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.

The World House Global Network presents Gerald and Marita Grudzen

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On Friday, October 29th, 2021 at 10am PT, The World House Global Network is honored to have Gerald and Marita Grudzen, founders of Global Ministries University who will discuss: "A Case Study in the Value of Interfaith Education for building Global Partnerships."
 

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About Gerald Grudzen:

Gerald Grudzen, Ph.D. was one of the founders of Global Ministries University in 2001 shortly after the tragedy of 9/11. Grudzen has served as President of Global Ministries University since 2001 and has developed graduate interfaith education programs in collaboration with universities and research institutes in the United States, Africa, Turkey, India, and Thailand. Grudzen earned his Ph.D. in the history of Christianity and Islam from Columbia University.  He received a John Templeton award in 2003 for the development of the first scientific curriculum by Christian and Muslim scholars for the first major universities in Europe. He did this research in collaboration with the Ian Ramsey Center at Oxford University. In 2010 Grudzen co-led the largest American academic delegation ever sponsored by the US State Department for interfaith and intercultural dialogue with faculty members 'at several Egyptian Universities throughout Egypt including Al Azhar University in Cairo, the leading Sunni Muslim education center in the world.  

Beginning in 2012, Grudzen and Global Ministries Universities undertook a major effort to combat religious extremism in the coastal areas of Kenya where there had been frequent terrorist incidents.  The project brought together religious leaders and educators from both the coastal region and throughout Kenya to train these leaders in interfaith dialogue and methods of conflict resolution.  The success of this program led to its integration  with the Tangaza University Institute for Interreligious Dialogue and Islamic Studies in 2019. In 2021 Grudzen and his wife, Marita Grudzen,  co-chaired the US Hub for a three-day interfaith conference on Pope Francis' encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, co-sponsored with Tangaza Univesity and other Christian and Muslim universities in Kenya and Indonesia in collaboration with the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue at the Vatican.  Over 3000 participants took part in this conference from 15 different countries. A second international, interfaith conference is scheduled for February of 2023. Grudzen has authored or co-authored several books on the role of interfaith dialogue and collaboration in promoting peace and reconciliation across the world.

About Marita Grudzen:

Marita Grudzen, MHS, is Associate Director Emerita and a founding member of the Stanford Geriatric Education Center, a national center in ethnogeriatrics within Stanford University School of Medicine. Ms. Grudzen was co-recipient with Chaplain Bruce Feldstein, MD, of the Templeton Award(2001-06) for the medical school required curriculum they developed, Spirituality and Meaning in Medicine. Ms. Grudzen chaired a qualitative study of diverse healing practices in six ethnic minority populations in the Bay Area which was translated into health professional educational programming. She also developed a relationship of trust with the Afghan leadership in Fremont, CA during a series of three focus groups she co-led with the Afghan elder women’s community. Most recently, Marita co-developed the curriculum for the Fremont Community Ambassador Program for Seniors, and 25 hour Hospital to Home Transition training for volunteers from the Ethnic Minority Senior Services Consortium of San Jose, CA. Marita has received an international award from the Prime Minister of Turkey for her contribution to the First International Care Congress in Istanbul from May 2-8, 2005.

Since August of 2011, every year Ms. Grudzen with her husband have co-developed, implemented, evaluated and revised a 40 hour Interfaith Leadership Program in partnership with Christian, Muslim and African Indigenous Religious leaders in Kenya. Recruiting local expert and community leaders as co-presenters they returned every August until the current Covid era and maintain communication through the year with their interfaith partners through Skype and email.

Online via Zoom. Register Now 

Gerald and Marita Grudzen Global Ministries University 

Institutionalized Police Brutality: Torture, the Militarization of Security, and the Reform of Inquisitorial Criminal Justice in Mexico

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How can societies restrain their coercive institutions and transition to a more humane criminal justice system? We argue that two main factors explain why torture can persist as a generalized practice even in democratic societies: weak procedural protections and the militarization of policing, which introduces strategies, equipment, and mentality that treats criminal suspects as though they were enemies in wartime. Using a large survey of the Mexican prison population and leveraging the date and place of arrest, this paper provides causal evidence about how these two explanatory variables shape police brutality. Our paper offers a grim picture of the survival of authoritarian policing practices in democracies. It also provides novel evidence of the extent to which the abolition of inquisitorial criminal justice institutions—a remnant of colonial legacies and a common trend in the region—has worked to restrain police brutality.

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American Political Science Review
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Beatriz Magaloni
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Issue 4

The World House Global Network presents Andre Kamenshikov

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On Friday, October 22, 2021 from 10:00-11:00 am PT, The World House Global Network is honored to have Andre Kamenshikov as our guest speaker. We will be discussing current challenges for civil society in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.

