As the political climate becomes increasingly more repressive in Russia, civil society organizations have come under threat by the government.

A new law requires advocacy oriented non-governmental organizations (NGOs) receiving foreign funding to register as foreign agents, jeopardizing their financial lifeline and reputation. In addition, nation-wide inspections have threatened to suspend activities of organizations advancing and defending democratic practices.

Sevortian has an esteemed career as a journalist and human rights defender. In 2010, Sevortian became the director of the Human Rights Watch office in Moscow. Previously, she was a visiting scholar at Cambridge University and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. At present, she is participating in a mid-career course at Harvard's Kennedy School.Anna Sevortian, a 2006 Draper Hills Summer Fellows alumna, comments on the unfolding situation in Russia - reminiscent of Soviet times - and the tough trade-offs Russian NGOs must make to secure their survival in this climate of intimidation. However, Sevortian remains hopeful that the fight for human rights will continue despite these adverse circumstances.

Can you describe the current political climate in Russia?

It is a sad thing to say, but the current political climate in Russia quickly grows more regressive and repressive. Human Rights Watch's 2013 annual report describes it as probably the worst crackdown on fundamental freedoms in the country’s post-Soviet history.

This environment has an immediate toll on the society’s collective thinking and ability to act. For example, the anti-Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LBST) legislation that bans so-called “LGBT propaganda” literally returns Russia back to the times when homosexuality was a criminal offence.

What is the new foreign agent law?

This bill introduced a requirement for NGOs that receive foreign funding and are involved in any sort of “political activity” (advocacy is the closest English word for the definition given in the law) to formally register as “foreign agents.” For a native speaker of Russian a “foreign agent” means a foreign spy.

The law was passed in July 2012 and this spring there has been a nation-wide campaign of inspections of NGOs, sometimes run in a clearly intimidating manner.

Currently over 60 groups received and are trying to appeal warnings or orders to register. Many of these groups are prominent voices of Russian civil society. According to the law, those who fail to register within six months may be suspended without a court order.

The introduction of the “foreign agent” law brings back the heavily loaded and hateful rhetoric of the 20^th century. This is detrimental to the freedom of thought in Russia.

What is the impact of the “foreign agent” law on NGO activity in Russia?

Since Vladimir Putin’s third presidential term started in May 2012, the authorities acquired broad and often abusive powers to restrict freedom of assembly and association. The new NGO law is only one of the tools used for that purpose.

In addition, Russia’s treason definition was amended and now allows penalization for international human rights advocacy. NGOs are being marginalized and demonized as foreign spies. As we speak, advocacy groups in Russia need to make a tough choice - whether to comply with largely illegitimate laws to survive or, perhaps, see their own demise in the near future. This is possible both due to political or purely financial reasons.

Can you describe your experience leading the Human Rights Watch office in Russia?

Trained as a journalist, I worked for rights organizations for almost all of my life. However, Human Rights Watch was certainly something new - being part of a dynamic, global and highly professional team. As director of the Russia office, I spent a lot of time travelling and conducting advocacy on human rights issues in Russia and Belarus, talking to journalists and doing research. Ensuring the well-being of the Human Rights Watch office in Moscow became all the more significant as the new wave of crackdown on civil society started last summer.

What were some of the issue areas you worked on at Human Rights Watch?

Our priority themes are very much those “on the frontline” and include: Russian civil society, the situation in the North Caucasus, implementation of the European Court of Human Rights’ judgments, migrant workers and more recently – the 2014 Sochi Olympics.

During my time at Human Rights Watch we started research on palliative care and access to morphine for terminally ill cancer patients. Social and economic rights are typically less visible in the Human Rights Watch Russia portfolio and we were glad to take this one on board. In Russia approximately 300,000 cancer and HIV/AIDS patients die every year and only one-fifth of them receive access to adequate pain treatment.

How has Human Rights Watch been impacted by the foreign agent law, if at all?

Human Right Watch’s status in Russia is a representative office of an international NGO. The “foreign agent” law has primarily targeted Russian NGOs. However, for all NGOs - including representative offices - this law stipulates tougher reporting requirements and institutional as well as individual legal and criminal penalties for non-compliance.

