Education
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Early returns suggest that it may not be business as usual in state-society relations, with the Party-state being compelled to respond to an increasingly discontented and vocal society, and that a partial loosening of the tight censorship in media and culture may also be forthcoming. Indicators include changes in CCTV programming—e.g., a more interesting evening news report and the broadcast of the previously banned film V for Vendetta—media coverage of sensitive issues ranging from air pollution to the work of rights lawyers, and the relatively “enlightened” resolution of the Southern Weekend crisis, among other recent developments. What are we to make of these changes and, more importantly, how have these changes been received within China, for example on the ubiquitous and increasingly important Chinese microblogs?

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Stanley Rosen is a professor of political science at USC specializing in Chinese politics and society and was the director of the East Asian Studies Center at USC’s Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences from 2005–2011. He studied Chinese in Taiwan and Hong Kong and has traveled to mainland China over 40 times over the last 30 years. His courses range from Chinese politics and Chinese film to political change in Asia, East Asian societies, comparative politics theory, and politics and film in comparative perspective. The author or editor of eight books and many articles, he has written on such topics as the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese legal system, public opinion, youth, gender, human rights, and film and the media. He is the co-editor of Chinese Education and Society and a frequent guest editor of other translation journals. His most recent books include Chinese Politics: State, Society and the Market [Routledge, 2010 (co-edited with Peter Hays Gries)] and Art, Politics and Commerce in Chinese Cinema [Hong Kong University Press, 2010 (co-edited with Ying Zhu)]. Other ongoing projects include a study of the changing attitudes and behavior of Chinese youth, and a study of Hollywood films in China and the prospects for Chinese films on the international market, particularly in the United States.

In addition to his academic activities at USC, Professor Rosen has escorted eleven delegations to China for the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations (including American university presidents, professional associations, and Fulbright groups), and consulted for the World Bank, the Ford Foundation, the United States Information Agency, the Los Angeles Public Defenders Office and a number of private corporations, film companies, law firms and U.S. government agencies.

Philippines Conference Room

Stanley Rosen Professor, Department of Political Science Speaker University of Southern California
Seminars
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This event is intended to commemorate National Human Trafficking Awareness Day as well as recognize Stanford students' effort and conviction to act against human trafficking. Join us to learn about the anti-trafficking initiatives led by Stanford students, their research, work, stories, art and music.
 
Some of the participants include: Berkely Webster '13, Jared Naimark '14 and the band Too Big to Mail, Laura Hackney '14 MA, Julian Jaravata '13, Lily Steyer '15, Olivia Bryant '15, Nicolle Richards '15, Garima Sharma '15, Kylie Goh '15, Katherine Nasol '14, Tierney Colleen O'Rourke '13, Margaret Hagan (Stanford Law), Jeremy David Jimenez (Ph.D. Stanford School of Education) and Eugenia O'Kelly '14.

Light refreshments will be served

Free and Open to the Public

Bechtel Conference Center

Conferences
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Mr. William R. Pace has served as the Convenor of the Coalition for an International Criminal Court since its founding in 1995. He is the Executive Director of the World Federalist Movement-Institute for Global Policy (WFM-IGP) and is a co-founder and steering committee member of the International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect. He has been engaged in international justice, rule of law, environmental law, and human rights for the past 30 years. He previously served as the Secretary-General of the Hague Appeal for Peace, the Director of the Center for the Development of International Law, and the Director of Section Relations of the Concerts for Human Rights Foundation at Amnesty International, among other positions. He is the President of the Board of the Center for United Nations Reform Education and an Advisory Board member of the One Earth Foundation, as well as the co-founder of the NGO Steering Committee for the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development and the NGO Working Group on the United Nations Security Council. He is the recipient of the William J. Butler Human Rights Medal from the Urban Morgan Institute for Human Rights and currently serves as an Ashoka Foundation Fellow. Mr. Pace has authored numerous articles and reports on international justice, international affairs and UN issues, multilateral treaty processes, and civil society participation in international decision-making.

Bechtel Conference Center

William Pace Covenor Speaker International NGO Coalition for the ICC (CICC)
Lectures
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Abstract:

The roots of the revolts known as the Arab Spring lie in many sources but one of the leading causes was the high rates of unemployment, low skill levels, and the growth of the youth populations. Now Arab governments are faced with the dual challenges of creating new political and economic systems that can meet the needs and demands of the peoples of their countries. This presentation will focus on the role of the private sector and the need to build an entrepreneurial eco-system that can foster rapid economic growth. Practical examples of reform programs will be emphasized drawing from the work of the Center for International Private Enterprise.

