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.
Commentators have vigorously debated whether international criminal justice mechanisms favor conflict or peace. Others have debated whether decapitation (i.e., assassination of leaders) strengthens or weakens militias, insurgencies, and terrorist groups. This study examines how arrests of, and threats to arrest, militia leaders pursuant to international criminal warrants have affected demobilization of Rwandan militias in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Speaker Bio:
Image
Richard Steinberg writes and teaches in the areas of international law and international relations. He currently teaches International Trade Law, International Business Transactions, and Theories of International Law, and directs Law School clinics that work with the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and conduct research in conflict and post-conflict zones. He is also Director of the Sanela Diana Jenkins Human Rights Project, and Editor-in-Chief of the award-winning www.ICCforum.com (link is external). In addition to his UCLA appointment, Professor Steinberg is currently Visiting Professor of Stanford Global Studies at the WSD Handa Center for Human Rights and International Justice, and the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford.
Co-sponsor: HANDA Center for Human Rights & International Justice
Richard Steinberg
Visiting Professor at Stanford Global Studies and on faculty at UCLA School of Law
"I don't think anyone, including many in the media themselves, would say that they are somehow completely political neutral, but a much deeper assertion was made where even factual statements and fact-checking done by organizations like the New York Times or CNN were called into question, and they were called into question by people purporting to put forward facts that really had no actual empirical basis other than the fact that someone had said it on the Internet," says CDDRL Mosbacher Director Francis Fukuyama.
In Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World, I showed that turning points in global population trends have been driving waves of political stability or crisis for at least the last 500 years. We are currently seeing a new turning point, as rich countries enter a period of workforce decline and emerging markets divide into those with falling fertility vs. stable and still-high fertility. Drawing on experience from previous centuries in Europe and Asia, we can forecast political trends; these include a new wave of revolutions in Africa and the Middle East and a surge in populist and protectionist politics in Europe and the U.S., but also eventual peaceful transitions to democracy in Russia and China.
Speaker Bio:
Image
Jack A. Goldstone (PhD Harvard) is the Virginia E. and John T. Hazel, Jr. Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University. Previously, Dr. Goldstone was on the faculty of Northwestern University and the University of California, and has been a visiting scholar at Cambridge University and the California Institute of Technology. He is the author of Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World, awarded the 1993 Distinguished Scholarly Research Award of the American Sociological Association; Why Europe? The Rise of the West in World History; and co-editor of Political Demography: How Population Changes are Reshaping International Security and National Politics. He has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford University, and won Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. He has also won the Arnoldo Momigliano Award of the Historical Society, the Myron Weiner award of the International Studies Association, and been Holbrooke lecturer at the American Academy in Berlin. His current research focuses on conditions for building democracy and stability in developing nations, the impact of population change on the global economy and international security, and the cultural origins of modern economic growth.
When villages in China began to introduce local elections in the 1980s it was, for many, a moment of great optimism about the prospects for local democracy in the Peoples' Republic. Yet village self-government has not curbed the power of local officials in China to confiscate the wealth from the rural poor. Following the introduction of village elections, over 60 million villagers have had their land seized by their local governments. These land seizures amount to a redistribution of trillions of dollars of wealth from smallholders to the government. In this talk, I argue that local self-government in China is a strikingly effective tool for top-down authoritarian control. I focus on the consequences of including communal elites, like the leaders of lineages or religious groups, in village institutions of self-government. The view that local democracy nurtures accountability would suggest that the inclusion of communal elites in village government would strengthen villagers' land rights. After all, these communal elites face strong social expectations that they cooperate with their group and enact policies that benefit them. Drawing on case studies and a new dataset, I show that when communal elites join local institutions of self-government, the state is instead able to expropriate more land than when these elites remain outside of government. I argue that these communal elites are important intermediaries that help China's authoritarian state control and extract from their groups.
