The Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) will be accepting applications from eligible juniors from any university department who are interested in writing their senior thesis on a subject touching upon democracy, economic development, and rule of law (DDRL). 

Join CDDRL faculty and current honors students on Wednesday, January 21, at 12:00 pm, to discuss the program and answer questions.

The application period opens on January 5, 2026, and runs through February 13, 2026.

For more information on the Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program, please click here.

This seminar will introduce the prototype of an innovative new AI-powered decision-making intelligence platform that forecasts country trajectories with scenario analysis, predictive analytics, hotspot detection, causal explanations through large language models, etc., for a range of outcomes central to CDDRL and FSI's missions — effective governance, human security, and sustainable development. The initial use case is for political resilience and its inverse, fragility, conflict, and violence.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr. Sanjeev Khagram is a world-renowned leader, entrepreneur, scholar, and professor across the academic, private, public, and civic sectors. His specialities include global leadership and management across sectors, entrepreneurship and innovation, the data revolution and 4th Industrial Revolution — including AI, sustainable development and human security, good governance and accountability, globalization and transnationalism, public-private partnerships and multi-stakeholder networks. Dr. Khagram holds all of his transdisciplinary bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from Stanford University. He has lived and worked for extended periods in Australia, Brazil, China, Kenya, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, the GCC, Germany, South Africa, Thailand, and the United Kingdom.

Dr. Sanjeev Khagram is currently a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and Department of Management Science and Engineering.  He is also a Distinguished Visiting Fellow with the Hoover Institution's Emerging Markets Working Group, where he leads the Global Reslience Intelligence Platform Partnership (GRIPP), and at the Center for Sustainable Development and Global Competitiveness, where he leads the AI and Sustainability Initiative at Stanford.

Khagram was most recently CEO, Director-General, and Dean of the Thunderbird School of Global Management, 2018-2024, which he took to #1 in International Trade with QS World University Rankings. He is on leave from his position as Foundation Professor of Global Leadership and Global Futures at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, Arizona State University.  Previously, he was the inaugural Young Professor of Global Political Economy at Occidental College, Wyss Scholar at the Harvard Business School, Founding Director of the Lindenberg Center for International Development, Professor at the University of Washington, and Associate Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Dr. Khagram is an award-winning scholar and teacher. Dr. Khagram has published widely including the award winning book Dams and Development with Cornell University Press; Restructuring World Politics with University of Minnesota Press; The Transnational Studies Reader with Routledge Press; Open Budgets: The Political Economy of Transparency, Participation and Accountability with Brookings Press; "Inequality and Corruption" in the American Journal of Sociology; "Future Architectures of Global Governance" in Global Governance, "Environment and Security" in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, “Towards a Platinum Standard for Evidence-Based Assessment,” in Public Administration Review, “Social Balance Sheets” in Harvard Business Review, “Evidence for Development Effectiveness” in the Journal of Development Effectiveness, and “From Human Security and the Environment to Sustainable Security and Development,” in the Journal of Human Development.

Dr. Khagram has worked extensively in global leadership roles across international organizations, government, business, and civil society from the local to the international levels around the world. Dr. Khagram has established and led a range of global multi-stakeholder initiatives over the last three decades, including the Global Carbon Removal Partnership, Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency, and the World Commission on Dams, authoring its widely acclaimed final report.  

Dr. Khagram was selected as a Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum, was a senior advisor to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, Dean of the Desmond Tutu Peace Centre, and Founder/CEO of Innovations for Scaling Impact – a global technology enterprise solutions network. He is currently Chair of the Board of United Platform Solutions (an African AI-IOT Pollution Monitoring Venture) and Vice Chair of Altos Bank (the first new bank in Silicon Valley since 2008).

Dr. Khagram was born in Uganda as a fourth-generation East African Indian.  He and his family were expelled by Idi Amin and spent several years in refugee camps before being provided asylum in the United States in the 1970s.  He has lived and worked across all regions of the world and travelled to over 140 countries.

