Stanford University

Society

FSI researchers work to understand continuity and change in societies as they confront their problems and opportunities. This includes the implications of migration and human trafficking. What happens to a society when young girls exit the sex trade? How do groups moving between locations impact societies, economies, self-identity and citizenship? What are the ethnic challenges faced by an increasingly diverse European Union? From a policy perspective, scholars also work to investigate the consequences of security-related measures for society and its values.

The Europe Center reflects much of FSI’s agenda of investigating societies, serving as a forum for experts to research the cultures, religions and people of Europe. The Center sponsors several seminars and lectures, as well as visiting scholars.

Societal research also addresses issues of demography and aging, such as the social and economic challenges of providing health care for an aging population. How do older adults make decisions, and what societal tools need to be in place to ensure the resulting decisions are well-informed? FSI regularly brings in international scholars to look at these issues. They discuss how adults care for their older parents in rural China as well as the economic aspects of aging populations in China and India.

Why Abolish the Death Penalty? Domestic and Transnational Factors

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Dongwook Kim's research interests include the politics of human rights; international law and organizations; transnational activism; policy diffusion; event history and count models

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Dong Wook Kim

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CDDRL Hewlett Fellow 2009-2010
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Dongwook Kim received his Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in August 2009. His dissertation, entitled Institutionalizing Human Rights: The United Nations, Nongovernmental Organizations and National Human Rights Institutions, examined why states adopt the UN idea of national human rights institutions and hence create a permanent and independent state institution to promote and protect human rights. The dissertation argued that in the human rights issue area characterized by low cross-border externalities, sovereignty-bound international organizations, and weak self-enforcement by states, human rights NGOs are especially important for states' policy adoption. In his dissertation, Kim specified three causal mechanisms linking NGOs to global diffusion and demonstrated that the UN idea gains special traction in the states connected with strong human rights NGO activism by using event history analysis and case studies.

During the postdoctoral fellowship at CDDRL (2009-2010), Kim will examine the abolition of the death penalty, Amnesty International's letter-writing campaigns called ‘Urgent Action Appeals,' and the effectiveness of national human rights institutions. He will also expand his unique quantitative data on international human rights NGOs to cover the entire period from 1948 to 2009.

Dong Wook Kim Fellow Speaker CDDRL
Seminars

Thailand's Lost Consolidation: Democracy and Monarchy in Transition

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Despite its frequent military coups, Thai democracy was practically a textbook case of successful transition during the 1980s and 1990s. A so-called "semi-democracy" during 1980-88 gave way to a fully elected civilian leadership whose corrupt government laid the conditions for a putsch in February 1991. As the coup makers institutionalized their power through the political party and electoral systems, a popular uprising put the military back in the barracks in May 1992. Following an organic five-year constitution-drafting process, the promulgation of the reform-driven 1997 Constitution appeared to cross the threshold between transition and consolidation. But the rise of Thaksin Shinawatra and his Thai Rak Thai party changed all that. The Thaksin regime was paradoxically corrupt and abusive of power on the one hand but delivered the goods from its populist platform through policy innovation on the other. Thaksin triumphed at the polls in 2001 and again, by a landslide, in 2005. In the same year, a Bangkok-based "yellow-shirt" movement campaigned against his graft and abuse, laying the groundwork for Thailand's latest putsch in September 2006. Thai politics has been murky and topsy-turvy since. Thaksin's opponents from the military, palace, Bangkok's middle class, royalist political parties, swathes of civil society, and the yellow-shirted People's Alliance for Democracy are now in charge, fronted by Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and his Democrat Party-led coalition government. Yet this anti-Thaksin coalition is unable to put the lid on the pro-Thaksin "red shirts" as the remarkable reign of King Bhumibol Adulyadej enters its twilight. Thai democracy and monarchy are increasingly enmeshed. Its road ahead towards a workable constitutional monarchy that is consistent with democratic development will have much to say about the democratization in developing countries. It is a crucial case that could build or sap the momentum of democratization and democracy promotion elsewhere.

Dr. Thitinan Pongsudhirak is Director of the Institute of Security and International Studies (ISIS) and Associate Professor of International Political Economy at the Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University. He has authored a host of articles, books and book chapters on Thailand's politics, political economy, foreign policy, media and ASEAN and East Asian security and economic cooperation. He is frequently quoted and his op-eds have regularly appeared in international and local media. Dr. Thitinan has worked for The BBC World Service, The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), Independent Economic Analysis (IDEA) and consulting and research projects related to Thailand's macro-economy and politics. He received his B.A. from the University of California at Santa Barbara, M.A. from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and Ph.D. from the London School of Economics where he won the United Kingdom's Lord Bryce Prize for Best Dissertation in Comparative and International Politics. Dr. Thitinan has lectured at a host of universities in Thailand and abroad, and is currently a visiting scholar with the FSI-Humanities Center and Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.

CISAC Conference Room

Thitinan Pongsudhirak Visiting Scholar Speaker CDDRL / Humanities Center
Seminars

Clean Trade vs. the Resource Curse

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Profile
Leif Wenar is Chair of Ethics at King's College London.

After earning his Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Stanford, he went to Harvard to study with John Rawls, and wrote his dissertation on property rights with Robert Nozick and T.M. Scanlon.

Leif Wenar works in moral, political and legal theory. His most abstract theoretical work concerns the nature and justification of rights. Most of his scholarly writings have focused on the work of John Rawls. Much of his current research focuses on international issues such as war, human rights, severe poverty, development aid, and inequalities among nations.  He has recently written on the global trade in natural resources such as oil and diamonds, and how to stop the damaging effects of the "resource curse." Most of his published work is available online at  wenar.info.

He has been a Visiting Professor and a Fellow at the Princeton University Center for Human Values, a Fellow of the Center for Ethics and Public Affairs at The Murphy Institute of Political Economy, and a Fellow of the Program on Justice and the World Economy at The Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs.

Research
Leif Wenar works in moral, political and legal theory. Much of his current research focuses on international issues such as war, human rights, severe poverty, development aid, and inequalities among nations. His most abstract theoretical work concerns the nature and justification of rights. Most of his scholarly writings have focused on the work of John Rawls, and he co-edited the autobiographical volume Hayek on Hayek.

He has recently written on the global trade in natural resources such as oil and diamonds, and how to stop the damaging effects this trade has on low-income countries. His work on this topic can be found at www.cleantrade.org.

Attached is the paper for the seminar. Of course there's no expectation that you'll want to read the whole thing, so here's a short guide to what might be most interesting for our time together:
  • The main policy proposals in the project can be gotten from sections 1-14, skipping the 'Question' sections. (These sections cover the material in "Property Rights and the Resource Curse"; if you've read that article you'll not miss too much by skipping these sections.)
  • The final section, A14, tries to build on Seema's excellent work on loan sanctions;
  • Sections 7, 8, 9, and A13 touch on the issues of the standards for
    disqualifying regimes from selling resources/accessing credit, and the
    agencies that could rule on whether these standards have been met.

The rest of the material is just there in case it interests you.

Download pdf

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Leif Wenar Professor of Ethics Speaker Kings College London
Workshops
Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on Global Justice
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