Philippine people power, he wrote his dissertation at Yale University on the anti-Marcos struggle (Yale University Press, 1996). After moving to Germany, he witnessed popular uprisings in East Germany and Eastern Europe, inspiring him to conceptualize democratic revolutions in essays later published as a book (Routledge, 2004). He is in residence at Stanford as Lee Kong Chian Distinguished Fellow in Southeast Asian Studies from February through April 2009.
Information Technology and Education in China: Can We Use Experiments to Evaluate Programs and Assess Technologies?
Scott Rozelle is the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Dr. Rozelle received his BS from the University of California, Berkeley; and his MS and PhD from Cornell University. Before arriving at Stanford, Rozelle was a professor at the University of California, Davis (1998-2000) and an assistant professor in the Food Research Institute and Department of Economics at Stanford University (1990-98). Currently, he is a member of the American Economics Association, the American Agricultural Economics Association, the International Association for Agricultural Economists, the Asian Studies Association, and the Association of Comparative Economics. He also serves on the editorial board of Economic Development and Cultural Change, Agricultural Economics, Contemporary Economic Policy, China Journal, and the China Economic Review.
Dr. Rozelle's research focuses almost exclusively on China and is concerned with three general themes: a) agricultural policy, including the supply, demand, and trade in agricultural projects; b) the emergence and evolution of markets and other economic institutions in the transition process and their implications for equity and efficiency; and c) the economics of poverty and inequality.
In the past several years, Dr. Rozelle's papers have been published in top academic journals, including Science, Nature, American Economic Review, and the Journal of Economic Literature. He is fluent in Chinese and has established a research program in which he has close working ties with several Chinese collaborators and policymakers. He is the chair of the International Advisory Board of the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy; a co-director of the Agricultural Issues Center (University of California); and a member of Stanford's new Food, Security, and the Environment Program.
CO-SPONSORED BY LIBERATION TECHNOLOGY
Richard and Rhoda Goldman Conference Room
Scott Rozelle
Encina Hall East, E404
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Scott Rozelle is the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University. He received his BS from the University of California, Berkeley, and his MS and PhD from Cornell University. Previously, Rozelle was a professor at the University of California, Davis and an assistant professor in Stanford’s Food Research Institute and department of economics. He currently is a member of several organizations, including the American Economics Association, the International Association for Agricultural Economists, and the Association for Asian Studies. Rozelle also serves on the editorial boards of Economic Development and Cultural Change, Agricultural Economics, the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, and the China Economic Review.
His research focuses almost exclusively on China and is concerned with: agricultural policy, including the supply, demand, and trade in agricultural projects; the emergence and evolution of markets and other economic institutions in the transition process and their implications for equity and efficiency; and the economics of poverty and inequality, with an emphasis on rural education, health and nutrition.
Rozelle's papers have been published in top academic journals, including Science, Nature, American Economic Review, and the Journal of Economic Literature. His book, Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise, was published in 2020 by The University of Chicago Press. He is fluent in Chinese and has established a research program in which he has close working ties with several Chinese collaborators and policymakers. For the past 20 years, Rozelle has been the chair of the International Advisory Board of the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy; a co-director of the University of California's Agricultural Issues Center; and a member of Stanford's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and the Center on Food Security and the Environment.
In recognition of his outstanding achievements, Rozelle has received numerous honors and awards, including the Friendship Award in 2008, the highest award given to a non-Chinese by the Premier; and the National Science and Technology Collaboration Award in 2009 for scientific achievement in collaborative research.
Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions
Learn more
The Tamogami Affair: History and Security in Northeast Asia
Reckoning with the Past: Truth, Justice and Reconciliation in Asia
Is it possible to come to terms with the violent past and foster reconciliation with former foes, what are the obstacles and how can they be overcome? These are some of the questions we are asking in the "Divided Memories and Reconciliation" project. This colloquia will bring several scholars to Stanford to discuss the ‘history problem' in a series of lectures analyzing the ways in which past conflict has or has not been addressed and resolved in contemporary Asia. Examining issues of memory and forgetting, guilt and innocence, apology and restitution from diverse social science perspectives, our speakers investigate the handling of the violent past both within and between countries in contexts ranging from international diplomacy to the broadcast media to mass education.
