Stanford University

Trade

Just Supply Chain

This is the second meeting of the “Just Supply Chains” working group, to be held at Stanford University on May 16-17, 2008. It will builds on the themes and debates that came out of our first meeting, held at MIT in January, 2008, but extends them by focusing more on issues related to national level and global regulation. Please find, attached, a description of the Just Supply Chains project.  

Our first meeting brought together an exciting group of academics, business managers, leaders of various labor-rights NGOs, and representatives of the ILO to discuss the role of corporate codes of conduct and other private voluntary efforts have played in promoting just employment relations in global supply chains. We focused on issues of fair compensation, decent and healthy working conditions, and rights of association. Although this first meeting also discussed some innovative experiments taking place within certain sectors or even within individual nation-states, the bulk of our time was spent debating the possibilities and limitations of private voluntary regulatory efforts promoted by both corporations and NGOs.

Five key themes/questions emerged from our January meeting: 

  1. What are the costs and benefits associated with traditional labor compliance programs and how are these costs and benefits distributed among the different actors operating across global supply chains?
  2. Related to this first theme is a second set of questions about “ethical consumption.”
  3. A third issue that emerged from our discussions in January centered on independent unions and the rights of individual workers to associate and bargain collectively for improved wages, working conditions, and work hours.
  4. Our fourth set of concerns builds directly on the previous issues: What can we learn from various national-level experiments with regulatory reform, especially in some of the larger developing countries?
  5. Finally, how do global governance arrangements, in particular as they relate to bilateral and multilateral trade arrangements impact the promotion of just working conditions across global supply chains?

These five themes will be the focus of our May 16-17 workshop at Stanford. As with our first workshop, our minimal hope is to establish a common basis of knowledge and generate lively discussions around these important issues. Our more ambitious agenda is to generate a collaborative research agenda on these issues – research that will have an important impact not only on various academic disciplines but also on real-world practice and policy. To facilitate these two goals, we have once again invited a diverse group of academics, business managers, and NGO and IGO representatives to share their respective knowledge and engage in collective discussions and debates.

» Just Supply Chains - May Papers and Powerpoints (password protected)

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Bechtel Conference Center

Joshua Cohen

Program on Global Justice
Encina Hall West, Room 404
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 723-0256
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Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society, and Professor of Political Science, Philosophy, and Law
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Joshua Cohen is a professor of law, political science, and philosophy at Stanford University, where he also teaches at the d.school and helps to coordinate the Program on Liberation Technology. A political theorist trained in philosophy, Cohen has written extensively on issues of democratic theory—particularly deliberative democracy and the implications for personal liberty, freedom of expression, and campaign finance—and global justice. Cohen is author of On Democracy (1983, with Joel Rogers); Associations and Democracy (1995, with Joel Rogers); Philosophy, Politics, Democracy (2010); The Arc of the Moral Universe and Other Essays (2011); and Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals (2011). Since 1991, he has been editor of Boston Review, a bi-monthly magazine of political, cultural, and literary ideas. Cohen is currently a member of the faculty of Apple University.

CDDRL Affiliated Faculty
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Joshua Cohen Director of the Program on Global Justice Panelist
Richard Locke Professor of Political Science Speaker MIT
Conferences
Just Supply Chains
CDDRL Conferences

Assessing the International Influences on Democratization

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Jon Pevehouse, an associate professor at the Harris School, has written widely on international organizations and international political economy issues in the field of international relations. His most recent work focuses on American foreign policy and how domestic political institutions constrain the president's ability to exercise military force abroad. He also is involved in an ongoing project on the political implications of regional trade integration.

Pevehouse's previous work has examined reciprocity within regional political conflicts, democratization and regional organizations, the political-military implications of international organizations, and economic interdependence. He is the author of Democracy from Above? Regional Organizations and Democratization (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and (with William Howell) While Dangers Gather: Congressional Checks on Presidential War Powers (Princeton University Press, 2007). He is also the author (with Joshua Goldstein) of International Relations (Longman Press), the leading undergraduate text on international relations.

Prior to arriving at University of Chicago, Pevehouse was in the political science department at the University of Wisconsin, where he received the Chancellor's Distinguished Teaching Award. Pevehouse received his B.A. in political science, with honors and highest distinction, from the University of Kansas and received his Ph.D. in political science from Ohio State University.

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Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Jon Pevehouse Associate Professor Speaker Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago
Seminars

Building Effective States: From Practice to Theory

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Clare Lockhart is co-founder and Director of the Institute for State Effectiveness, advising a number of countries on their approaches to state-building. Between 2001 and 2005, she worked as UN adviser to the Bonn Agreement in Afghanistan and advised the Government of Afghanistan, where she led a number of national initiatives. She returned in 2006-7 as Adviser to NATO and ISAF. Previously she managed a World Bank program on institutional and organizational analysis, designing governance and legal reform approaches, adapting techniques from the private sector and military domains to public sector management, designing toolkits, training seminars and operational guidelines.