Speaker Bio:

John D. Sullivan is the executive director of the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), an affiliate of the US Chamber of Commerce. As associate director of the Democracy Program, Sullivan helped to establish both CIPE and the National Endowment for Democracy in 1983. After serving as CIPE program director, he became executive director in 1991. Under his leadership CIPE developed a number of innovative approaches that link democratic development to market reforms: combating corruption, promoting corporate governance, building business associations, supporting the informal sector, and programs to assist women and youth entrepreneurs. Today, CIPE has more than 90 full-time staff with offices in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine.

Sullivan began his career in Los Angeles’ inner city neighborhoods, helping to develop minority business programs with the Institute for Economic Research and the Office of Minority Business Enterprise. In 1976 he joined the President Ford Election Committee in the research department on campaign strategy, polling, and market research.  Sullivan joined the public affairs department of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1977 as a specialist in business and economic education.

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

John D. Sullivan Executive Director Speaker The Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE)
Seminars

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Veriene Melo is a research and program assistant with the Program on Poverty and Governance (PovGov) at CDDRL. She graduated from Stanford University in 2012 with an MA in Latin American Studies and was the recipient of a full fellowship from the Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho Foundation, which is awarded to promising students from Latin America. She also holds a BA with honors in International Studies and Spanish from the University of Colorado Denver.

Born and raised in the Baixada Fluminense in Rio's North zone, Veriene feels passionate about issues of socio-economic development in disenfranchised communities, social justice education, and public security in the Latin America region, particularly in her home country of Brazil. At PovGov, under the leadership of Professor Beatriz Magaloni, she works on several policy-oriented research projects about the Pacification security program, police reform, criminal violence, and youth education, all with a focus in Rio de Janeiro's favelas and peripheries. Some of her main responsibilities include: helping design qualitative and quantitative instruments for data collection, taking part in fieldwork and transcribing interviews/observations, entering, coding and analyzing data using the appropriate analysis tools, preparing papers and briefs describing and interpreting study findings, as well as conducting and annotating literature reviews.

Veriene is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Social Science and Comparative Education at UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies (GSE&IS) and a Fellow from the Lemann foundation, a non-profit organization that is helping train a generation of leaders in some of the world's best universities committed to improving the educational scenario in Brazil. Her dissertation project seeks to investigate into the individual and community benefits of a Rio-based non-formal educational program attending hundreds of youth from some of Rio's poorest communities using qualitative methodological tools and a critical pedagogy theoretical framework. 

 

 

Program and Research Assistant, Program on Poverty and Governance (PovGov)
Doctoral Candidate in Social Science and Comparative Education, UCLA
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Merit‐based incentives are a topic of growing interest in labor economics due to their potential to increase performance for private and public employees. Following this argument, such pay schemes have been applied in numerous countries to provide incentives to teachers and schools based on their students’ achievement scores and other performance metrics. However, because of the multi-task, multi-principal and multi-period nature of education, they present several caveats. Observational and experimental research provides ambiguous conclusions about their impact. This paper contributes to this literature by evaluating the effects of the Mexican PECD, a program that since 2010 has provided salary bonuses to teachers in primary and secondary public schools based on their national standardized tests scores. Nearly 30,000 schools and 300,000 teachers have benefited from this program in its first implementation. Given its characteristics, the PECD provides an ideal ground for a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) and for a Multiple Rating‐Score Discontinuity (MRSD). Combining these quasi‐experimental techniques with a Hierarchical Linear Model (HLM), I show that the effect of this program on student performance is null. If any, this program seems to harm student performance; this negative effect is more evident for indigenous schools.

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CDDRL's Program on Poverty and Governance posted a research project update for the project The Incidence of Criminal Activity Near Schools in Mexico. Currently this project is studying the interaction between education and violence in the context of Mexico's war on drugs. The initial results shed light on falling secondary educational attainment in Mexico, and its relationship to gang activity and school dropout rates. The project is working to systematically analyze several Mexican governmental programs including Escuela Segura and Espacios Recuperados that seek to rebuild disintegrating communities in order to improve educational attainment. You can read the update here

 

Increase in Drug Related Deaths, 2007-2010

 
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MEXICO VIOLENCE    Version 2
Police officers carry children away during a gun battle in Tijuana, in Mexico's state of Baja California. REUTERS/Jorge Duenes.
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Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Fulbright and BAEF postdoctoral fellow 2012-2013
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Karen Del Biondo is a 2012-2013 postdoctoral scholar at CDDRL. Her research is funded with a Fulbright-Schuman award and a postdoctoral grant from the Belgian-American Educational Foundation (BAEF). She holds an MA in Political Science (International Relations) from Ghent University and an MA in European Studies from the Université Libre de Bruxelles. In 2007-2008 she obtained a Bernheim fellowship for an internship in European affairs at the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Permanent Representation to the EU. 