When and how do autocrats use violence to win elections? Why don't they always use violence? This talk uses the past 25 years of elections in Zimbabwe to argue that autocrats try to avoid election violence and often use it as a last resort because it carries the risk of both backfire from citizens and holdup by organized agents of violence. Citizens’ reactions to repression are high variance and difficult for autocrats to predict because they depend in part on internal psychological characteristics that shape emotional reactions to violence. When electoral repression is used as a last resort, it has implications for how and where it can be organized. However, autocrats cannot always scale back election violence, particularly when it is perpetrated by state security forces. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Lauren Young is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at UC Davis. She is a member of Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) and the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) and a Steering Committee member of the Future of Democracy Initiative at the UC IGCC. She co-runs the UC Davis Contentious Politics Lab with Juan Tellez.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Room E-008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Climate change is among the most contentious issues of the 21st century. Without a shared understanding of its consequences, securing support for climate policies remains difficult. We hypothesize that exposure to tailored opportunities to trade in financial markets, particularly in energy stocks that are central to the green transition, can induce experiential learning and greater policy support for climate mitigation efforts. We test our hypothesis using a randomized controlled trial. We find that randomly assigned exposure to trade in green and brown energy stocks leads treated individuals to express stronger agreement with the view that climate change is driven by human activity, that it will affect quality of life in the U.S., and that the U.S. government and U.S. companies should do more to reduce emissions. Treated respondents also exhibit a greater tendency to donate to climate causes and factor climate change into personal decisions regarding where to live, work, and invest. These attitudinal changes are particularly pronounced among individuals identifying as Republicans, who are more likely to be skeptical of climate change at baseline. In line with our primary theoretical argument, our findings suggest exposure to financial markets incentivizes learning, which in turn shapes climate-related beliefs, preferences, and behaviors.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Saumitra Jha is an associate professor of political economy at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and a professor of economics and of political science by courtesy. He is also a senior fellow at the Center for Democracy, Development and Rule of Law, in the Freeman-Spogli Institute, and at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

Prior to joining the GSB, Saumitra was an Academy Scholar at Harvard University. He has been a fellow of the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance and the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University. He received the Michael Wallerstein Award for best published article in political economy from the American Political Science Association for his research on ethnic tolerance. Saumitra has consulted on economic and political risk issues for the United Nations/ WTO and the World Bank. He holds a BA from Williams College, master’s degrees in economics and mathematics from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD in economics from Stanford University.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to the William J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Although much work examines foreign aid’s impact on development outcomes, its effect on bureaucracies — institutions that are key to development and profoundly influenced by aid interventions—remains understudied. I argue that project-based aid alters financial and social aspects of work over which bureaucrats hold salient preferences, generating tradeoffs that drive bureaucrats to redirect effort from routine functions toward donor-funded initiatives. Drawing on interviews, surveys, and survey experiments with more than 600 Ugandan bureaucrats, I find that, despite preferring government funding and autonomy, bureaucrats are drawn to better-paid aid projects, thus diverting effort away from regular duties. They also prefer departments with substantial donor funding, although it undermines the equity and teamwork they value. These findings reveal why aid can weaken bureaucracies: the same incentives that boost performance on donor projects divert effort from government programming and erode the organizational cohesion needed for lasting bureaucratic capacity.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Maria Nagawa is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. Maria earned her PhD in Public Policy and Political Science from Duke University and was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University. Maria studies state building and development in the Global South, with a substantive focus on the consequences of foreign interventions, the resilience of civil society, and the organization of state authority. Her book project investigates how foreign aid reshapes bureaucracies in developing countries. Prior to starting her PhD, Maria was a Research Associate at the Economic Policy Research Centre and a Lecturer at Makerere University Business School in Kampala, Uganda. In addition, Maria was a Visiting Researcher at the BRICS Policy Research Center in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Colorado’s School of Public Affairs in Denver, Colorado.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Conference Room E-008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Women’s political participation remains persistently lower than men’s worldwide. This study evaluates whether a group-based training intervention can enhance women’s engagement in local governance. In a randomized controlled trial across 300 communities in southwest Nigeria, we recruited 3,900 politically unaffiliated women into newly formed women’s action committees (WACs). Control WACs received basic civic education, while treatment WACs received additional training aimed at strengthening women’s collective efficacy. Leveraging baseline and endline surveys, as well as behavioral data from a community grant competition, we find that the intervention significantly increased both the level and quality of women’s political participation. It also improved women’s perceptions of community leaders’ responsiveness. Such gains appear to be driven by increased perceptions of individual and collective agency. These findings underscore the potential of addressing both psychological and structural barriers to advance women’s political engagement.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Claire Adida is a Senior Fellow at FSI (CDDRL), Professor (by courtesy) of Political Science, and faculty co-director at the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University. She is also a faculty affiliate with the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), the Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) group, the Policy Design and Evaluation Lab (PDEL), and the Future of Democracy Initiative at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC). She is an invited researcher with J-PAL’s Humanitarian Protection and Displaced Livelihoods Initiatives and an international advisory board member with CFREF’s Bridging Divides research program.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to the Philippines Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person.