About the Topic: Conventional accounts of the proliferation of illicit transnational actors--ranging from migrant smugglers to drug traffickers to black market arms dealers--describe them as increasingly agile, sophisticated, and technologically savvy. Governments, in sharp contrast, are often depicted as increasingly besieged, outsmarted, poorly equipped, and clumsy in dealing with them. While there is much truth in these common claims, Andreas argues that they are overly alarmist and misleading and suffer from historical amnesia. Drawing especially from the U.S. historical and contemporary experience, he offers a corrective that challenges common myths and misconceptions about the illicit side of globalization.
About the Speaker: Peter Andreas is a professor of political science and international studies in the Department of Political Science and the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. Andreas has published nine books, including Blue Helmets and Black Markets: The Business of Survival in the Siege of Sarajevo (Cornell University Press, 2008) and Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide (Cornell University Press, 2nd edition 2009). Other writings include articles for publications such as International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Political Science Quarterly, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, and The Nation. His latest book is on the politics of smuggling in American history, titled, Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America (Oxford University Press, 2013).
CISAC Conference Room
Peter Andreas
Professor of Political Science and International Studies, Brown University
Speaker
5:30 pm - 6:30 pm: Registration/Reception (Manning Faculty Lounge, second floor breezeway fo Stanford Law School)
6:30 pm - 8:30 pm: Panel (Room 290)
An evening panel to discuss behavioral advertising and privacy law, including:
+ Evolving legal, technology and business practices + What companies and individuals need to know + How the international landscape differs from the U.S. + Long term trends and developments + Corporate best practices
The more a country depends on aid, the more distorted are its incentives to manage its own development in sustainably beneficial ways. Cambodia, a post-conflict state that cannot refuse aid, is rife with trial-and-error donor experiments and their unintended results, including bad governance—a major impediment to rational economic growth. Massive intervention by the UN in the early 1990s did help to end the Cambodian civil war and to prepare for more representative rule. Yet the country’s social indicators, the integrity of its political institutions, and its ability to manage its own development soon deteriorated. Based on a comparison of how more and less aid-dependent sectors have performed, Prof. Ear will highlight the complicity of foreign assistance in helping to degrade Cambodia’s political economy. Copies of his just-published book, Aid Dependence in Cambodia, will be available for sale. The book intertwines events in 1990s and 2000s Cambodia with the story of his own family’s life (and death) under the Khmer Rouge, escape to Vietnam in 1976, asylum in France in 1978, and immigration to America in 1985.
Sophal Ear was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2011 and a TED Fellow in 2009. His next book—The Hungry Dragon: How China’s Resources Quest is Reshaping the World, co-authored with Sigfrido Burgos Cáceres—will appear in February 2013. Prof. Ear is vice-president of the Diagnostic Microbiology Development Program, advises the University of Phnom Penh’s master’s program in development studies, and serves on the international advisory board of the International Public Management Journal. He wrote and narrated “The End/Beginning: Cambodia,” an award-winning documentary about his family’s escape from the Khmer Rouge. He has a PhD in political science, two master’s degrees from the University of California-Berkeley, and a third master’s from Princeton University.
Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room
Sophal Ear
Assistant Professor, Department of National Security Affairs
Speaker
US Naval Postgraduate School
Freshwater scarcity has been cited as the major crisis of the 21st century, but it is surprisingly hard to describe the nature of the global water crisis. We conducted a meta- analysis of 22 coupled human–water system case studies, using qualitative comparison analysis (QCA) to identify water resource system outcomes and the factors that drive them. The cases exhibited different outcomes for human wellbeing that could be grouped into a six “syndromes”: groundwater depletion, ecological destruction, drought-driven conflicts, unmet subsistence needs, resource capture by elite, and water reallocation to nature. For syndromes that were not successful adaptations, three characteristics gave cause for concern: (1) unsustainability—a decline in the water stock or ecosystem function that could result in a long-term steep decline in future human wellbeing; (2) vulnerability—high variability in water resource availability combined with inadequate coping capacity, leading to temporary drops in human wellbeing; (3) chronic scarcity—persistent inadequate access and hence low conditions of human wellbeing. All syndromes could be explained by a limited set of causal factors that fell into four categories: demand changes, supply changes, governance systems, and infrastructure/technology. By considering basins as members of syndrome classes and tracing common causal pathways of water crises, water resource analysts and planners might develop improved water policies aimed at reducing vulnerability, inequity, and unsustainability of freshwater systems.