Speaker Bio:
Image
Daniel Mattingly is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. He received a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2016. Starting in summer 2017, he will join the department of political science at Yale as an assistant professor. Dan’s dissertation focuses on the sources of state power in China, and shows how the ruling party uses democratic institutions to strengthen its political control over rural China. More broadly he is interested in local governance, state-building, authoritarian rule, and political accountability. His work appears in Comparative Political Studies and World Politics.
Media censorship is considered as the hallmark of authoritarian regimes. Why don’t citizens acquire uncensored info despite the low cost availability? What does it take to expose citizens to uncensored information, and how does exposure affect their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors? We conduct a field experiment directly varying the supply of uncensored information (by providing free access to uncensored internet to university students in China), and students’ demand for information (by providing informational and monetary incentives) over the course of 18 months. We measure and trace students’ media consumption, beliefs and attitudes regarding media, as well as a broad range of economic and political attitudes and behaviors. We find that censorship successfully prevents information consumption due to the combination of restricted supply of and low demand for uncensored information. The low demand is primarily driven by students’ skeptical beliefs regarding uncensored media outlets, and such beliefs can be persistently changed after a period of exposure. Having exposed to uncensored information makes students more knowledgeable, more pessimistic of the Chinese economy, more critical of the government, and more likely to plan on leaving China in the near future.
Speaker Bio:
Image
David Y. Yang is a PhD candidate in Economics at Stanford University. He received B.A. in statistics and B.S. in business administration from University of California, Berkeley. His research interests center on political economy, behavioral and experimental economics, and economic history. In particular, he is interested in the causes and consequences of political beliefs, attitudes, and preferences.
David Y. Yang
PhD candidate in Economics at Stanford University
Property rights are important for economic exchange, but in much of the world they are not publicly provided. Private market organizations can fill this gap by providing an institutional structure to enforce agreements, but with this power comes the ability to extort from the group’s members. Under what circumstances will private organizations provide a stable environment for economic activity? Using survey data collected from 1,878 randomly sampled traders across 269 markets, 68 market leaders, and 55 government revenue collectors in Lagos, I find that strong markets maintain institutions to support trade not in the absence of government, but rather as a response to active interference. I argue that organizations develop pro-trade institutions when threatened by politicians they perceive as predatory, and when the organization can respond with threats of its own. Under this balance of power, the organization will not extort because it needs trader support to keep threats credible.
Speaker Bio:
Image
Shelby Grossman is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Her primary research interests are in comparative politics and political economy. Her book manuscript explores the politics of property rights in informal markets in Nigeria. Other research projects include a study on the political economy of diversified business groups, a project on casual inter-group interactions in the informal economy, and a paper on the politics of non-compliance with polio vaccination in northern Nigeria. Shelby received her Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University in 2016.
In this paper published by the International Journal of Educational Development, we investigate the impact of drug-related violence in Mexico on academic achievement. We use panel of elementary and lower secondary schools and locality-level firearm homicides from 2006 to 2011. We rely on school fixed-effects models to estimate the impact on math test scores of turf war exposure and turf war persistence (e.g. months of exposure) during the academic year. According to the results, both exposure and persistence of criminal violence reduces math test scores. The analysis of heterogeneous effects shows that schools located in poor urban settings experience the largest negative effects. Further, we find stronger negative effects of drug-related violence exposure in lower secondary schools with street gang presence nearby. Finally, we further examine potential mechanisms driving the effects of criminal violence on test scores. Our findings indicate that turf war exposure and persistence are associated with a loss of instructional time due to higher teacher absenteeism and turnover, as well as student absenteeism, tardiness, and propensity to leave school days early.
Lisa Blaydes and Christopher Paik explore the impact the Holy Land Crusaders in Cambridge International Organization, as the most significant forms of military mobilization during the medieval period, had important implications for European state formation. Their findings contribute to a scholarly debate regarding when the essential elements of the modern state first began to appear. Read more here.
Faculty from Anthropology, English and Political Science join Stanford students and staff for perspectives on the U.S. election and its implications for Mexico and Latin America, and for the prospects of immigrants living in the U.S.
