Stanford University

Prospects for Independent Media in Putin's Russia

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Manana Aslamazyan, a media and television expert who has worked with Russian journalists for more than 15 years, is Executive Director of Internews Europe based in Paris.

Aslamazyan and Alexei K. Simonov launched Russia's first freedom of speech organization in 1991, the Glasnost Defense Foundation (GDF). In 1992, Aslamazyan began to work with Internews Network to organize events for newly formed independent TV stations around the former Soviet Union. She became its first foreign staff person and by 1994, was managing the Russian operation, which in 1997 registered as a fully independent Russian non-commercial organization. In 2006, in response to changing legislation and its increased focus on training, Internews Russia re-organized as the Educated Media Foundation (EMF).

As director, Aslamazyan led Internews Russia/EMF in the creation of numerous innovative and ambitious projects. Aslamazyan's constant drive to respond to the changing needs of Russian media led to the launch of Internews Russia/EMF's month-long Journalism School, the News Factory newsroom automation project, and the Russian-American Media Entrepreneurship Dialogue. Internews Russia/EMF was forced to shut down in 2007 following a raid on its Moscow headquarters and filing of criminal charges against EMF and Aslamazyan that were widely seen as politically motivated. In 2008, the Constitutional Court of Russia ruled that the charges against Aslamayan had no legal basis.

Aslamazyan has served as an expert to the Russian Duma Committee on Information Policy, and from 2000 to 2004, she was one of three representatives of civil society on the influential Federal Competition Commission of Ministry of Press, TV Broadcasting and Mass Media. She is a board member of the prestigious Academy of Russian Television and served for three years as a Vice-President of the National Association of TV and Radio Broadcasters (NAT).

Aslamazyan serves on the boards of several Russian nonprofit organizations, Internews Network, and Internews International, which unites local Internews organizations around the world.

Co-sponsored by CREES and Internews Network

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Manana Aslamazyan Executive Director Speaker Internews Europe
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Is multilateralism dead?

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Pascal Lamy has served as Director-General of the World Trade Organization since September 2005.

Previously, he was the Trade Commissioner of the European Union in Brussels from 1999 to 2004.

From 1994 until 1999, he served as Director-General of the team responsible for restructuring the Credit Lyonnaise.

The beginnings of Mr. Lamy’s career are marked by time spent in civil service at the French Finance Ministry, the Inspection Générale des Finances, and the Treasury Department.

He later became adviser to Economics and Finance Minister, Jacques Delors, and to Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy. From 1984 to 1994, Mr. Lamy worked in Brussels as chief of staff to Commission President, Jacques Delors.

A member of the French Socialist Party, Mr. Lamy is also politically active in the Mouvement Europeen. In 1999, he was the recipient of the Officier de la Legion d’Honneur and has been honored with several international orders of merit.

THIS EVENT IS CO-SPONSORED BY ICA

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Pascal Lamy Director-General Speaker World Trade Organization
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Comparing American and European Strategies for Democracy Promotion

Conventional wisdom holds that the United States and the European Union pursue vastly different strategies to promote democracy around the globe. The U.S. is often perceived to rely on coercion, while the EU employs "soft power." This project completed a book demonstrating that American and European strategies to spread democracy display far more similarities than differences. For the first time, leading European and American experts systematically compare U.S.

Forum on Akbar Ganji's Road to Democracy in Iran

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The FSI Program on Global Justice and the Iranian Studies Program present A Forum on Akbar Ganji's Road to Democracy in Iran.

Ganji is an Iranian journalist and dissident who was imprisoned in Tehran from 2000 to 2006 and whose writings are currently banned in Iran. He has won numerous prestigious awards in Europe and North America. His 56-day hunger strike turned him into a figure of international fame, with many heads of states and hundreds of the world's most renowned public intellectuals demanding his safety and freedom. Ganji first gained prominence in Iran as an investigative journalist when he helped uncover a government conspiracy to murder Iranian intellectuals. In response, the regime put him in prison for six years. Behind bars, Ganji continued to write and produced his famous Republican Manifesto where he argued in favor of a secular liberal democracy for Iran. In April 2008, Ganji's first English language  book appeared from Boston Review Books/MIT Press: The Road to Democracy in Iran, with an introduction by Joshua Cohen and Abbas Milani. 