U.N. Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees T. Alexander Aleinikoff estimates that in the last two years, the UNHCR has taken in an additional 2,000 refugees every day, making it one of the most challenging periods for the U.N. body in decades. Meanwhile, the traditional methods to shelter, protect and aid those refugees don’t always keep pace with growing demands and emerging technologies.
"Many of us work in ways we have worked for many years, where things that have worked in the past continue to work in the present. But, meanwhile, the world has moved on," Aleinikoff recently told a gathering of nongovernment organizations from around the world. The UNHCR, he said, is looking at mobile phone technology, solar power and lighting, fuel-efficient stoves, microcredit loans and stimulating refugee livelihoods.
The agency needed an incubator to test out some of these innovative ideas. So Aleinikoff turned to CISAC, calling on its security experts to collaborate with the UNHCR on a handful of prototypes that would better protect and support the more than 42 million refugees, internally displaced and stateless people worldwide.
The request has led to a multidisciplinary partnership between the UNHCR and CISAC, with students from across the Stanford campus, professors and NGOs, as well as physicians, architects and other professionals eager to volunteer their time and expertise.
“This really matters; it’s about real people,” said Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, CISAC’s co-director and a Stanford Law School professor teaching a class to coincide with the project. “I like to think we are creating a network of people who will stay engaged. I’m looking for people who say: This is exciting, this is doable, this is important, and I want to be a part of this.”
Cuellar has found dozens. Students, professors at the Hassno-Platner Institute of Design – better known as the d.school – as well as Bay Area NGOs and Silicon Valley designers have signed on, attending workshops and brainstorming sessions with UNHCR officials and Stanford students from around the world.
Some of the Stanford professors include Paul H. Wise, a professor of pediatrics at the Stanford Medical School and a CISAC affiliated faculty member; Francis Fukuyama, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a specialist in international political economy; and Bernard Roth, a professor of mechanical engineering and one of the founders of the d.school.
“I’m curious to see how it’s all going to play out,” Paul Spiegel, deputy director of the Division of Program Support at the UNHCR and a senior fellow at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, recently told the Stanford Law School class during a Skype chat from Geneva. “For us at the UNHCR, the most interesting thing is the multidisciplinary nature of this project. This is something we’ve never done before. So this is very innovative and different.”
Two dozens students with majors ranging from engineering to computer science, international policy studies, law and public health are taking Cuéllar’s class, Rethinking Refugee Communities, co-taught by Leslie Witt of the global design consultancy, IDEO.
“I got involved in the project out of intellectual curiosity and because of the prospect of seeing our ideas applied in the field,” said Danny Buerkli, a second year master’s student in international policy studies. “While most of us are not experts in humanitarian policy, we have the luxury of time to reflect and rethink how UNHCR deals with refugee situations. The project is a great way of exploring design thinking, humanitarian policies and working with a large institutional client all at the same time.”
Some of the students are preparing for a visit to a UNHCR refugee camp in Jordan for Syrians fleeing the violence in their homeland. They want to see operations firsthand to better visualize what’s needed on the ground.
You can follow the project at CISAC’s Storify.com page.
