CDDRL Deputy Director Stephen Stedman is named a chair to the Stanford University Faculty Senate. Read more about his work, legacy, and aspirations here. 

The Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is proud to congratulate the 2018 class of honors students for completing their research under the CDDRL Fisher Family Honors Program. The ceremony for the honors students took place on June 15, 2018.

Each year the Center offers an interdisciplinary honors program, through which students write a thesis related to the topics of democracy, development and the rule of law. This year’s cohort wrote on a vast range of topics, including electoral reform in Chile, the rise of the far-right in Greece, and public health in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Each year the CDDRL gives one student an Outstanding Thesis Award. This year’s recipient is Marin Callaway for her work, “Whose California? Power, Property Rights, and the Legacy of the 1851 California Land Act”. Callaway researched Mexican land grant ownership in California throughout the nineteenth century, and how the 1851 California Land Act interacted with social, economic and political phenomena, which led to a loss in this ownership.  
 

One of the CDDRL honors students, Qitong Thomas Cao will receive the Stanford University Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research. This award is given to the top ten percent of all theses in social sciences, natural sciences and engineering and applied sciences. Cao’s thesis, titled “The China Wide Web: The Information Dilemma and the Domestication of Cyberspace”, addresses many of the contemporary technology and information issues within authoritarian regimes.

Furthermore, several of this year’s honors students have been the recipients of university-wide and national awards.

Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award

The Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel award is given for university-wide recognition of distinctive and exceptional contributions to undergraduate education or the quality of student life at Stanford. Each, year, two graduating seniors receive the award for their service to the university. 
 

Alexis Kallen

Fulbright Scholarship

Fulbright scholarships provide graduates the opportunity to pursue research all over the world to foster intercultural relations and understanding with other countries.  
 

Jason Jiajie Li—Fulbright research scholarship to Shaanxi China to implement and independently evaluate an integrated early child development intervention with community health workers to combat the effects of childhood malnutrition and a lack of quality health care.

Rhodes Scholarship

Rhodes scholarships are awarded to promising future leaders to support their academic studies at the University of Oxford.  
 

Qitong Thomas Cao

Alexis Kallen

Schwarzman Scholars

Schwarzman Scholars continue post-graduate studies and focus on China's relations with the world at the Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Lucienne Oyer

Truman Scholarship

The Truman Scholarship is a prestigious graduate fellowship in the United States for those pursuing promising careers in public service.   
 

Alexis Kallen

Finally, a special shout out to two of our alumni. Anna Blue (2016) received a research Fulbright to Estonia, and Jelani Munroe (2016) received a Rhodes scholarship to the University of Oxford.

CDDRL Deputy Director Stephen J. Stedman received the 2018 Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award For Outstanding Service to Undergraduate Education. Stedman is a Freeman Spogli Senior Fellow, an affiliated faculty member at CISAC, and professor of political science (by courtesy) at Stanford University. He has directed the Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program for the past three years during which time several students have won prestigious university awards for their outstanding research.  

According to the Stanford News Service, Stedman was honored for his work in shaping the intellectual development of students with thoughtful and forward-thinking ideas, as well as for his profound and lasting contributions to the quality and richness of the undergraduate experience.

CDDRL sat down to learn more about why undergraduate teaching is so meaningful to Stedman and how his own experience as an undergraduate at Stanford has informed his teaching style.

What does this award mean to you?

It’s nice recognition from the university about something that has been a big part of what I’ve done at Stanford over the last twenty years, but more importantly it’s incredible to hear from so many students about how I’ve touched their lives and helped them reach their potential. 

It’s also a validation of Corinne - my wife - and my decision to live our lives among undergraduates as Resident Fellows, a role that we’ve had 15 of the 21 years we’ve been at Stanford. We are huge believers in the mission of residential education at Stanford, and since many of the students who supported my nomination either staffed for us or lived in our dorms, I want to say that Corinne deserves a lot of this award and that our kids deserve a shout-out for being willing to live with college students in a dorm most of their lives. It’s not a normal upbringing!