Under this new legislation, Human Rights Watch as well as many NGOs were visited by governmental inspectors this spring. Most importantly, the law has affected many of our local counterparts – so the environment we all operate is a very different from one before 2012.

How can the international community intervene - if at all -to help support the efforts of civil society in Russia?

The international community should watch and be vocal about the human rights situation in Russia, especially in the light of the upcoming 2014 Sochi Olympics. It is essential that issues around Russian civil society are raised at every bilateral and multilateral talk with the Russian Federation. Of course, international solidarity actions are crucial for moral support. These days all you need to show solidarity is to go online.

What does all of this mean for the future of human rights in Russia?

It has been a very challenging time for human rights in Russia, a difficult time. However, the human rights groups survived and actually even managed to develop in the Soviet era. Human rights is about strong principles so I believe this work will not discontinue at any given time. Indeed, the scale of it can be diminished. But change in Russia can also happen very quickly.

To learn more about the current situation in Russia, you can follow the Open Democracy Russia series on human rights, which features daily pieces by prominent Russian NGO activists - including former Draper Hills Summer Fellows alumni Yuri Dzhibladze (05) . The series is guest edited by Sevortian and Tanya Lokshina (05) of Human Rights Watch. Please visit: http://www.opendemocracy.net/russia 

In this paper, Marinov draws on the experience of the European Union (EU) to ask under what conditions economic integration furthers democratization. Scholars agree that incentives at the European level have helped democratic transitions in Southern and Eastern Europe. However, there is no agreement on (i) the exact causal mechanisms involved, (ii) the relative size of the effects, (iii) whether this success can be replicated outside or Europe. He addresses these issues by offering a theory of how integration furthers democratization. He argues economic integration can help citizens resolve the coordination dilemmas they face in holding their rulers accountable. Integration works in two ways: (a) through diffusion of civic culture, it enables citizens to second-guess each other's likely actions in the event of government abuse, (b) through credible conditionality, integration removes the ability of the ruler to lean on some support coalitions while abusing others. An empirical test of the theory strongly confirms that economic integration leads to democracy when its culture-spreading aspect is strongly backed by conditionality. An important aspects of the theory is that it generalizes. The theory and evidence suggest that there are substantial unexploited opportunities for encouraging democracy in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

This paper presents an instituion - the COmmunity Responsibility System (CRS) - which constitutes a missing link in our understanding of market development. It highlights the importance of contract enforcement institutions combining reputational and legal mechanisms in the rise of modern markets. Throughout pre-modern Europe, the CRS provided the contract enforcement required for intercommunity impersonal exchange characterized by separation between the quid and the quo over time and space. It induced communities to care about their collective reputation and motivated their partial courts to provide partial justice. Collective responsibility, which supports micro-lending in developing countries, was a central component of the European developmental process. The CRS contributed to teh endogenous institutional dynamic that led to the development of an intra-state centralized legal system based on personal legal responsibility that is currently the norm. This development supports the view that long-distance trade impacts economic growth through its influence on intra-state institutional development.

Why is there so much alleged electoral fraud in new democracies? Most scholarship focuses on the proximate cause of electoral competition. This article proposes a different answer by constructing and analyzing an original dataset drawn from the German parliament’s own voluminous record of election disputes for every parliamentary election in the life of Imperial Germany (1871-1912) after its adoption of universal male suffrage in 1871. The article analyzes the election of over 5,000 parliamentary seats to identify where and why elections were disputed as a result of “election misconduct.” The empirical analysis demonstrates that electoral fraud’s incidence is significantly related to a society’s level of inequality in landholding, a major source of wealth, power, and prestige in this period. After weighing the importance of two different causal mechanisms, the article concludes that socio-economic inequality, by making new democratic institutions endogenous to preexisting social power, can be a major and underappreciated barrier to democratization even after the adoption of formally democratic rules.