Paul Collier will talk about how to manage the difference between helpful and damaging commercialisation, and puts forth three arguments. First, we need to face the tough reality that African food production has failed to keep pace with demand over the course of several decades, suggesting that there is a deep problem with respect to innovation and investment given the way African agriculture has been organised. Second, we need to accept that climate change, population growth, and income gains from natural resources will all stress this imbalance further: the prospect is for widening food deficits with business as usual. Third, two major changes are afoot. Globally, the model of commercial tropical agriculture pioneered in Brazil has demonstrated that output can be raised very substantially by changing the mode of organisation. Africa is now starting to open land markets to large foreign management. Superficially this looks like Brazil2, but it may instead be a wave of speculative acquisitions triggered by the price peaks of 2008.
Collier is the Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies and Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford University. He is currently Advisor to the Strategy and Policy Department of the IMF, advisor to the Africa Region of the World Bank; and he has advised the British Government on its recent White Paper on economic development policy. He has been writing a monthly column for the Independent, and also writes for the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. His research covers the causes and consequences of civil war; the effects of aid and the problems of democracy in low-income and natural-resources rich societies.
Derek Byerlee's talk will lay out a number of models of inclusive agribusiness growth, grouped into three categories (i) institutional arrangements for improving productivity of smallholders operating in spot markets, (ii) various types of contract farming arrangements, and (iii) large-scale farms that generate jobs and/or include community equity shares. The institutional and policy context as well as commodity characteristics that favor these models are discussed within a simple transactions cost framework. He will also discuss cross-cutting policy priorities to enable the growth of commercial agriculture and agribusiness. These include continuing reforms to liberalize product and input markets, access to technology and skills, stimulating financial and risks markets, securing land rights, and investment in infrastructure through public-private partnerships.
Byerlee has dedicated his career to agriculture in developing countries, as a teacher, researcher, administrator and policy advisor. He has lived and worked for a total of 20 years in the three major developing regions-Africa, Asia, and Latin America. After beginning in academia at Michigan State University, he spent the bulk of his career at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT). There as a economist and research manager he made notable contributions in forging a new spirit of collaboration between scientists, economists and farmers. He also published widely on efficiency of research systems, spillovers, and sustaining productivity in post green revolution agriculture. After joining the World Bank in 1994, he has applied his experience of research systems to finding innovative approaches to funding and organizing agricultural research, including emerging challenges in biotechnology policy. Since 2003, he has provided strategic direction and led policy world for the agricultural and rural sector in the World Bank.
This conference will bring together scholars of North Korea who will debate various aspects of North Korean culture from historical, comparative, and multidisciplinary perspectives. The prominence of North Korea in world news and the media cannot be understated; yet at a time when much of the analytic energy goes into trying to predict North Korea’s next political move, to assess its military and economic strategies, or to determine the extent of an ever-growing Chinese influence, more attention needs to be paid to its expressions of art, literature, and performance culture that continues to be produced for both internal and external consumption. The presentations in this conference engage with music, graphic novels, art, science fiction, film, and ego-documents with an attempt to illuminate the ways in which North Korea remembers its past, asserts itself in the present, and imagines its future even while outside influences increasingly disrupt its once-hermetically sealed borders.
This event is co-sponsored by the Korean Studies Program at APARC and the Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS). RSVP Required.
The advent of ubiquitous networking and computation and deepening globalization since the 1990s has eroded traditional international security architectures by multiplying conflict surfaces and empowering new actors. This talk describes research in the context of track 1.5 dialogues with Russia and China that aims to develop shared frameworks for understanding escalatory models of cyber conflict, sources of instability, and feasible approaches for risk mitigation. It will argue that cyber has made deterrence much more complex, and now, increased information assurance and new legal or normative constraints on state behavior are likely necessary for effective cross-sectoral deterrence. Finally, it suggests three tasks for cyber norms or confidence and security building measures to attenuate instability.
John Mallery is a research scientist at the Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is concerned with cyber policy and has been developing advanced architectural concepts for cyber security and transformational computing for the past decade. Since 2006, he organized a series of national workshops on technical and policy aspects of cyber.
CISAC Conference Room
John C. Mallery
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Speaker
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