Your work as director of the Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program is a big part of this recognition. Can you tell us more about your commitment to the students and to this program?

The Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program in Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law is a special program. We are getting terrific students who are smart, hard-working and really interesting. It takes a special kind of undergraduate who can see the value in studying with a cohort of diverse majors from engineering to earth sciences, English and History to political science and international relations. We stress to our students, and they take it to heart, that to do good interdisciplinary work you have to be strong in a discipline. Interdisciplinary work that is founded on weak disciplinary skills and knowledge will be weak interdisciplinary work. 

Didi Kuo, who is a superb teaching fellow for the program, and I spend more than a year with every cohort. It’s an enormous amount of fun to see how the students develop and what they produce. And their work has been spectacular as evidenced by the fact that in the last six years the program has produced three Kennedy Award winners which recognizes the single best thesis in each of the four areas of humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering at Stanford.

Being a mentor - how important and rewarding is this for you? 

It’s a huge part of who I am and by far the most rewarding part of my job. I was fortunate to have an incredible mentor, John Lewis, when I was an undergraduate at Stanford. John passed away last fall and I spoke at his memorial service in January about the impact that he had on me and my career. He taught me how to write, how to create a clear, coherent argument, and how to think about how knowledge can and should contribute to solving problems. He also had a profound ethical core. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that my big light bulb moment when I was an undergraduate was to realize that I wanted to do what he did.

A lot of Stanford faculty are incredible undergraduate teachers, but I also think if you are a faculty member who was an undergraduate here, you especially care about undergraduate education at Stanford. It’s no accident that faculty like Larry Diamond, Mike McFaul and Norman Naimark, among others, are superb undergraduate teachers and care deeply about the lifelong development of our students.

One last note on the Stanford undergraduate experience and why this award is special. My freshman RA over 40 years ago, Al Tomaszczuk, won the Dinkelspiel Award as a graduating senior; his RA when he was a freshman was Larry Diamond, who won the Dinkelspiel Award 11 years ago.

Erik Jensen is professor of the practice, director of the Rule of Law Program at Stanford Law School, and affiliated core faculty member at CDDRL. In recent years, he has committed considerable effort to building out law degree-granting programs at the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF) through the Afghanistan Legal Education Project. He spent more than a decade in South Asia, focusing on Pakistan and Afghanistan, and working to launch education development projects. Here Erik gives his account of the Aug. 25, 2016 attack on the AUAF in which 13 people were tragically killed, including seven students and one faculty member. In this video, Jensen reflects on this day, which he describes as the most difficult of his life, but at the same time shares an inspiring story of hope and the progress that only education can bring.

The Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University collaborates widely with academics, policymakers and practitioners around the world to advance knowledge and practice about democracy, broad-based economic development, human rights, and the rule of law. We are deeply concerned by the recent executive order on immigration issued by the new administration. This order impacts members of our community - students, practitioners, academics, and visitors - who come to Stanford to attend our training programs, conferences and conduct research. Ultimately, barring entry into the country of citizens from a specific set of countries compromises the quality of our research, programming and intellectual activities. It also violates our shared values and integrity as an academic research institute.

CDDRL is currently in the process of reviewing the applications for our 2017 Draper Hills Summer Fellowship program and we want to assure everyone that each applicant will be equally considered, regardless of their country of origin.

In over a decade of working and training democracy activists from all over the world – including Muslim majority countries – we have developed friendships with colleagues who are working against great odds to build democratic institutions. The overwhelming majority is risking their lives to do so. These fellows together with students and researchers challenge our theories about democratic development and help inspire new projects and ideas to enrich our research agenda, not only for our center, but also for our broader institute - The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

We will continue to build our relationships equally with all countries around the world regardless of this new policy, and will stand in solidarity with those who are targeted by the adverse effects. The one lesson that recent events have conveyed is the resounding importance of the work we do to understand how countries become just, democratic and well-governed states.

