Abstract
Since the early years of her career working with children in some of the direst situations in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, Susan Bissell, UNICEF’s Chief of Child Protection, has witnessed children being targeted for such exploitative practices as human trafficking, recruitment into armed forces, and child labor. Violations of the child’s right to protection take place in every country and are massive, under-recognized, and under-reported barriers to child survival and development, in addition to being human rights violations. Children subjected to violence, exploitation, abuse and neglect are at risk of death, poor physical and mental health, HIV/AIDS infection, educational problems, displacement, and vagrancy.

 Protecting children from violence, exploitation and abuse is an integral component of protecting their rights to survival, growth, and development. UNICEF advocates and supports the creation of a protective environment for children in partnership with governments, national and international partners including the private sector, and civil society.  Bissell guides UNICEF’s Child Protection program in 170 countries, working with government officials and other partners to shape child protection policies. During this discussion, she will provide an overview of her role at UNICEF and the work she does to help ensure that governments honor their commitments to strengthen child protection systems and protect children.

In 2009, Susan Bissell was appointed to her current position in New York, heading all of UNICEF’s Child Protection work.  She oversees a team of professionals guiding efforts for children affected by armed conflict, child protection systems strengthening to prevent and respond to all forms of violence against children, and a range of other matters.

Lina Khatib is the co-founding Head of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. She joined Stanford University in 2010 from the University of London where she was an Associate Professor. Her research is firmly interdisciplinary and focuses on the intersections of politics, media, and social factors in relation to the politics of the Middle East. She is also a consultant on Middle East politics and media and has published widely on topics such as new media and Islamism, US public diplomacy towards the Middle East, and political media and conflict in the Arab world, as well as on the political dynamics in Lebanon and Iran. She has an active interest in the link between track two dialogue and democratization policy. She is also a Research Associate at SOAS, University of London, and, from 2010-2012, was a Research Fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School.

Lina is one of the core authors of the forthcoming Arab Human Development Report (2013) published by the UNDP, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Syria Justice and Accountability Center. She is also a founding co-editor of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, a multidisciplinary journal concerned with politics, culture and communication in the region, and in 2009 co-edited (with Klaus Dodds) a special issue of the journal on geopolitics, public diplomacy and soft power in the Middle East. She edited the Journal of Media Practice from 2007-2010.

Paul Wise is the Richard E. Behrman Professor of Child Health and Society, Professor of Pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine, and Senior Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.  He is Director of the Center for Policy, Outcomes and Prevention and a core faculty of the Centers for Health Policy and Primary Care Outcomes Research, at Stanford University.

Dr. Wise received his A.B. degree summa cum laude and his M.D. degree from Cornell University, a Master of Public Health degree from the Harvard School of Public Health and did his pediatric training at the Children's Hospital in Boston.  His former positions include serving as the Director of Emergency and Primary Care Services at the Children's Hospital, Boston, Director of the Harvard Institute for Reproductive and Child Health at Harvard Medical School, and Special Assistant to the U.S. Surgeon General.  Prior to moving to Stanford University, Dr. Wise was Vice-Chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities in the Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, the academic and research base of Partners in Health.

Rajaie Batniji is a resident physician in internal medicine at Stanford and a CDDRL affiliate. His research examines the selection of priority diseases and countries in global health, and he is interested in global health financing and the priority-setting process of international institutions. His work has also examined social determinants of health in the Middle East. At FSI, Dr. Batniji is co-investigator on Global Underdevelopment Action Fund projects explaining U.S. global health financing and political causes of public health crisis.

Dr. Batniji received his doctorate in international relations (D.Phil) from Oxford University where he studied as a Marshall Scholar. He also earned a M.D. from the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine and M.A. and B.A. (with distinction) degrees in History from Stanford University. Dr. Batniji was previously based at Oxford's Global Economic Governance Program, and he has worked as a consultant to the World Health Organization.

Abstract:

The levels of violence in Mexico have dramatically increased in the last few years due to structural changes in the drug trafficking business. The increase in the number of drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) fighting over the control of territory and trafficking routes has resulted in a substantial increase in the rates of homicides and other crimes. This study evaluates the economic costs of drug-related violence. We propose electricity consumption as an indicator of the level of municipal economic activity and use two different empirical strategies to test this. To estimate the marginal effect of violence in the rate of homicides (per 100,000 inhabitants) we use an instrumental variable regression created by Mejía, Castillo and Restrepo (2012). For the average municipality, the marginal negative effect of the increase in homicides rates is substantive for earned income and the proportion of business owners, but not for energy consumption. Although negative and statistically significant, the effects are mild for labor participation. We also employ the methodology of synthetic controls to evaluate the effect that inter-narco wars have on local economies. The analysis indicates that the drug wars in those municipalities that saw dramatic increases in violence between 2006 and 2010 significantly reduced their energy consumption in the years after the change occurred, which is interpreted as a significant reduction in GDP per capita for these municipalities.