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She has practiced as a constitutional and human rights barrister and is trained in history, law and economics. She has authored a number of papers and toolkits on state-building and development, including the book, Fixing Failed States, OUP 2008.

Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World
Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart, Apr 2008

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Clare Lockhart Co-Founder and Director Speaker the Institute for State Effectiveness
Seminars

Caring About Systemic Military Atrocity in Iraq and Afghanistan

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Neta C. Crawford is Professor of Political Science and African American Studies where her teaching focuses on international ethics and normative change. Crawford is currently on the board of the Academic Council of the United Nations System (ACUNS). She has also served as a member of the governing Council of the American Political Science Association; on the editorial board of the American Political Science Review; and on the Slavery and Justice Committee at Brown University, which examined Brown University's relationship to slavery and the slave trade.

Her research interests include international relations theory, normative theory, foreign policy decisionmaking, abolition of slavery, African foreign and military policy, sanctions, peace movements, discourse ethics, post-conflict peacebuilding, research design, utopian science fiction, and emotion. She is the author of Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization, Humanitarian Intervention (Cambridge University Press, 2002) which was a co-winner of the 2003 American Political Science Association Jervis and Schroeder Award for best book in International History and Politics. She is co-editor of How Sanctions Work: Lessons from South Africa (St. Martin's, 1999). Her articles have been published in books and scholarly journals such as the Journal of Political Philosophy; International Organization; Security Studies; Perspectives on Politics; International Security; Ethics & International Affairs; Press/Politics; Africa Today; Naval War College Review; Orbis; and, Qualitative Methods. Crawford has appeared on radio and TV and written op-eds on U.S. foreign policy and international relations for newspapers including the Boston Globe; Newsday (Long Island), The Christian Science Monitor, and the Los Angeles Times. Crawford has a Ph.D. in political science from MIT and a bachelor of arts from Brown.

This event is co-sponsored with the Program on Global Justice and the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

» Password-protected paper

» Article: The Real "Surge" of 2007: Non-Combatant Death in Iraq and Afghanistan
Neta C. Crawford, Catherine Lutz, Robert Jay Lifton, Judith L. Herman, Howard Zinn
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Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Neta Crawford Political Science Speaker Boston University
Workshops
Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on Global Justice
Human Trafficking

Savings, Sustainability and Equity

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Kirsten finished her PhD at Stanford’s Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources in 2007. Her dissertation was entitled: Sustainability of Comprehensive Wealth – A practical and normative assessment. In a truely interdisciplinary manner, she combined economics, ethics, and engineering to improve and assess a macroeconomic sustainability indicator. She is currently a Teaching Fellow with Stanford’s Public Policy Program and a Research Associate at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. She teaches classes at the intersection of policy analysis and ethics, leads a seminar on comparative research design, and convenes a weekly environmental ethics working group. Her research interests lie in combining quantitative data with normative argument, to this end, she is co-Investigator on a Woods Institute for Environment grant working with PIs Kenneth Arrow and Debra Satz.

Prior to entering Stanford’s Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources in 2003 Kirsten worked at the World Bank for five years. Her work at the World Bank focused on the environmental impacts of infrastructure projects, remediation of industrial sites, carbon finance, compliance of projects with the World Bank’s environmental and social policies and corporate environmental strategy development. Her projects spanned the globe, including India, Kazakhstan, Dominican Republic, Peru, Colombia and Brazil. She is comfortable holding conversations over a beer or two in French, Spanish and Dutch. For two years, she served as an elected official of the World Bank’s Staff Association board, representing 8,500 staff to management on myriad issues. She won numerous awards at the World Bank and from community groups for her professional achievements and volunteer work.

Kirsten is an environmental engineer trained first at the University of Virginia (BS ‘96) and the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands (MS ’98). More recently, she completed an MS in Applied Environmental Economics from Imperial College of London (’05).

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Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Kirsten Oleson Public Policy Speaker Stanford University
Workshops
Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on Global Justice

Oil, Islam, and Women?

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Michael Ross received his Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University in 1996. From 1996 to 2001 he was an Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He spent the 2000 calendar year as a Visiting Scholar at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and Jakarta, Indonesia. He is now an Associate Professor of Political Science at UCLA; and also the Chairman of the International Development Studies program, and Acting Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies.