(TBD) undergraduate (Centro Chicano and Latino Outreach and CORE Coordinator)
Lenica Morales-Valenzuela is a Masters in Latin American Studies student here at the Center of Latin American Studies. Her past research has focused on human rights advocacy for genocide survivors of the Guatemalan Civil War and studying root causes for Central American migration to the United States. Currently, her research is shifting towards issues of constitutionality of indigenous rights in Guatemala and how indigenous populations have been interacting (or not) with the Guatemalan state.
#LatinxsReact
Speakers:
Image
Professor Garcia’s work engages historical and institutional processes through which violence and suffering is produced and lived. A central theme is the disproportionate burden of addiction, depression and incarceration among poor families and communities. Her research is oriented toward understanding how attachments, affect, and practices of intimacy are important registers of politics and economy.
Professor Garcia is currently engaged in research in Mexico City that examines emerging social and discursive worlds related to the dynamics of extreme urban poverty, mental illness and drug addiction in Mexico City, particularly within its peripheral zones.
Image
Dr. Paula M. L. Moya is Professor of English and, by courtesy, of Iberian and Latin American Cultures and the Director of the Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University.
She was also a founding organizer and coordinating team member of The Future of Minority Studies research project (FMS), an inter-institutional, interdisciplinary, and multigenerational research project facilitating focused and productive discussions about the democratizing role of minority identity and participation in a multicultural society.
Beatriz Magaloni
Beatriz Magaloni is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is also an affiliated faculty member of the Woods Institute of the Environment (2011-2013), a Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Center for International Development, and became an affiliated faculty member at CISAC in 2014.
Moderator(s):
Image
Francisco Preciado, J.D., Executive Director SEIU Local 2007 at Stanford. Francisco has experience working in local and state politics. He has advised California State Assembly Members and State Senators, managed a non-profit, worked as a union organizer, and completed several legal externships. He is a graduate of UC Berkeley School of Law, where he was recognized for his work assisting low-income workers. Francisco has a Masters Degree in Mexican American Studies from San Jose State University, and a dual Bachelors Degree in Political Science and Chicano(a) Studies from Stanford University.
Image
Alberto Diaz-Cayeros Director of the Center for Latin American Studies. Alberto joined the FSI faculty in 2013 after serving for five years as the director of the Center for US-Mexico studies at the University of California, San Diego. He earned his Ph.D at Duke University in 1997. He was an assistant professor of political science at Stanford from 2001-2008, before which he served as an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Diaz-Cayeros has also served as a researcher at Centro de Investigacion Para el Desarrollo, A.C. from 1997-1999. His work has primarily focused on federalism, poverty and economic reform in Latin America, and Mexico in particular. He has published widely in Spanish and English.
Dept. of Political Science
Encina Hall, Room 436
Stanford University,
Stanford, CA
(650) 724-5949
0
magaloni@stanford.edu
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations
Professor of Political Science
beatriz_magaloni_2024.jpg
MA, PhD
Beatriz Magaloni Magaloni is the Graham Stuart Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science. Magaloni is also a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, where she holds affiliations with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She is also a Stanford’s King Center for Global Development faculty affiliate. Magaloni has taught at Stanford University for over two decades.
She leads the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (Povgov). Founded by Magaloni in 2010, Povgov is one of Stanford University’s leading impact-driven knowledge production laboratories in the social sciences. Under her leadership, Povgov has innovated and advanced a host of cutting-edge research agendas to reduce violence and poverty and promote peace, security, and human rights.
Magaloni’s work has contributed to the study of authoritarian politics, poverty alleviation, indigenous governance, and, more recently, violence, crime, security institutions, and human rights. Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006) is widely recognized as a seminal study in the field of comparative politics. It received the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations, as well as the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section. Her second book The Politics of Poverty Relief: Strategies of Vote Buying and Social Policies in Mexico (with Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estevez) (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores how politics shapes poverty alleviation.
