Kotkin’s scholarly contributions span the fields of Russian-Soviet, Northeast Asian, and global history. His publications include Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941, and Stalin, Vol. I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928, part of a three-volume history of Russian power in the world and of Stalin’s power in Russia.

"I am thrilled to welcome Stephen to FSI this fall,” said FSI Director Michael McFaul. “He is an excellent addition to the cutting-edge research and teaching team at APARC, and I look forward to seeing the important impact he makes in his new role."

Kotkin writes reviews and essays for The Times Literary Supplement, Foreign Affairs, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. He was the business book reviewer for the New York Times Sunday Business Section for a number of years. He earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Rochester in 1981 and received a Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in 1988, and during that time took a graduate seminar at Stanford.

Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute, said: “I cannot believe our good fortune that we have managed to convince Peter to come back to FSI, where he was a senior fellow before leaving for NYU. His research interest fits perfectly with the mission of our Center for Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law, and our students have no idea how lucky they will be to have Peter in the classroom.” 

Henry has published groundbreaking articles in top economics journals that evaluate the impact of economic reform on asset prices, investment, wages, and economic growth. His current research on the global infrastructure challenge builds on the scholarship in his book Turnaround: Third World Lessons for First World Growth (Basic Books, 2013), which addresses economic efficiency as well as international relations, with the aim of increasing awareness of the interconnected fortunes of advanced and developing nations. 

Henry taught economics at Stanford from 1997 to 2009. He was a national fellow of the Hoover Institution from 2000 to 2001. At Stanford, his research was funded by an NSF CAREER Grant from 2001 to 2006, and in 2005 he became the first African American professor to earn tenure at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where, from 2008 to 2010, he was the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of International Economics. Henry holds a PhD in economics (MIT, 1997), a BA in mathematics as a Rhodes Scholar (Oxford, 1993), and a BA with distinction, highest honors, and Phi Beta Kappa in economics (UNC Chapel Hill, 1991). 

A vice chair of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Economic Club of New York, Henry received the 2021 Impactful Mentor Award from the American Economic Association for his founding and continued leadership of the PhD Excellence Initiative. A member of the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships from 2009 to 2017, he also received the Foreign Policy Association Medal in 2015, the Carnegie Foundation Great Immigrant Award in 2016, and the Council on Economic Education Visionary Award in 2018.

On April 21, 2021, the APARC China Program hosted Professor Erin Baggott Carter, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Southern California, and Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. Her program, "When Beijing Goes to Washington: Autocratic Lobbying Influence in Democracies," explored how lobbying from China and China-based companies can affect policy in the United States. Professor Jean Oi, William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics and director of the APARC China Program, moderated the event.

Professor Baggot Carter based her talk on a dataset drawn from the public records of the US Foreign Agents Registration Act, which includes over 10,000 lobbying activities undertaken by the Chinese government between 2005 and 2019. According to Baggot Carter, the evidence suggests that Chinese government lobbying makes legislators at least twice as likely to sponsor legislation that is favorable to Chinese interests. Moreover, US media outlets that participated in Chinese-government sponsored trips subsequently covered China as less threatening. Coverage pivoted away from US-China military rivalry and the CCP’s persecution of religious minorities and toward US-China economic cooperation. These results suggest that autocratic lobbying poses an important challenge to democratic integrity. Watch now: 

With the announcement on Monday that an agreement has been reached on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the controversial trade accord is in the news all across Asia this week. Taiwan is not one of the founding participants, but its leaders have reiterated their determination to join the next round of negotiations if the agreement is ratified and comes into effect. Taiwan's prospects for entry remain uncertain, however, and will depend to a great degree on the attitudes of decision-makers in the United States and the People's Republic of China.

The Taiwan Democracy Project (TDP) at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law has been at the forefront of research and discussion on this topic. In the fall of 2013, the TDP held a conference to explore the prospects for Taiwan’s participation in the TPP that brought together policymakers and scholars from Taiwan along with with leading specialists from other Asian countries and the U.S. The key findings of the conference are summarized in a conference report. The key conclusions of the conference remain valid today: it is in Taiwan's national interest to join the TPP; external obstacles to Taiwan's accession to the partnership are signficant but not insurmountable; and Taiwanese policy-makers need to worry about domestic obstacles as much as international ones in seeking TPP membership. 

The Taiwan Democracy Project will continue to monitor TPP-related developments over the coming months and plans to revisit Taiwan's prospects for TPP entry in a symposium in February 2016.