Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is housed in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
In-person: Stanford Graduate School Business - C105 (655 Knight Way, Stanford)
Online: Via Zoom
In May 2024, Georgia's president, Salome Zourabichvili, vetoed the Parliament's contentious anti-foreign agent law, but called her act "symbolic," as the majority Georgian Dream party promised to override the veto at their next session.
In a talk hosted by The Europe Center on May 28, Kathryn Stoner, Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), explored Georgia's democratic aspirations within the context of the law, dissecting its potential ramifications for civil society, political freedoms, and Georgia's European integration ambitions.
Professor Stoner, who was awarded an honorary doctorate in 2016 from Iliad State University in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia, also discussed the politics and complexities of the recent law and its implications for Georgia's future.
A recording of the talk can be viewed below:
Kathryn Stoner, Mosbacher Director of CDDRL, discussed the politics and complexities of the anti-foreign agent law and its implications for Georgia's future.
Encina Hall
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Senem is the acting Program Manager, Leadership Academy for Developmentat the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. She has over a decade of experience in fundraising and project management in non-profit organizations in Istanbul, Turkey. Before coming to Stanford, she served as a Development Associate at the School of Music and Arts in the Bay Area.
Senem holds a Bachelor of Arts in Communication and Design from Bilkent University. She has a passion for the arts and enjoys baking and traveling with her family in her free time.
Kumi Naidoo is a prominent South African human rights and environmental justice activist. At the age of fifteen, he organized school boycotts against the apartheid educational system in South Africa. His courageous actions made him a target for the Security Police, leading to his exile in the United Kingdom, where he remained until 1990. Upon his return to South Africa, Kumi played a pivotal role in the legalization of the African National Congress in his home province of KwaZulu Natal.
Kumi also served as the official spokesperson for the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), responsible for overseeing the country's first democratic elections in April 1994. His dedication to democracy and justice led to notable international roles, including being the first person from the global South to lead Greenpeace International as Executive Director from 2009 to 2016. He later served as the Secretary General of Amnesty International from 2018 to 2020.
In the realm of education, Kumi has shared his expertise, lecturing at Fossil Free University and holding a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellowship at the Robert Bosch Academy until early 2022.
Currently, Kumi serves as a Senior Advisor for the Community Arts Network (CAN). He holds the position of Distinguished visiting lecturer at Stanford University’s Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and is a Professor of Practice at the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University. Additionally, he continues to represent global interests as a Global Ambassador for Africans Rising for Justice, Peace, and Dignity. He also holds positions as a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University and an Honorary Fellow at Magdalen College.
In a testament to his family's commitment to positive change, they have established the Riky Rick Foundation for the Promotion of Artivism, honoring the legacy of their son and brother, the now late South African rapper Rikhado “Riky Rick” Makhado through a commitment to supporting artivism and mental health in South Africa.
Kumi has authored and co-authored numerous books, the most recent being Letters To My Mother (2022), a personal and professional memoir that won the HSS 2023 non-fiction award by the National Institute Humanities and Social Sciences.
As part of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law’s Fall 2023 Research Seminar series, University of Southern California Political Scientists, Hoover Fellows, and CDDRL affiliated scholars Erin Baggot Carter and Brett Carter presented findings from their latest book Propaganda in Autocracies: Institutions, Information, and the Politics of Belief (Cambridge University Press, 2023). The book offers unique insight into how and why autocratic regimes use propaganda.
Under authoritarian regimes with “non-binding electoral constraints,” the authors explained, the goal of propaganda is to intimidate citizens and convey the idea that the regime can survive without their support. Propaganda in this context also makes the consequences of dissent common knowledge, thereby saving the regime the cost of actual repression.
As for regimes with binding electoral constraints, their use of propaganda is often aimed at creating a semblance of credibility with a view to enhancing the functioning of future messaging. This involves mixing fact and fiction by exploiting the infrequent provision of public goods and occasionally conceding policy failures. The latter can sometimes prove damaging to the regime since it may contribute to future protests and unrest.
The data compiled and analyzed by the Carters in this book constitute the world’s largest dataset on propaganda in autocracies, comprising 80 newspapers from 70 countries. Based on extensive coding and computational linguistics techniques, the authors used the coverage of about 8 million articles to build several measures of pro-regime propaganda.
Propaganda in Autocracies is full of novel findings on how repressive governments approach propaganda. For example, the book challenges conventional wisdom that the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) propaganda is actually persuasive to its citizens. Using an innovative list experiment, they found no evidence that citizens’ beliefs were swayed by propaganda, although exposure to propaganda can reduce people’s propensity to protest by cueing fear.
By analyzing propaganda trends over time, the book brings to light the CCP’s strategies of control during anniversaries of pro-democracy events. For most such anniversaries, regime propaganda remained the same. Yet, for salient anniversaries, like that of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the regime propped up its propaganda messaging. The authors found that repression against the ethnic Uygurs is often more heavily broadcasted, possibly to showcase the regime’s repressive power.
Erin Baggot Carter and Brett Carter discuss their new book in the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law’s weekly research seminar.
Governance is the way that societies make decisions and solve problems. Good governance is difficult when a society is divided in its values, when trust in governing institutions is low, when political participation is biased along various social lines, and when there is not enough reliable information and structured debate in the media. Complicating matters further, governments may not be able to reach important decisions when there are too many veto points that enable small groups to delay or stop decisions, regardless of their merit or public support. Finally, even after a decision is made, governmental agencies may lack the personnel and capacity to implement and administer policies.