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Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Michael Ross Associate Professor of Political Science Speaker University of California, Los Angeles
Seminars

Ray Jennings

N/A

(202) 421-5184
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Visiting Scholar
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Ray Salvatore Jennings is a practitioner scholar with extensive experience within war to peace transitions in over 20 countries including Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Indonesia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Macedonia, Peru, and Sierra Leone. Over the last twenty years, he has served as country director and senior consultant with the United States Institute of Peace, the United Nations, the United States Agency for International Development, the World Bank, and many non-governmental organizations. He has served as a Senior Fellow with the United States Institute of Peace, and as a Public Policy Scholar and an Eastern European Research Scholar with the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. He is currently conducting research with the Stanford University Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law on comparative cases of democratic breakthrough, teaching post-conflict reconstruction and transitional development at Georgetown and Syracuse Universities and is a social development consultant to the World Bank on Middle East and North African affairs. He is the author of numerous articles and is co-authoring a book on democratic breakthrough with Michael McFaul. His media appearances include CNN, CSPAN, NPR and the BBC.

Property Law, Rule of Law, and Beyond - What Matters to Foreign Investors in China? And What Not?

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Weitseng Chen, a Fulbright scholar, will receive his JSD from Yale Law School in October 2007. His recent research focuses on China's foreign direct investment and property rights transition, the economic behaviors of ethnic foreign investors in China, and a China-Taiwan comparison on their rule of law transition. Prior to his Yale education, Chen practiced law in Taiwan in diverse fields such as Internet and information technology industry, the private sector and public interest affairs, governmental reforms, and international NGO affairs.

Weitseng Chen's recent publications include "East Asian Model and Rule of Law (with Randall Peerenboom, a to be published book chapter)", "WTO: Time's Up for Chinese Banks - China's Banking Reform and Non-Performing Loans Disposal" (Chicago Journal of International Law), "State, Market, and the Law: Law and Development in Taiwan" (Chinese) (Journal of the Humanities & Social Science), and a book titled Law and Economic Miracle: Interaction between Taiwan's Economic Development and Economic & Trade Laws after WWII. (Chinese).

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Weitseng Chen

N/A

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CDDRL Hewlett Fellow 2007-2008
weitseng_web.jpg J.S.D.

Weitseng Chen, a Fulbright scholar, will receive his JSD from Yale Law School in October 2007. His recent research focuses on China's foreign direct investment and property rights transition, the economic behaviors of ethnic foreign investors in China, and a China-Taiwan comparison on their rule of law transition. Prior to his Yale education, Chen practiced law in Taiwan in diverse fields such as Internet and information technology industry, the private sector and public interest affairs, governmental reforms, and international NGO affairs.

Weitseng Chen's recent publications include "East Asian Model and Rule of Law (with Randall Peerenboom, a to be published book chapter)", "WTO: Time's Up for Chinese Banks - China's Banking Reform and Non-Performing Loans Disposal" (Chicago Journal of International Law), "State, Market, and the Law: Law and Development in Taiwan" (Chinese) (Journal of the Humanities & Social Science), and a book titled "Law and Economic Miracle: Interaction between Taiwan's Economic Development and Economic & Trade Laws after WWII." (Chinese).

Weitseng Chen Hewlett Fellow Speaker CDDRL
Seminars

Weitseng Chen

N/A

0
CDDRL Hewlett Fellow 2007-2008
weitseng_web.jpg J.S.D.

Weitseng Chen, a Fulbright scholar, will receive his JSD from Yale Law School in October 2007. His recent research focuses on China's foreign direct investment and property rights transition, the economic behaviors of ethnic foreign investors in China, and a China-Taiwan comparison on their rule of law transition. Prior to his Yale education, Chen practiced law in Taiwan in diverse fields such as Internet and information technology industry, the private sector and public interest affairs, governmental reforms, and international NGO affairs.

Weitseng Chen's recent publications include "East Asian Model and Rule of Law (with Randall Peerenboom, a to be published book chapter)", "WTO: Time's Up for Chinese Banks - China's Banking Reform and Non-Performing Loans Disposal" (Chicago Journal of International Law), "State, Market, and the Law: Law and Development in Taiwan" (Chinese) (Journal of the Humanities & Social Science), and a book titled "Law and Economic Miracle: Interaction between Taiwan's Economic Development and Economic & Trade Laws after WWII." (Chinese).

Policing Politicians: Experiments on Democratic Accountability in Africa

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Jeremy Weinstein is an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University and an affiliated faculty member at CDDRL and CISAC. Previously, he was a research fellow at the Center for Global Development, where he directed the bi-partisan Commission on Weak States and US National Security. While working on his PhD, with funding from the Jacob Javits Fellowship, a Sheldon Fellowship, and the World Bank, he conducted hundreds of interviews with rebel combatants and civilians in both Africa and Latin America for his forthcoming book, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence. He has also worked on the National Security Council staff; served as a visiting scholar at the World Bank; was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; and received a research fellowship in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution. He received his BA with high honors from Swarthmore College, and his MA and PhD in political economy and government from Harvard University.

CISAC Conference Room

Jeremy M. Weinstein Professor Speaker CDDRL
Seminars
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