Ganji will speak in Farsi with consecutive translation in English, and will be joined on the panel by Abbas Milani, director of the Hamid & Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies at Stanford University, and Martha Nussbaum, Ernst Freud Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. Program on Global Justice Director Joshua Cohen will moderate the discussion.

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Joshua Cohen

Program on Global Justice
Encina Hall West, Room 404
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 723-0256
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Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society, and Professor of Political Science, Philosophy, and Law
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Joshua Cohen is a professor of law, political science, and philosophy at Stanford University, where he also teaches at the d.school and helps to coordinate the Program on Liberation Technology. A political theorist trained in philosophy, Cohen has written extensively on issues of democratic theory—particularly deliberative democracy and the implications for personal liberty, freedom of expression, and campaign finance—and global justice. Cohen is author of On Democracy (1983, with Joel Rogers); Associations and Democracy (1995, with Joel Rogers); Philosophy, Politics, Democracy (2010); The Arc of the Moral Universe and Other Essays (2011); and Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals (2011). Since 1991, he has been editor of Boston Review, a bi-monthly magazine of political, cultural, and literary ideas. Cohen is currently a member of the faculty of Apple University.

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Joshua Cohen Director, Program on Global Justice Moderator Stanford University

Abbas Milani

615 Crothers Way,
Encina Commons, Room 128A
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 721-4052
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Research Fellow, Hoover Institution
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Abbas Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University and a visiting professor in the department of political science. In addition, Dr. Milani is a research fellow and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution.

Prior to coming to Stanford, Milani was a professor of history and political science and chair of the department at Notre Dame de Namur University and a research fellow at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Milani was an assistant professor in the faculty of law and political science at Tehran University and a member of the board of directors of Tehran University's Center for International Studies from 1979 to 1987. He was a research fellow at the Iranian Center for Social Research from 1977 to 1978 and an assistant professor at the National University of Iran from 1975 to 1977.

Dr. Milani is the author of Eminent Persians: Men and Women Who Made Modern Iran, 1941-1979, (Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY, 2 volumes, November, 2008); King of Shadows: Essays on Iran's Encounter with Modernity, Persian text published in the U.S. (Ketab Corp., Spring 2005); Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Persian Modernity in Iran, (Mage 2004); The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution (Mage, 2000); Modernity and Its Foes in Iran (Gardon Press, 1998); Tales of Two Cities: A Persian Memoir (Mage 1996); On Democracy and Socialism, a collection of articles coauthored with Faramarz Tabrizi (Pars Press, 1987); and Malraux and the Tragic Vision (Agah Press, 1982). Milani has also translated numerous books and articles into Persian and English.

Milani received his BA in political science and economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970 and his PhD in political science from the University of Hawaii in 1974.

Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies
Co-director of the Iran Democracy Project
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Abbas Milani Director, Hamid & Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies Panelist Stanford University
Martha Nussbaum Ernst Freud Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics Panelist University of Chicago
Akbar Ganji Iranian dissident journalist and author Keynote Speaker
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Claire Adida

Encina Hall
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Professor (by courtesy) of Political Science
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Claire Adida is 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.

Adida uses quantitative and field methods to investigate how countries manage new and existing forms of diversity, what exacerbates or alleviates outgroup prejudice and discrimination, and how vulnerable groups navigate discriminatory environments. She has published two books on immigrant integration and exclusion: Immigrant exclusion and insecurity in Africa; Coethnic strangers (Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Why Muslim integration fails in Christian-heritage societies (with David Laitin and Marie-Anne Valfort, Harvard University Press, 2016). Her articles are published in the American Political Science Review, Science Advances, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, the Journal of Population Economics, the Journal of Experimental Political Science, and Political Science Research & Methods, among others.

Prior to joining Stanford, she was Assistant Professor (2010-2016), Associate Professor (2016-2022), and Professor of Political Science at UC San Diego, where she also served as the co-Director and Director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies (2018-2024). In 2021-2022, she served as Research Advisor to the Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the U.S. Government’s Department of Health & Human Services. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University in 2010, her Master's in International Affairs from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (2003), and her Bachelor's in political science and communication studies from Northwestern University (2000).

CDDRL Visiting Scholar, Summer 2016
CDDRL Hewlett Fellow, 2008-09
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Shaping Democratic Practice and the Causes of Electoral Fraud

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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.