The Program on Arab Reform and Democracy (ARD) at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is pleased to welcome international media figure and Egyptian political satirist Bassem Youssef as a visiting scholar during the Fall of 2016. Dubbed the Jon Stewart of the Arab World, Youssef was the host of the popular TV political satire show Al-Bernameg, which was the first of its kind in the Middle East region. Al-Bernameg was the most watched show in the history of Egyptian TV with an average of 40 million viewers every week. Due to its sharp criticism of Egyptian leaders, Al-Bernameg faced political pressure from successive governments until it was finally taken off the air in the summer of 2014. Recently, Youssef launched “The Democracy Handbook,” a Fusion TV digital series that satirizes American politics through a Middle Eastern perspective. Named one of TIME’s “100 most influential people in the world” in 2013, Youssef served as a resident fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government in 2015.

Youssef’s fellowship is supported by a generous grant from the Carnegie Corporation, and by the Stanford Arts Office of the Associate Dean. In the following interview Youssef discusses his current projects and their relevance to the Stanford community.

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Bassem Youssef in conversation with ARD Associate-Director Hesham Sallam and CDDRL Visiting Scholar Alexandra Pichler Fong at the CDDRL fall 2016 reception, September 29, 2016 (Photo credit: Djurdja Jovanovic Padejski)

What are your research goals and priorities at CDDRL, Stanford?

I am not a stranger to CDDRL. About a year ago I spoke at the Center in conversation with Professor Larry Diamond in what might have been one of the best interviews I had on a college campus in the United States. During my visit, I was very impressed with CDDRL’s efforts to try to make sense of all what is happening in the Middle East and to nuance American perspectives on the situation the region. I was elated when I was informed that there was a chance for me to join forces with this prestigious center.

Through my fellowship at CDDRL, I would like to bring a different voice to the discussion over what is happening in the Middle East and the Muslim World, and how narratives in the United States can affect the realities in the region. Beyond my own research on satire and social change, my priority is to connect with the student community at Stanford and encourage them to find their own voices and their own opinions about that part of the world. I believe that satire can be a great tool to understand and even change how people view the world around them. As much I have a lot to share with students, I am sure I will have a great deal to learn from them too, and from the Stanford community more generally. I had the privilege to meet with some of the smartest young people here and I look forward to benefit from this intellectually promising experience.

How are the ongoing political developments in the United States informing your current projects?

After I moved to the United States, I started to follow the American elections very closely. With the rise of a populist Right not just in the States but also in Europe, I could see many similarities of how masses are being controlled through hate, xenophobia, and fear. These have been key elements in the narratives used by many Middle Eastern regimes for decades. As people were horrified with the likes of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Ben Carson, this came to me as a reminder that no nation, no matter how strong or advanced, is free of such forms of public manipulation and fear-mongering. This was a great starting point for me here in the States. I discovered many similarities that I can comment on and use to show people that we are not that different from each other and that intolerance and bigotry have no single home or language. I was fortunate to relay that message in my new show in America "Democracy Handbook" and also in my coverage of the National Conventions of the Republican and Democratic Parties.

What is your assessment of the prospects for meaningful political change at the current moment in Egypt?

The current realities in Egypt and the Middle East are a product of decades of authoritarian rule. What happened in the Arab Spring interrupted the rule of particular autocrats, but did not succeed in delivering the type of lasting social change we all had hoped for. The biggest obstacle to meaningful social change in Egypt remains the massive webs of special interests that have ruled the country for the last 60 years and shaped its political and social hierarchies. It was naive of us to think that 18 days of protests could make profound changes to the system. You can get rid of the autocrat at the helm, but the system can still endure, as evidenced by the current realities. Any changes will be worthless in the absence of complete transparency and accountability of the ruling class that controls the country’s economy, governance, and legislation.