Speaker Bio:

Gabriela Calderon holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University. Her research interests include policies that affect gender differences in developing countries, policy evaluation, violence in Latin America and the effect of institutions and governance on the provision of public goods and health/education outcomes. She did her master's degree in economic theory and bachelor's degree in economics at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México. Currently, in the Program on Poverty and Governance, her research analyzes the way institutions and democracy affect the provision of public goods, and the impact they have on health outcomes like infant mortality trends. She is also studying the effects of government interventions that combat drug-trafficking organizations over violence in Mexico.

Her research has focused on the topics of development, public finance, and the evaluation of public policy programs in Mexico. For example, during the summers of 2009/2010, she conducted a field experiment in Zacatecas, Mexico with Giacomo de Giorgi, an assistant professor from Stanford University, and Jesse Cuhna, a former Stanford student. The main task was to evaluate the impact of financial literacy classes on underprivileged women entrepreneurs in the region. To successfully complete an evaluation in an untreated region, they proposed collaborating with the Mexican NGO CREA on a joint project. They contacted local interviewers, trained them, and identified all women entrepreneurs in the 17 communities, in which we conducted the experiment. Preliminary results suggest that the female entrepreneurs who were randomly assigned to treatment earned higher profits, had larger revenues, and served a greater number of clients. They also found that they were more likely to implement formal accounting techniques.

She has also studied programs that are not randomly assigned as an experiment. For example, she has analyzed the effects of a national policy in Mexico of child care services, called Estancias Infantiles para apoyar a Madres Trabajadoras (EI), using administrative, census and household data. Her empirical research strategy identifies the effects of the program on both the men and women who were eligible for the program. She used time, location and eligibility variation, and considered a major threat to identification of the actual effects: for example, a manufacturer who moves into a municipality at approximately the same time as the EI program and who happens to disproportionately demand the skills of women who were eligible to the program happened to have. To ensure that such scenarios do not affect her results, she chose not triple difference strategy, in which all ineligible people are treated as “controls” for the EI-eligible families. Instead, she employs Synthetic Control Methods, using the same methodology as Abadie and Gardeazabal (2003) and Abadie, Diamond and Hainmueller (2010) to ensure that her control group has the same mix of skills and preferences as the EI-eligible group. She adapted the Synthetic Control Method to analyze repeated cross-sectional household data, which are data that are typically available in developing countries

Speaker Bio:

Yael Zeira is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. In fall 2013, she will be Croft Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Mississippi. Her research agenda explores the sources and dynamics of political conflict and violence in the context of the Middle East, with a focus on the political behavior, attitudes and identities of ordinary individuals during times of conflict. Her book project investigates the logic of individual participation in political conflict and violence using original survey and interview research on the Palestinian national movement. Other projects include a field study examining the effect of international legal decisions on the conflict attitudes of individuals in war-torn societies, as well as a new study assessing the impact of family law on women and girls in the Islamic world. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Politics at New York University in fall 2012.

Processes of democratic transition in today’s Arab world carry with them both challenges and opportunities for minorities. While emerging social and political spaces may offer minorities better opportunities for political participation and social inclusion, minority rights are not always given enough importance in current processes of democratic transition, as is the case in Egypt. Furthermore, in places undergoing conflict, like Syria, threats facing minorities as a result of escalating sectarianism undermine prospects of democratic transition and reconciliation. The aim of this workshop is to help further understand how the political participation and social inclusion of minorities during Arab democratic transitions can be strengthened, with invited speakers covering cautionary tales offered by the Lebanese and Iraqi experiences, and the current challenges faced in Egypt and Syria.

The workshop is co-sponsored by the Stanford Initiative for Religious and Ethnic Understanding and Coexistence, supported by the President's Fund, the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity, the Religious Studies Department, and the Taube Center for Jewish Studies.

Abstract:

Why have militarized crackdowns on drug cartels had wildly divergent outcomes, sometimes exacerbating cartel-state conflict, as in Mexico and, for decades, in Brazil, but sometimes reducing violence, as with Rio de Janeiro's new 'Pacification' (UPP) strategy?  CDDRL-CISAC Post Doctoral Fellow Benjamin Lessing will distinguish key logics of violence, focusing on violent corruption--cartels' use of coercive force in the negotiation of bribes. Through this channel, crackdowns can lead to increased fighting unless the intensity of state repression is made conditional on cartels' use of violence--a key difference between Mexico and Brazil.

Speaker Bio:

Benjamin Lessing is a recent Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a joint postdoctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center on International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), and will join the Political Science faculty at University of Chicago as assistant professor in 2013.

Lessing studies 'criminal conflict'—organized armed violence involving non-state actors who, unlike revolutionary insurgents, are not trying to topple the state. His doctoral dissertation examines armed conflict between drug trafficking organizations and the state in Colombia, Mexico and Brazil. Additionally, he has studied prison gangs’ pernicious effect on state authority, and the effect of paramilitary groups’ territorial control on electoral outcomes. 

Prior to his graduate work, he conducted field research on the licit and illicit small arms trade in Latin America and the Caribbean for international organizations like Amnesty International, Oxfam, and the Small Arms Survey, as well as Viva Rio, Brazil’s largest NGO, and was a Fulbright Student Grantee in Argentina and Uruguay.