Stanford University

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Julia Gray

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Pre-doctoral Fellow 2005 - 2006

Her dissertation research focuses on the role of international institutions in economic development. Specifically, the dissertation looks at which international institutions - including trade agreements and international treaties - give credibility to developing countries in the eyes of financial markets as well as contribute to the success or failure of domestic policy reform. She has previously worked in Prague for Transitions magazine which covers all 27 post-communist countries, as well as in Budapest for Freedom House as the program officer for the Regional Networking Project.

Afghanistan at Halftime

Authors
Alex Thier
News Type
Commentary
Date
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In a recent op ed, CDDRL's J. Alexander Thier discusses Afghanistan's landmark September 2005 elections. He notes, however, that while this is an encouraging sign, Afghanistan is far from out of the woods in terms of establishing itself as a stable state.

Afghanistan held its landmark legislative elections this Sunday. Almost exactly four years after 9/11, and the invasion that followed, Afghanistan will have, for the first time in its history, a democratically elected constitutional government. That is something remarkable, and cause to celebrate - but only in the way that one cheers hopefully during a tough game at halftime.

Everything we know about democracy promotion and post-conflict reconstruction tells us that Afghanistan is far from out of the woods. Even after significant international intervention, many failed states remain unstable, or relapse into conflict and chaos. Remember Haiti? The United States invaded in 1994 and oversaw reconstruction and elections in 1995 and 2000, as international forces slowly withdrew. By 2004, U.S. and United Nations Forces were dispatched to the troubled island again. Haiti is not an outlier. World Bank studies show that countries coming out of civil war are forty percent likely to return to war within five years. It took one horrific hurricane to turn New Orleans to chaos. Imagine the effects of 25 years of war.

One of the main reasons failing countries continue to fail is economic. Economic recovery after war provides one of the best measures of the likelihood of long-term stability. International assistance can play a key role in jump-starting the economy and paying for basic government services, but it can take a generation to return to pre-war standards of living. The problem is that donor countries tend to be most generous in the first few years of the crisis - when local capacity to do something with those funds is limited. And just when the government starts to get on its feet - usually around the four-year mark - the assistance dries up.

The Afghan economy has seen remarkable growth rates over the last four years, but that is only half good. There is a truly free market now in Afghanistan - free from the rule of law. Much of the growth has come from the booming opium trade and other smuggling operations. While a strong economy is necessary to rebuild state and society, a criminal economy will necessarily destroy them both.

Politically, Afghanistan is getting its first taste of real elections - but it is far from being a stable democracy. There were more than 5,000 candidates in the legislative elections this Sunday, violence was relatively low, and turnout decent - all signs that political participation is blossoming. But nobody knows who will run the new parliament, or how it will function. It has no building and no staff. The only other parliament in Afghanistan's history, from 1965 to 1973, is widely blamed for increasing the polarization that led to civil war there. Since armed warlords still dominate many parts of the country, they will undoubtedly be strongly represented in the new legislature. As we have seen in places like Liberia and Serbia, post-conflict elections can produce quite undemocratic leaders.

What does this mean for Afghanistan? First, it means that the next four years will be as important there as the last four. Afghanistan's leaders, elected and otherwise, must put the cause of their nation before their factional, ethnic and venal interests. For our part, the United States and its allies must continue to support Afghanistan, financially and militarily, until it gets out of the danger zone. That means the same level of support for at least another four years.

Second, it means we have to shift our mentality there from short term to long term. If the United States has one overarching goal, it must be to build a legitimate Afghan state that is strong enough to survive and competent enough to deliver results. The Afghan police and legal system remain in shambles. Afghanistan's school system was rated the worst in the world last year by the United Nations Development Program. More international support needs to go to education, training a capable Afghan government, and supporting the rule of law.

Finally, it means something a little more intangible: continued political attention. If Afghanistan falls off the policy agenda in Washington, London and Berlin, the dangers that lurk there will prosper. Lagging reconstruction is already creating support for the ongoing Taliban insurgency. An unchecked opium trade keeps warlord armies well fed.

On this anniversary, we must remember the true cause of those grim attacks four years ago: Bin Laden and Al Qaeda had free reign of a failed state in chaos. We may not be able to find bin Laden, but we know where Afghanistan is located.