Karen Del Biondo obtained her PhD at the Centre for EU Studies, Ghent University in September 2012 with a dissertation entitled ‘Norms, self-interest and effectiveness: Explaining double standards in EU reactions to violations of democratic principles in sub-Saharan Africa’. Her PhD research was funded by the Flemish Fund for Scientific Research (FWO). Apart from her PhD research, she has been involved in the research project ‘The Substance of EU Democracy Promotion’ (Ghent University/University of Mannheim/Centre of European Policy Studies) and has published on the securitisation of EU development policies. In January 2011 she conducted field research in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Her postdoctoral research will focus on the comparison between EU and US democracy assistance in sub-Saharan Africa.

Karen Del Biondo’s recent publications include: ‘Security and Development in EU External Relations: Converging, but in which direction?’ (with Stefan Oltsch and Jan Orbie), in S. Biscop & R. Whitman (eds.) Handbook of European Union Security, Routledge (2012); ‘Democracy Promotion Meets Development Cooperation: The EU as a Promoter of Democratic Governance in Sub-Saharan Africa’, European Foreign Affairs Review, Vol. 16, N°5, 2011, 659-672; and ‘EU Aid Conditionality in ACP Countries. Explaining Inconsistency in EU Sanctions Practice’, Journal of Contemporary European Research, Vol. 7, N°3, 2011, 380-395.

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Abstract:

Voter education campaigns often aim to increase voter participation and political accountability. We follow randomized interventions implemented nationwide during the 2009 Mozambican elections using a free newspaper, leaflets and text messaging. We investigate whether treatment effects were transmitted through social networks (kinship and chatting) or geographical proximity. For individuals personally targeted by the campaign, we estimate the reinforcement effect of proximity to other targeted individuals. For untargeted individuals we estimate the diffusion of the campaign depending on proximity to targeted individuals. We find evidence for both effects, similar across the different treatments and across the different connectedness measures. We observe that the treatments worked through networks by raising the levels of information and interest about the election, in line with the average treatments effects. However, differently from those average effects, we find negative network effects of voter education on voter participation. We interpret this result as a free-riding effect, likely to occur for costly actions. 

Marcel Fafchamps is Professor of Development Economics at Oxford University, a Professional Fellow at Mansfield College and the Deputy Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies. Fafchamps’ research is focused primarily on institutions that enable exchange, including risk-coping strategies, market institutions, intra-household allocation and the allocation of economic activity across space, with a concentration on the regions of Africa and South Asia. He is also interested in spatial networks and social networks from a methodological perspective. His scholarship on the topic of market institutions is summarized in Market Institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa, (MIT Press, 2004), which his work on risk coping is addressed in Rural Poverty, Risk, and Development (Elgar Press, 2003). Fafchamps studied law and economics at the Université Catholique de Louvain and spent nearly five years working on rural development in Africa for the International Labour Organization before earning his Ph.D. in agricultural economics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1989. He taught development economics at Stanford from 1989 until 1998.

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Marcel Fafchamps Professor of Development Economics, Oxford University; Professorial Fellow, Mansfield College; Deputy Director, Centre for the Study of African Economies Speaker

Encina Hall, C148
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

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Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy
Research Affiliate at The Europe Center
Professor by Courtesy, Department of Political Science
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Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a faculty member of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also Director of Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy, and a professor (by courtesy) of Political Science.

Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His book In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir will be published in fall 2026.

Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation, and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004. He is editor-in-chief of American Purpose, an online journal.

Dr. Fukuyama holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), Aarhus University (Denmark), the Pardee Rand Graduate School, and Adam Mickiewicz University (Poland). He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Trustees of Freedom House, and the Board of the Volcker Alliance. He is a fellow of the National Academy for Public Administration, a member of the American Political Science Association, and of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.

(October 2025)

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