Daniel Ziblatt, PhD is an Associate Professor of Government and Social Studies at Harvard University, focusing his research and teaching on comparative politics, state-building, democratization, and federalism. His main intrests lie in contemporary Europe and the political development of the area, as well as electoral reform, voting rights, and the politics of public goods.

Ziblatt writes copious articles, but is also the author of the book Structuring the State: The Formation of Italy, Germany and the Puzzle of Federalism (Princeton University Press, 2006), awarded in 2007 the American Political Science Association's prize for the best book in European Politics. The book is based on a dissertation that received two additional awards from the APSA (the Gabriel Almond award in comparative politics and the European Politics Division award).

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Daniel Ziblatt Assoc. Prof. of Government and Social Studies Speaker Harvard University
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McFaul testifies to Congress on future of US-Russian relations

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Russia's invasion of Georgia last month seriously undermined peace and security in Europe for the first time in years, CDDRL Director Michael McFaul told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on September 9. Russia's military actions and subsequent decision to recognize South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states, McFaul said, represent a fundamental challenge to the norms and rules that help to promote order in the international system.

"Instead of business as usual or isolation, the United States must navigate a third, more nuanced, more complicated, and more comprehensive strategy that seeks to bolster our allies and partners, check Russian aggression, and at the same time deal directly with the Russian government on issues of mutual interest. The long term goal of fostering democratic change and keeping the door of Western integration open for countries in the region, including Russia, must not be abandoned. American foreign policy leaders have to move beyond tough talk and catchy phrases and instead articulate a smart, sustained strategy for dealing with this new Russia, a strategy that advances both our interests and values."

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U.S.-Russia Relations in the Aftermath of the Georgia Crisis

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Russia's invasion of Georgia last month seriously undermined peace and security in Europe for the first time in years. Russia's military actions and subsequent decision to recognize South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states also represent a fundamental challenge to the norms and rules that help to promote order in the international system.

The initial skirmishes between Ossetian and Georgian forces that first sparked this conflict in early August 2008 should have been contained. Had the international community – led by an attentive and proactive American government – engaged both the Russian and Georgian governments in an effort to first stop the violence immediately, and then more ambitiously, to mediate a permanent solution to Georgia’s border disputes, this war might have been avoided. It still remains unclear what sequence of events turned skirmishes into war -- an international investigation should be conducted to shed light on this question. Irrespective of who moved first to escalate, the Georgian government’s decision to use military force to reassert its sovereignty over South Ossetia, which included sending its forces into the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, was short-sighted and ill-considered. Nonetheless, Georgian military action within its borders can in no way be equated with or cited as an excuse for Russia’s invasion and then dismemberment of a sovereign country. Russia’s actions were disproportionate and illegal. The tragic loss of life – soldiers and civilians alike – on all sides was regrettable, unnecessary and avoidable.

Because Georgia is a democracy, Georgian voters will someday judge the decisions of their government last month. But let’s not confuse that discussion with a clear-headed understanding of Russian motivations. Russia’s military actions last month and continued illegal occupation of Georgian territory today were not a mere defensive reaction to Georgian military actions in South Ossetia. On the contrary, the Kremlin’s moves represent the latest and boldest moves in a long-term strategy to undermine Georgian sovereignty, cripple the Georgian economy, and ultimately overthrow the democratically-elected government of Georgia. Moreover, Russia’s government actions in Georgia constitute just one front of a comprehensive campaign to reassert Russian dominance in the region through both coercive and cooperative instruments.

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Michael A. McFaul

Is Democracy Promotable?

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James Traub is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, where he has worked since 1998. From 1994 to 1997, he was a staff writer for The New Yorker. He has also written for The New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic and elsewhere. His articles have been widely reprinted and anthologized. He has written extensively about international affairs and especially the United Nations. In recent years, he has reported from Iran, Iraq, Sierra Leone, East Timor, Vietnam, India, Kosovo and Haiti. He has also written often about national politics and urban affairs, including education, immigration, race, poverty and crime.

Most recently, Traub authored the critically acclaimed book, The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American World Power. His previous books include, The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square, which was published in 2004, and City On A Hill, a book on open admissions at City College that was published in 1994 and won the Sidney Hillman Award for nonfiction. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

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James Traub Writer Speaker New York Times Magazine
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