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Ayelet Shachar is a professor of law, political science, and arts and science at the University of Toronto. She received her JSD from Yale Law School in 1997. Prior to that, she served as law clerk to former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel, Aharon Barak. She joined the University of Toronto Faculty of Law in 1999.

Shachar is the author of Multicultural Jurisdictions: Cultural Differences and Women's Rights, winner of the 2002 Best First Book Award by the American Political Science Association, Foundations of Political Theory Section. She is recipient of many academic awards and fellowships, including, most recently, Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor in Human Rights at Stanford Law School, the Connaught Research Fellowship in Social Sciences at the University of Toronto, and the Emile Noel Senior Fellow at NYU School of Law.

Her scholarship focuses on citizenship and immigration law, highly skilled migrants and transnational legal processes, as well as state and religion, family law, multilevel governance regimes, group rights, and gender equality.

Sponsored by the Program on Global Justice, Stanford Humanities Center, and Department of Political Science (Stanford Political Theory Workshop).

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Ayelet Shachar Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor in Human Rights Speaker Stanford Law School
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Thomas Scanlon is Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity. He received his BA from Princeton in 1962 and his PhD from Harvard. In between, he studied for a year at Oxford as a Fulbright Fellow. He taught at Princeton from 1966 before Harvard in 1984.

Professor Scanlon's dissertation and some of his first papers were in mathematical logic, but the bulk of his teaching and writing has been in moral and political philosophy. He has published papers on freedom of expression, the nature of rights, conceptions of welfare, and theories of justice, as well as on foundational questions in moral theory. His teaching has included courses on theories of justice, equality, and recent ethical theory. His book, What We Owe to Each Other, was published by Harvard University Press in 1988; a collection of papers on political theory, The Difficulty of Tolerance, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2003.

Sponsored by the Program on Global Justice, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Stanford Department of Political Science (Stanford Political Theory Workshop), and the Stanford Philosophy Department.

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Thomas Scanlon Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity Speaker Harvard University
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The paper utilizes a new dataset on civil liberties covering 20 Latin American and 28 post-communist countries from 1977 to 2003. It is shown that, despite the overall trend in the direction of more liberal regimes in both regions, significant intraregional and interregional disparities existed in this period. The communist regimes were characterized by a stable and severe repression of all civil liberties to a higher degree than other autocracies. Consequently, their collapse initiated a very sudden and steep improvement in the level of civil liberty. In comparison, the Latin American wave was more gradual, uneven and modest; the patterns of repression were more diverse, and the average respect for the specific liberal rights was higher across the period. After the Cold War, however, the gap decreased and the Latin American countries became more homogeneous while the group of former communist countries turned more heterogeneous.

The paper also identifies some regional similarities. The liberal rights were practically respected in the same order throughout the period, i.e., freedom of religion, freedom of movement, freedom of assembly, freedom of expression and independent courts. Moreover, semi-liberal regimes often constituted a plurality in both regions after 1991. Finally, both Latin American and post-communist countries faced tendencies towards a greater gap between the respect for self-government and civil liberty, respectively, and increasing sub-regional homogeneity.

All in all, the paper provides a comparative account of regime changes that answers some research questions in itself. More important, though, the revealed patterns also suggest hypotheses and propositions that may help explain the regional and country specific similarities and differences found.

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Svend-Erik Skaaning
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The working title of his PHD project is Democracy besides Elections: An Exploration into the Development and Causes of Respect for Civil Liberties in Latin American and Post-Communist Countries. The dissertation addresses the extent of civil liberty (freedom of: opinion and expression, assembly and association, religion, movement and residence as well as independent courts) in 20 Latin American and 28 post-communist countries. Apart from tracking the development of respect for civil liberties from the late 1970's till 2003, it also attempts to explain the present level of respect by examining different structural explanations, such as historical experience with liberty, ethno-religious composition, modernization and natural resources (primarily oil).