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Addressing State Failure

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In today's increasingly interconnected world, weak and failed states pose an acute risk to U.S. and global security. Indeed, they present one of the most important foreign policy challenges of the contemporary era. States are most vulnerable to collapse in the time immediately before, during, and after conflict. When chaos prevails, terrorism, narcotics trade, weapons proliferation, and other forms of organized crime can flourish. Left in dire straits, subject to depredation, and denied access to basic services, people become susceptible to the exhortations of demagogues and hatemongers. It was in such circumstances that in 2001 one of the poorest countries in the world, Afghanistan, became the base for the deadliest attack ever on the U.S. homeland, graphically and tragically illustrating that the problems of other countries often do not affect them alone.

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Publication Type
Journal Articles
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
Foreign Affairs
Authors
Stephen D. Krasner
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The Effect of European Union Integration on Democracy Promotion

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Alina Mungiu Pippidi holds a PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Iasi, Romania. She is a Professor of Political Communication at the Romanian National School of Government and Administration, a consultant for the World Bank and UNDP in Romania, and the Director of Romanian Academic Society. She is a former Shorenstein Fellow of Harvard University and Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science. She has authored many books and articles on the Romanian transition, post-Communist political culture and nationalism.

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Alina Mungiu-Pippidi Professor of Political Communication
Seminars

Empowering the Poor: What Does Democracy Have to Do with It?

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Poverty reduction on a large scale depends on empowering those who are most motivated to move out of poverty - poor people themselves. But if empowerment cannot be measured, it will not be taken seriously in development policy making and programming.

Building on the award-winning Empowerment and Poverty Reduction sourcebook, this volume outlines a conceptual framework that can be used to monitor and evaluate programs centered on empowerment approaches. It presents the perspectives of 27 distinguished researchers and practitioners in economics, political science, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and demography, all of whom are grappling in different ways with the challenge of measuring empowerment. The authors draw from their research and experiences at different levels, from households to communities to nations, in various regions of the world.

Measuring Empowerment is an invaluable resource for planners, practitioners, evaluators, and students?indeed for all who are interested in approaches to poverty reduction that address issues of inequitable power relations.

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Books
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
World Bank in "Measuring Empowerment: Cross Disciplinary Perspectives", Deepa Narayan, ed.
Authors
Larry Diamond

Mobilizing the State as Public Risk Mitigator

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Dr. Hilton Root, an academic and policy specialist in international political economy and development joined the Faculty of Pitzer, a member of Claremont Colleges, as Freeman Fellow from June 2003 to June 2005. Before joining, he served the current administration as US Executive Director Designate of the Asian Development Bank, and as senior advisor on development finance to the Department of the Treasury. Dr. Root was Director and Senior Fellow of Global Studies at the Milken Institute and was a Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Initiative on Economic Growth and Democracy at the Hoover Institution. His areas of expertise are international economics, economic development and policy reform, and Asian affairs.

As a policy expert, Dr. Root advises the Asian Development Bank, the IMF, the World Bank, the UNDP, the OECD, the US State Department, the US Treasury Department and USAID. He has completed projects in 23 countries. The analytical framework he contributed to the World Bank's Asian Miracle study, 1993, was part of the effort to put institutions on the development agenda. While at the ADB as chief advisor on governance, he was the principal author of the ADB's Board-approved governance policy. He presided over a committee on governance indicators at the OECD and initiated the restructuring of the Sri Lanka civil service as an advisor to President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga. He was one of the principal contributors to the design of the Millenium Challenge Account of the Bush administration.

As an academic, he has taught at the University of Michigan, California Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University. Dr. Root has written and lectured extensively, publishing six books and more than 100 articles. He is a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal Asia, the International Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. He has published and presented in both the English and the French languages and has been translated into many languages including Chinese, Korean and Japanese.

He has been awarded honors for The Key to the East Asian Miracle: Making Shared Growth Credible (with J. Edgardo Campos), which won the 1997 Charles H. Levine Award for best book of the year by the International Political Science Association. The Social Sciences History Association awarded him the 1995 best book prize of its Economic History Section for The Fountain of Privilege: Political Foundations of Markets in Old Regime France and England. From the American Historical Association he received the Chester Higby Prize, 1986, for the best article among those published during the previous two years. He is on the board of a number of organizations and journals including the Open Society Institute, Center for Public Integrity and Review of Pacific Basin Markets and Policies. Dr. Root received his doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1983.