While California’s governance system has solved many problems, its governance system suffers from significant challenges in many areas. These include: hard problems (with large-scale challenges associated with climate change, housing, poverty, and more), multiple veto points in public decision-making, partisan division, and polarization, lack of trust in institutions, biased participation in public decisions, and the need to accelerate the modernization and strengthening of civil service in state and local government.
The following are presented as four possible scenarios for California’s governance, media, and civil society future.
A California 100 Report on Policies and Future Scenarios
Meduza is the last remaining independent Russian media outlet. It continues to reach millions of people inside the country despite the project’s newsroom having to operate from exile for the last eight years. In April 2021, Russian authorities designated Meduza as a “foreign agent” in an attempt to knock out its advertising income, and weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the government began blocking Meduza’s website outright. Finally, in January 2023, the Kremlin banned Meduza completely, declaring the outlet an illegal “undesirable organization.”
In an event* hosted by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University, Meduza’s editor-in-chief and CTO will discuss what is happening in Russia’s media landscape, how they covered the last year of brutal warfare in Ukraine and the invasion’s reverberations back in Russia, how readers in Russia have responded to the war, the nature of “proxy reporting,” and the challenges in maintaining journalistic objectivity when you’re treated like an outlaw. Meduza’s senior managers will also talk about how the outlet delivers content to people inside Russia, behind the Kremlin’s Internet firewall.
*Please note that this event is open to Stanford affiliates and invited guests only.
You can also follow Meduza’s English-language edition or support the newsroom’s work with one-time or recurring donations.
Philippines Conference Room
Encina Hall, Third Floor, Central, C330
616 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305
This event is open to Stanford affiliates and invited guests only.
The Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is pleased to welcome Russian journalist and researcher Roman Badanin as a CDDRL-JSK Visiting Fellow.
Badanin is the founder and editor-in-chief of Proekt (The Project, in English) and Agentstvo (The Agency, in English), media organizations that have been targeted by the Russian government for their investigative reporting into the most powerful forces in their country.
He started Agentstvo in the summer of 2021 after Russian authorities outlawed Proekt, the nonprofit investigative news organization he founded in 2018 during his 2018 JSK Fellowship that was modeled after the U.S. nonprofit investigative news outlet, ProPublica. It was Russia’s first nonprofit news organization.
The Kremlin declared Proekt an “undesirable” organization, which meant that Badanin, his colleagues, and anyone who had dealings with Proekt, including sources, could face criminal prosecution. Over the previous three years, Badanin had led his team in publishing a series of investigations into secret financial ties between major business interests and top Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin and his family. Proekt has been recognized with several Russian and international journalism awards.
"Roman brings two decades of experience as a working journalist in Russia and has seen firsthand how disinformation, censorship, and propaganda threaten democracy," said Kathryn Stoner, Mosbacher Director of CDDRL. "It is an honor to welcome him to our academic community and support his research on this important subject.”
As a 2022 JSK Senior International Fellow, Badanin focused on finding alternative ways to produce and distribute deep investigative reporting on Russia’s ruling elite that gets around government censorship and intimidation efforts. Agentstvo is his first effort and he envisions it as a collaborative home for Russian investigative journalists, many of whom have over the last year been declared “foreign agents” by the government. While that is a less severe action than the “undesirable” organization designation, it has led multiple journalists to quietly move their base of operations outside of the country.
In this new role, Badanin will focus his research on Russian media and propaganda. “For more than 20 years, the Putin regime has deployed a massive propaganda and censorship machine to gain, then reinforce, its hold on power. These efforts are much more extensive than the now well-known Russian propaganda campaigns aimed at U.S. residents since 2016, but have not been sufficiently studied by Western researchers,” he said in a statement.
“I believe this is rich research territory that would yield globally important insights and practical recommendations for policymakers and others who shape the West’s response to the regime’s increasing aggression. And I believe Stanford is the ideal place to do this work, because of the opportunities to collaborate with brilliant scholars, faculty, and researchers who have deep knowledge about Russia and about the role of the internet in effectively deploying propaganda.”
Badanin has been working as a journalist in leading independent Russian news organizations for 20 years. He previously was deputy editor-in-chief at Gazeta.Ru, editor-in-chief at Forbes Digital (Russia), RBC News Agency, and editor-in-chief of Dozhd (TV Rain), an independent Russian TV channel. He has also been affiliated with the Gorbachev Foundation and the Russian Academy of Sciences as a researcher and studied history at Moscow State University.
Badanin, the founder and editor-in-chief of Proekt and Agentstvo — media organizations that have been targeted by the Russian government for their investigative reporting into the most powerful forces in their country — will focus his research on Russian media and propaganda.
Cold War Radio is a fascinating look at how the United States waged the Cold War through the international broadcasting of Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). Mark G. Pomar served in senior positions at VOA and RFE/RL from 1982 to 1993, during which time the Reagan and Bush administrations made VOA and RFE/RL an important part of their foreign policy. Pomar takes readers inside the two radio stations to show how the broadcasts were conceived and developed and the impact they had on international broadcasting, U.S.-Soviet relations, Russian political and cultural history, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Pomar provides nuanced analysis of the broadcasts and sheds light on the multifaceted role the radios played during the Cold War, ranging from instruments of U.S. Cold War policy to repositories of independent Russian culture, literature, philosophy, religion, and the arts. Cold War Radio breaks new ground as Pomar integrates his analysis of Cold War radio programming with the long-term aims of U.S. foreign policy, illuminating the role of radio in the peaceful end of the Cold War.
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This event is co-sponsored by CREEES Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.