Skaaning has constructed his own dataset and index on civil liberties based on coding of the State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices from 1977 to 2003, which he uses in his descriptive analysis of the development and as the dependent variable in the subsequent causal assessment. In this stage of the research, he both undertakes intraregional analyses, utilizing the fuzzy-set method and OLS-regression, and interregional comparisons.

Skaaning received his B.A. (2000) and M.A. (2003) in Political Science from the University of Aarhus, Denmark, where he is also a PHD scholar in the final year. Parts of his MA degree were completed at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität (Heidelberg) and Freie Universität (Berlin).

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Pre-doctoral Fellow 2005 - 2006

The working title of his PHD project is Democracy besides Elections: An Exploration into the Development and Causes of Respect for Civil Liberties in Latin American and Post-Communist Countries. The dissertation addresses the extent of civil liberty (freedom of: opinion and expression, assembly and association, religion, movement and residence as well as independent courts) in 20 Latin American and 28 post-communist countries. Apart from tracking the development of respect for civil liberties from the late 1970's till 2003, it also attempts to explain the present level of respect by examining different structural explanations, such as historical experience with liberty, ethno-religious composition, modernization and natural resources (primarily oil).

Skaaning has constructed his own dataset and index on civil liberties based on coding of the State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices from 1977 to 2003, which he uses in his descriptive analysis of the development and as the dependent variable in the subsequent causal assessment. In this stage of the research, he both undertakes intraregional analyses, utilizing the fuzzy-set method and OLS-regression, and

interregional comparisons.

Skaaning received his B.A. (2000) and M.A. (2003) in Political Science from the University of Aarhus, Denmark, where he is also a PHD scholar in the final year. Parts of his MA degree were completed at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität (Heidelberg) and Freie Universität (Berlin).

Svend-Erik Skaaning Speaker CDDRL/Univ of Aarhus, Denmark
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In order to facilitate a subsequent operationalization of civil liberty, the paper attempts to define and ground civil liberty on the basis of liberal political philosophy/theory as this tradition provides fruitful conceptual distinctions and specifications and offers some interesting motivations for taking civil liberties into deeper consideration. Different clusters of perspectives are found in the literature and one these is identified as key to understand the character of civil liberty and the relationship between civil liberty and democracy. Thereafter, to specify was is plausibly meant by civil liberties, I introduce three historically significant forms of rights codifications, that is, agreements about rights put down in peace treatises on the background of religious wars between Catholics and Protestants; national declarations and constitutional provisions connected to the revolutions in the seventeenth century England and the late eighteenth century USA and France; and international conventions on human rights. As one cannot settle the question of the plausibility of civil liberties just by reference to their legal recognition, I turn to some of the justifications offered by liberal philosophers that are briefly confronted with some general critiques.

The paper concludes that there are good reasons to respect civil liberties and to narrow the focus to (modern, negative) liberal freedom understood as absence of state interference in certain personal exertion rights. On this background, five rights are selected to constitute the core of a civil liberty measure: freedom of opinion and expression; freedom of assembly and association; freedom of thought, conscience and religion; freedom of movement and residence; freedom of recourse to independent courts.

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Svend-Erik Skaaning
Svend-Erik Skaaning

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Pre-doctoral Fellow 2005 - 2006

The working title of his PHD project is Democracy besides Elections: An Exploration into the Development and Causes of Respect for Civil Liberties in Latin American and Post-Communist Countries. The dissertation addresses the extent of civil liberty (freedom of: opinion and expression, assembly and association, religion, movement and residence as well as independent courts) in 20 Latin American and 28 post-communist countries. Apart from tracking the development of respect for civil liberties from the late 1970's till 2003, it also attempts to explain the present level of respect by examining different structural explanations, such as historical experience with liberty, ethno-religious composition, modernization and natural resources (primarily oil).

Skaaning has constructed his own dataset and index on civil liberties based on coding of the State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices from 1977 to 2003, which he uses in his descriptive analysis of the development and as the dependent variable in the subsequent causal assessment. In this stage of the research, he both undertakes intraregional analyses, utilizing the fuzzy-set method and OLS-regression, and

interregional comparisons.