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Hilton Root Professor or Economics Claremont Colleges, Claremont, CA
Seminars

Perspective Paper on Financial Instability

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A unique publication exploring the opportunities for addressing ten of the most serious challenges facing the world today: Climate Change, Communicable Diseases, Conflicts, Education, Financial Instability, Corruption, Migration, Malnutrition and Hunger, Trade Barriers, Access to Water. In a world fraught with problems and challenges, we need to gauge how to achieve the greatest good with our money. Global Crises, Global Solutions provides a rich set of arguments and data for prioritising our response most effectively. Each problem is introduced by a world-renowned expert defining the scale of the problem and describing the costs and benefits of a range of policy options to improve the situation. Each challenge is evaluated by economists from North America, Europe and China who attempt a ranking of the most promising options. Whether you agree or disagree with the analysis or conclusions, Global Crises, Global Solutions provides a serious, yet accessible, springboard for debate and discussion.

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Publication Type
Books
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Cambridge University Press, in "Global Crises, Global Solutions"
Authors
Peter Blair Henry

Forms of Property Rights: Oligarchic Versus Democratic Societies

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Daron Acemoglu is Charles P. Kindleberger Professor of Applied Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the Economic Growth program of the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research. He is also affiliated with the National Bureau Economic Research, Center for Economic Performance, and Center for Economic Policy Research.

His work has been published in leading scholarly journals, including the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal Economics and Review of Economic Studies to name a few. Daron Acemoglu's research covers a wide range of areas within economics, including political economy, economic development and growth, human capital theory, growth theory, technical change, and search theory. Acemoglu is also the editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics, and associate editor of the Journal of Economic Growth.

Abstract of paper presented in this research seminar

This paper develops a model where there is a trade-off between the enforcement of the property rights of different groups. An "oligarchic" society, where political power is in the hands of major producers, protects their property rights, but also tends to erect significant entry barriers, violating the property rights of future producers. Democracy, where political power is more widely diffused, imposes redistributive taxes on the producers, but tends to avoid entry barriers. When taxes in democracy are high and the distortions caused by entry barriers are low, an oligarchic society achieves greater efficiency. Nevertheless, because comparative advantage in entrepreneurship shifts away from the incumbents, the inefficiency created by entry barriers in oligarchy deteriorates over time. The typical pattern is therefore one of the rise and decline of oligarchic societies: of two otherwise identical societies, the one with an oligarchic organization will first become richer, but later fall behind the democratic society. I also discuss how democratic societies may be better able to take advantage of new technologies, how an oligarchic society might transition to democracy because of within-elite conflict, and how the unequal distribution of income in oligarchy supports the oligarchic institutions and may keep them in place even when they become significantly costly to society.

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Daron Acemoglu Professor of Economics MIT
Seminars

Dams and Development: Transnational Struggles For Water and Power

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Big dams built for irrigation, power, water supply, and other purposes were among the most potent symbols of economic development for much of the twentieth century. Of late they have become a lightning rod for challenges to this vision of development as something planned by elites with scant regard for environmental and social consequences, especially for the populations that are displaced as their homelands are flooded. In this book, Sanjeev Khagram traces changes in our ideas of what constitutes appropriate development through the shifting transnational dynamics of big dam construction.

Khagram tells the story of a growing, but contentious, world society that features novel and increasingly efficacious norms of appropriate behavior in such areas as human rights and environmental protection. The transnational coalitions and networks led by nongovernmental groups that espouse such norms may seem weak in comparison with states, corporations, and such international agencies as the World Bank. Yet they became progressively more effective at altering the policies and practices of these historically more powerful actors and organizations from the 1970s on.

Khagram develops these claims in a detailed ethnographic account of the transnational struggles around the Narmada River Valley Dam Projects, a huge complex of thirty large and more than three thousand small dams. He offers further substantiation through a comparative historical analysis of the political economy of big dam projects in India, Brazil, South Africa, and China as well as by examining the changing behavior of international agencies and global companies. The author concludes with a discussion of the World Commission on Dams, an innovative attempt in the late 1990s to generate new norms among conflicting stakeholders.

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Publication Type
Books
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
Cornell University Press
Authors
Number
0801489075
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