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Andre Kamenshikov
Andre Kamenshikov is a civil society activist in the field of peacebuilding, with both a US and Russian background. He graduated Moscow State University majoring in sociology in 1991 as well as studied various subjects in Carroll College, Waukesha, Wisconsin and undertook courses in human rights and other relevant topics. He is the representative of a US-based NGO Nonviolence International and the regional coordinator of an international civil society network - the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC) in the Eastern Europe region. He has over 28 years of experience as a civil peacebuilding activist in conflict areas of the ex-USSR. He was the founder of Nonviolence International–CIS, a civil society organization that was based in Moscow and operated in the post-soviet states for 22 years until it had to be closed due to the current political climate in Russia. Since 2015 he has been based in Kyiv, Ukraine, working primarily with the local civil society sector on enhancing its capacities to contribute to peace and democratic development of the country. He is an author of a number of publications about the role of civil society in post-soviet conflicts, including “International experience of civilian peacebuilding in the post-soviet space” (2016), the “Strategic framework for the development of civil peacebuilding activities in Ukraine” (2017).

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Andre Kamenshikov
Lectures

Authoritarian media and diversionary threats: lessons from 30 years of Syrian state discourse

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Scholars have long argued that leaders manipulate foreign policy, sometimes even initiating wars in order to enhance their domestic political position. But diversionary wars are relatively rare given the high costs of conflict. In this project, we examine data from major Syrian daily newspapers over a 30-year period (1987–2018) to explore how autocratic regimes use diversionary rhetoric. We find that before the 2011 Arab Uprisings, Syria's state-controlled media concentrated on Israel as a security and political threat. Emphasis on Israel as a diversionary threat decreased during peace negotiations between Syria and Israel, probably in a bid to prepare the Syrian public for normalization of bilateral relations. After 2011, scrutiny of Israel—and other long-standing topics of state discourse—was displaced by discussion of foreign plots and conspiracies against the Syrian state. Our analysis illustrates how authoritarian regimes make use of diversionary strategies as well as how political shocks generate discontinuities in authoritarian rhetoric.

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Political Science Research and Methods
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Lisa Blaydes
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Issue 4

Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program Information Session AY 22-23

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The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) will be accepting applications from eligible juniors on who are interested in writing their senior thesis on a subject touching upon democracy, economic development, and rule of law (DDRL) from any university department.  The application period opens on January 10, 2022 and runs through February 11, 2022.   For more information on the Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program, please click here.

Join us online via Zoom on Friday, January 21st at 12:00pm (PST) to learn more! 

REGISTER NOW

CDDRL faculty and current honors students will be present to discuss the program and answer any questions.

 

Online via zoom. REGISTER HERE.

Stephen J. Stedman

CDDRL
Encina Hall, C152
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 725-2705 (650) 724-2996
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
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Stephen Stedman is a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), an affiliated faculty member at CISAC, and professor of political science (by courtesy) at Stanford University. He is director of CDDRL's Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy, Development and Rule of Law, and will be faculty director of the Program on International Relations in the School of Humanities and Sciences effective Fall 2025.

In 2011-12 Professor Stedman served as the Director for the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy, and Security, a body of eminent persons tasked with developing recommendations on promoting and protecting the integrity of elections and international electoral assistance. The Commission is a joint project of the Kofi Annan Foundation and International IDEA, an intergovernmental organization that works on international democracy and electoral assistance.

In 2003-04 Professor Stedman was Research Director of the United Nations High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change and was a principal drafter of the Panel’s report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility.

In 2005 he served as Assistant Secretary-General and Special Advisor to the Secretary- General of the United Nations, with responsibility for working with governments to adopt the Panel’s recommendations for strengthening collective security and for implementing changes within the United Nations Secretariat, including the creation of a Peacebuilding Support Office, a Counter Terrorism Task Force, and a Policy Committee to act as a cabinet to the Secretary-General.

His most recent book, with Bruce Jones and Carlos Pascual, is Power and Responsibility: Creating International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2009).

Director, Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy, Development and Rule of Law
Director, Program in International Relations
Affiliated faculty at the Center for International Security and Cooperation
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Didi Kuo

Encina Hall, C150
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

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Center Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
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Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.

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System Error, Live! With Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami, and Jeremy Weinstein

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 Register for System Error, Live!

This event will be held outside on Stanford's campus. In accordance with Santa Clara County Public Health, masks are encouraged to be worn by all at crowded outdoor events.

Join Profs. Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami, and Jeremy Weinstein — the authors of System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot — for a discussion hosted by Professor Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. The operating system of Big Tech is broken, and this panel discussion will explore the path to a reboot. Plus, it will also allow you experience Professor Sahami’s famous tradition of throwing candy into the audience!

A forward-thinking manifesto from three Stanford professors — experts who have worked at ground zero of the tech revolution for decades — System Error reveals how Big Tech’s obsession with optimization and efficiency has sacrificed fundamental human values and demands that we change course to renew our democracy and save ourselves.