Skaaning received his B.A. (2000) and M.A. (2003) in Political Science from the University of Aarhus, Denmark, where he is also a PHD scholar in the final year. Parts of his MA degree were completed at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität (Heidelberg) and Freie Universität (Berlin).

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Why did Israeli women not fight for social equality until the late 1980s? And what changed their individual and collective willingness to act? The paper maintains that social action to improve women's positions in society did exist before the late 1980s but it was mostly not rebellious in the sense that it was not directed against men or the existing social order. The main factor behind the inaction is the lack of feminist ideologies that affect and support gender identities. This kind of feminist gender identity was inhibited in Israel by the inter-relations among three factors: (1) the lack of ideological pluralism, (2) the influence of traditional and religious beliefs, and (3) the effect of national, total, and masculine institutions (like the Israeli army). The same factors - or some combinations of these factors - may inhibit women's activism in other societies as well.

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Dahlia Moore
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Can religion be compatible with liberal democracy? World Religions and Democracy brings together insights from renowned scholars and world leaders in a provocative and timely discussion of religions' role in the success or failure of democracy. An essay by Alfred Stepan outlines the concept of "twin tolerations" and differentiation, and creates a template that can be applied to all of the religion-democracy relationships observed and analyzed throughout the volume. "Twin tolerations" means that there is a clear distinction and a mutual respect between political authorities and religious leaders and bodies. When true differentiation is accomplished, the religious sector enjoys freedom of activity and the ability to peacefully influence its members but does not wield direct political power. A country's ability to implement the principle of differentiation directly affects the successful development of democracy.

Part two focuses on eastern religions -- Confucianism, Hinduism, and Buddhism -- and includes contributions from Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The third part addresses democracy in relationship to Judaism and the three branches of Christianity -- Catholicism, Protestantism, and Eastern Orthodoxy. Sociologist Peter Berger offers a global perspective of Christianity and democracy.

The volume's final section discusses what is perhaps the most challenging example of the struggling relationship between religion and democracy today: Islam and the governments of the Muslim nations. Abdou Filali-Ansary, Bernard Lewis, and others present a comprehensive exploration of Muslim thought and faith in an increasingly secular, modern world. It is in this volatile political and religious climate that solutions are most urgently needed but also most elusive. Johns Hopkins University Press

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Larry Diamond
Larry Diamond
Marc F. Plattner
Philip J. Costopoulos

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Byron Bland is associate director of the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation and a research associate at CDDRL. An ordained Presbyterian minister and former Stanford campus chaplain, he has served as an ombudsman and conflict resolution consultant for various community and church groups. His more recent work concerns the politics of reconciliation in divided societies.

After serving the Stanford campus for 18 years as a chaplain, Bland left that post in 1994 to concentrate on peacemaking efforts in Northern Ireland. He is currently involved in a research project exploring the social and political dynamics of reconciliation with Community Dialogue, a grassroots dialogue organization in Northern Ireland. He is also working with community groups and civil leaders in the Israel and the West Bank.

Before coming to Stanford University in 1976, Bland was the pastor of a multiracial, urban church in San Francisco. While at Stanford, he was appointed an associate fellow at the Program for Interdisciplinary Studies during 1993-1994. He is a founding member of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion. For the past 20 years, he has taught an interdisciplinary course on peace at Stanford. He has also served as a lecturer in the Stanford Law School, the School of Education, and the International Relations program. He received an undergraduate degree in industrial engineering from Georgia Tech, an MA in social ethics and a master of divinity degree from the San Francisco Theological Seminary.

Associate Director of the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation
CDDRL Affiliated Faculty

Nearly half the world's population - some 2.8 billion people - lives on less than two dollars per day. The gap between the rich and the poor is vast. There are two overarching reasons for those fortunate enough to reside in the more affluent West to be concerned about poverty in the developing world. One is humanitarian. The other is self-interest. Poverty triggers violence. In the over one hundred large civil wars that have engulfed many parts of the world since the Second World War, the leading cause of insurgency is poverty - not ethnicity or religion.

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