Magaloni’s work was published in leading journals, including the American Political Science Review,American Journal of Political Science, Criminology & Public Policy, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, Latin American Research Review, and others.
Magaloni received wide international acclaim for identifying innovative solutions for salient societal problems through impact-driven research. In 2023, she was named winner of the world-renowned Stockholm Prize in Criminology, considered an equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of criminology. The award recognized her extensive research on crime, policing, and human rights in Mexico and Brazil. Magaloni’s research production in this area was also recognized by the American Political Science Association, which named her recipient of the 2021 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review, the leading journal in the discipline.
She received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University and holds a law degree from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.
Encina Hall, C149
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305
(650) 725-0500
0
albertod@stanford.edu
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
alberto_diaz-cayeros_2024.jpg
MA, PhD
Alberto Díaz-Cayeros is a Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and co-director of the Democracy Action Lab (DAL), based at FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law (CDDRL). His research interests include federalism, poverty relief, indigenous governance, political economy of health, violence, and citizen security in Mexico and Latin America.
He is currently working on a project on cartography and the developmental legacies of colonial rule and governance in indigenous communities in Mexico.
Effective Law Enforcement Institutions and Democratic Accountability: Workshop Focuses on Regional Issues in Law Enforcement
The Stanford Program on Poverty and Governance delivered its five-day training course, “Effective Law Enforcement Institutions and Democratic Accountability,” to law enforcement professionals from the Planning Unit of the Mexican Comision Nacional de Seguridad (CNS). Held in Encina Hall October 11-15, 2016, the workshop was led by Professors Beatriz Magaloni and Alberto Diaz-Cayeros as part of their U.S. State Department-funded research project on police accountability and citizen trust in Mexico. Stanford political scientists and legal scholars participated in the week-long workshop to address a wide range of topics focused on the dynamics between criminal violence, police practices and citizen trust. Highlights of the unique curriculum included:
Design of police interventions by Beatriz Magaloni and Alberto Diaz Cayeros, with discussion of drug policy, fighting organized crime, what law enforcement looks like up close, and prevention of violence.
How to measure the success of police operations by Edgar Franco, a doctoral student in Political Science.
Use of empirical evidence to develop effective public policy by Gustavo Robles, Ph.D candidate in Political Science, with a discussion of methods for gathering and analyzing data and how to develop indicators for performance, results and impact.
Regional issues with a focus on Latin America, including anomie and law, by Stanford Law School visiting professor Rogelio Perez-Perdomo.
Roundtable moderated by Beatriz Magaloni featuring Francis Fukuyama, Erik Jensen and Stephen Stedman on accountability, anti-corruption practices, trust in public institutions, civil engagement, and the role of international organizations.
A lecture by legal scholar Mirte Posterna from the Stanford Law School on human Rights, security and anti-drug policy.
The Mexican delegation took afiled trip to the Stockton Police Department to meet with Chief of Police Eric Jones, an innovator in effective community policing and use of body-worn cameras. They also a visited Stanford's new David Rumsey Map Center, where scholars can work with digital mapping software to manipulate, enlarge, quantify, aggregate, and visualize geo-data in unique ways for research.
The final session of the workshop focused on developing collaborative approaches between scholars and law enforcement practitioners in Mexico on a CNS-sponsored "risk terrain" project currently underway in Acapulco, with an analysis of police patrolling data, the role of schools in mitigating risk for youth violence and gang activity, and the design of federal police surveys.
The workshop and site visits were instrumental in advancing key goals of U.S. State Department-funded research project on project police accountability and citizen trust, which include assessing the efficacy of new law enforcement approaches in coordinating policing between federal, states and municipal agencies, mapping criminal activity and drug trafficking routes in Mexico, and correlating socio-economic characteristics with levels of trust among Mexican citizens.
FSI researchers work to understand continuity and change in societies as they confront their problems and opportunities. This includes the implications of 
Beatriz Magaloni