Armed with an understanding of how technologists think and exercise their power, these three Stanford professors—a philosopher working at the intersection of tech and ethics, the director of the undergraduate computer science program who was also an early Google engineer, and a political scientist who served under Barack Obama—reveal how we can hold that power to account. Troubled by the values that permeate the university and Silicon Valley, these professors worked together to chart a new path forward, creating a popular course to transform how tomorrow’s technologists might better approach their profession. Now, as the dominance of Big Tech becomes an explosive societal conundrum, join us as they share their provocative insights and concrete solutions to help everyone understand what is happening, what is at stake, and what we can do to control technology instead of letting it control us.

Books will be available for purchase at the event, and the authors will be signing copies as well.

This event is hosted by Professor Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and it is co-sponsored by the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, the Stanford School of Engineering, and the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences.

Rob Reich | FSI Affiliate
Mehran Sahami | Associate Chair for Education, Computer Science Department Associate Chair for Education, Computer Science Department
Jeremy Weinstein | FSI Senior Fellow at CDDRL
Lectures

New Developments in Online Political Activism

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What has happened to digital activism in the 10 years since the Arab Spring? Writer, activist, and 2016 Draper Hills Summer Fellow Abdelrahman Mansour divides the answer to this question into four sections. First, he provides a short history of digital activism before and during the Arab Spring in 2011. Second, he outlines three major changes to the political environment that have affected online activism since 2013. Third, he provides seven observations about how digital activism has changed between 2013 and 2021. Finally, he provides some hopeful predictions about the way forward.

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Yulia Bezvershenko

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CDDRL Visiting UELP Scholar, 2021-22
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Yulia Bezvershenko is the former Director General of Directorate for Science and Innovation at the Ministry of Education and Science. The Directorate was created for policy development and implementation in the research, development and innovation sector.

Since the Revolution of Dignity, Bezvershenko has been deeply involved in the reform of science development and implementation process. Her mission is to build knowledge-based Ukraine as economy and society based on knowledge, science and innovation. She has contributed to the Law on Science, which was adopted by Parliament in 2015. In cooperation with scientists and reformers she developed and actively participated in the creation of two new institutions, the National Council on Science and Technology and the National Science Fund. Bezvershenko currently works both on implementation of the aforementioned law and on its future iterations.

Bezvershenko holds a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the Bogolyubov Institute for Theoretical Physics (National Academy of Science of Ukraine) and a Master’s degree in Public Policy and Governance from the Kyiv School of Economics. She has diverse experience in the research and development sector, having worked as a researcher at the Bogolyubov Institute as well as a senior lecturer on quantum theory at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Until 2019, Yulia was a Deputy Head of Young Scientists Council of National Academy of Science of Ukraine and Vice-President of NGO "Unia Scientifica" aimed to promote science and to advocate reform of science in Ukraine.

 

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Nationalist Authoritarianism and the Future of Democracy

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For Fall Quarter 2021, FSI will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will be open to the public online via Zoom, and limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford affiliates may be available in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines.

                                                Register for Zoom                                                         Register for In-Person
                                                           (Open to all)                                                                    (Stanford affiliates only)              


Why is democracy so threatened in America and around the world? And what can we do about it? Join Ben Rhodes to explore the answers to these questions and discuss his recent book, After the Fall.

Ben Rhodes

In 2017, as Ben Rhodes was helping Barack Obama begin his next chapter, the legacy they had worked to build for eight years was being taken apart. To understand what was happening in America, Rhodes decided to look outward. Over the next three years, he traveled to dozens of countries, meeting with politicians, activists, and dissidents confronting the same nationalism and authoritarianism that was tearing America apart. Part memoir and part reportage, After the Fall investigates how much America’s fingerprints are on a world we helped to shape, through our post–Cold War embrace of unbridled capitalism and our post-9/11 nationalism and militarism; our mania for technology and social media; and the racism that fueled the backlash to America’s first Black president. At the same time, Rhodes learns from stories of a diverse set of characters—from Barack Obama himself to Cuban rebels to a rising generation of international leaders—that looking squarely at where America has gone wrong makes clear how essential it is to fight for what America is supposed to be, for our own country and the entire world.

Ben Rhodes is a writer, political commentator, and national security analyst. He is currently a contributor for NBC News and MSNBC; co-host of Pod Save the World; a senior advisor to former President Barack Obama; and chair of National Security Action, which he co-founded with Jake Sullivan in 2018. From 2009-2017, Ben served as a Deputy National Security Advisor to President Obama. In that capacity, he participated in all of President Obama’s key decisions, and oversaw the President’s national security communications, speechwriting, and public diplomacy.

Writer, political commentator, and national security analyst
Ben Rhodes | Writer, political commentator, and national security analyst
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