In November of 2008, the head of the Japanese air self defense force, General Tamogami Toshio, resigned in a swirl of controversy over an essay he wrote entitled "Was Japan An Aggressor Nation?" The essay argued that Japan's seizure of Korea and of northern China was a legal act and that it had pursued a moderate policy of modernization in its colonial rule of Korea, Taiwan and Manchuria, superior to the colonial rule of the Western imperial powers. General Tamogami also argued, in his published essay, that Japan's war with the United States was a result of being "ensnared in a trap that was carefully laid by the United States to draw Japan into a war." What is the story behind this controversial incident? What does it mean when a senior Japanese military officer holds such views of the wartime past? What are the implications of this for Japan's security relations with its neighbors and the United States?
Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room
Daniel C. Sneider
Stanford University
Encina Hall, Room E301
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Daniel C. Sneider is a lecturer in international policy at Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy and a lecturer in East Asian Studies at Stanford. His own research is focused on current U.S. foreign and national security policy in Asia and on the foreign policy of Japan and Korea. Since 2017, he has been based partly in Tokyo as a Visiting Researcher at the Canon Institute for Global Studies, where he is working on a diplomatic history of the creation and management of the U.S. security alliances with Japan and South Korea during the Cold War. Sneider contributes regularly to the leading Japanese publication Toyo Keizai as well as to the Nelson Report on Asia policy issues.
Sneider is the former Associate Director for Research at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford. At Shorenstein APARC, Sneider directed the center’s Divided Memories and Reconciliation project, a comparative study of the formation of wartime historical memory in East Asia. He is the co-author of a book on wartime memory and elite opinion, Divergent Memories, from Stanford University Press. He is the co-editor, with Dr. Gi-Wook Shin, of Divided Memories: History Textbooks and the Wars in Asia, from Routledge and of Confronting Memories of World War II: European and Asian Legacies, from University of Washington Press.
Sneider was named a National Asia Research Fellow by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the National Bureau of Asian Research in 2010. He is the co-editor of Cross Currents: Regionalism and Nationalism in Northeast Asia, Shorenstein APARC, distributed by Brookings Institution Press, 2007; of First Drafts of Korea: The U.S. Media and Perceptions of the Last Cold War Frontier, 2009; as well as of Does South Asia Exist?: Prospects for Regional Integration, 2010. Sneider’s path-breaking study “The New Asianism: Japanese Foreign Policy under the Democratic Party of Japan” appeared in the July 2011 issue of Asia Policy. He has also contributed to other volumes, including “Strategic Abandonment: Alliance Relations in Northeast Asia in the Post-Iraq Era” in Towards Sustainable Economic and Security Relations in East Asia: U.S. and ROK Policy Options, Korea Economic Institute, 2008; “The History and Meaning of Denuclearization,” in William H. Overholt, editor, North Korea: Peace? Nuclear War?, Harvard Kennedy School of Government, 2019; and “Evolution or new Doctrine? Japanese security policy in the era of collective self-defense,” in James D.J. Brown and Jeff Kingston, eds, Japan’s Foreign Relations in Asia, Routledge, December 2017.
Sneider’s writings have appeared in many publications, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, Slate, Foreign Policy, the New Republic, National Review, the Far Eastern Economic Review, the Oriental Economist, Newsweek, Time, the International Herald Tribune, the Financial Times, and Yale Global. He is frequently cited in such publications.
Prior to coming to Stanford, Sneider was a long-time foreign correspondent. His twice-weekly column for the San Jose Mercury News looking at international issues and national security from a West Coast perspective was syndicated nationally on the Knight Ridder Tribune wire service. Previously, Sneider served as national/foreign editor of the Mercury News. From 1990 to 1994, he was the Moscow bureau chief of the Christian Science Monitor, covering the end of Soviet Communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union. From 1985 to 1990, he was Tokyo correspondent for the Monitor, covering Japan and Korea. Prior to that he was a correspondent in India, covering South and Southeast Asia. He also wrote widely on defense issues, including as a contributor and correspondent for Defense News, the national defense weekly.
Sneider has a BA in East Asian history from Columbia University and an MPA from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.