Many resource dependent states have to varying degrees, failed to provide for the welfare of their own populations, could threaten global energy markets, and could pose security risks for the United States and other countries.  Many are in Africa, but also Central Asia (Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan), Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Burma, East Timor), and South America (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador) Some have only recently become – or are about to become – significant resource exporters.  Many have histories of conflict and poor governance.  The recent boom and decline in commodity prices – the largest price shock since the 1970s – will almost certainly cause them special difficulties.  The growing role of India and China, as commodity importers and investors, makes the policy landscape even more challenging.

We believe there is much the new administration can learn from both academic research, and recent global initiatives, about how to address the challenge of poorly governed states that are dependent on oil, gas, and mineral exports.  Over the last eight years there has been a wealth of new research on the special problems that resource dependence can cause in low-income countries – including violent conflict, authoritarian rule, economic volatility, and disappointing growth.  The better we understand the causes of these problems, the more we can learn about how to mitigate them.

There has also been a new set of policy initiatives to address these issues: the Kimberley Process, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, the World Bank’s new “EITI plus plus,” Norway’s Oil for Development initiative, and the incipient Resource Charter.  NGOs have played an important role in most of these initiatives; key players include Global Witness, the Publish What You Pay campaign, the Revenue Watch Institute, Oxfam America, and an extensive network of civil society organizations in the resource-rich countries themselves.

Some of these initiatives have been remarkably successful.  The campaign against ‘blood diamonds,’ through the Kimberley Process, has reduced the trade in illicit diamonds to a fraction of its former level, and may have helped curtail conflicts in Angola, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.  Many other initiatives are so new they have not been have not been carefully evaluated.

This workshop is designed to bring together people in the academic and policy worlds to identify lessons from this research, and from these policy initiatives, that can inform US policy towards resource-dependent poorly states in the new administration.

The republican tradition continues to frame French debates on empire, as it has done since the Revolution. French republicanism and Anglophone liberalism have shared numerous features in relation to empire: both are egalitarian traditions of moral universalism, and both uphold an ideal of political emancipation that has tended to entail assimilation to a European political model. This paper explores the course of French debates over empire from the period of Napoleon through the July Monarchy — the broader context for the thought of the iconic liberal republicans Constant and Tocqueville — with particular attention to the ways in which liberal and republican registers were deployed in both support and critique of empire, and to how the articulation of liberal and republican agendas in France was affected by the Algeria conquest. It also discusses the first Algerian contribution to French public deliberation about the conquest, Hamdan Khodja’s 1833 text Le Miroir, a work that self-consciously inhabited both a liberal cosmopolitan and a Muslim perspective and that was nearly alone in French debates in making a principled argument for Algerian.

On May 10-11, 2010 the Program on Good Governance and Political Reform in the Arab World at CDDRL held its international inaugural conference. In line with the Arab Reform Program's vision, the conference featured internationally renowned scholars, activists, and practitioners from the Arab world, Europe and the United States. Over the two days, conference participants engaged in multidisciplinary debates addressing hard politics as well as soft politics, and analyzing political reform from different angles, with panels on the economy, state systems, the media, civil society, political opposition, youth politics, and the role of international actors. Problems facing political reform in the Arab world today were discussed and scrutinized, as were possible paths forward. The conference debates unearthed the need for a deep understanding of the problems facing political reform in the region that is driven by an analysis of long-term and often ignored issues that are at the core of political developments. The debates also highlighted that problems and prospects for reform are different in each Arab country because each country has its own unique set of issues and because within each country different ethnic groups, classes, and locales have different takes on and stakes in political developments. The conference closed with a speech by Dr. Saad Eddin Ibrahim.

The Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at CDDRL is pleased to announce a one-day conference to be held on Friday April 29, 2011, entitled, "Democratic Transition in Egypt." This event, co-sponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University, will focus on Egypt's current revolutionary period, to examine this pivotal moment in Egypt's political history and prospects for future reform. The conference brings to Stanford leading Egypt academics from American, European, and Egyptian universities and think tanks.  Panels will examine the background to the revolution, discuss the role of oppositions parties and civil society, and forecast Egypt's political future.