Stanford University

Ivan Prymachenko

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Visiting Scholar, Ukrainian Emerging Leaders Program, 2018-19
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Ivan Prymachenko is an educational technology innovator and a co-founder of the largest Ukrainian massive open online courses platform Prometheus with 600,000 users. Structured as a non-profit organization, Prometheus creates and publish on its platform massive online courses from leading Ukrainian universities, companies, international organizations, and government. Prometheus also works on making its online courses a part of the curriculum of Ukrainian educational facilities in the blended learning format: twenty-two Ukrainian universities are already participating in this program. In addition, Prymachenko is a lead educational expert in the largest NGO coalition in Ukraine, the Reanimation Package of Reforms, the most influential non-governmental reform advocate in the country.    In 2011, Prymachenko saw the first massive open online courses launched by Stanford and was inspired to create similar courses in Ukraine. In 2013, while still pursuing a master’s degree, he launched the first massive open online course in post-soviet countries. In 2014, Prymachenko co-founded Prometheus and initially funded the project with six months' of his university scholarship. In four years, the volunteer initiative grew into one of the largest educational projects in independent Ukraine’s history. To date, the platform hosts 75 massive online courses from top-rated Ukrainian universities, international organizations such as United Nations Development Program, the Council of Europe, OSCE, and leading companies — Microsoft Ukraine and EY Ukraine. To support the implementation of key Ukrainian reforms, such as the public procurement system - Prozorro, Prometheus worked with the state authorities to create several governmental massive online courses and enrolled tens of thousands of civil servants as students.  

Laura Jakli

Encina Hall, C147 616 Jane Stanford Way Stanford, CA 94305-6055
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CDDRL Predoctoral Fellow, 2018-20
Fellow, Program on Democracy and the Internet, 2018-20
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​I am a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Starting in 2023, I will be an Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School's Business, Government and the International Economy (BGIE) unit.

My research examines political extremism, destigmatization, and radicalization, focusing on the role of popularity cues in online media. My related research examines a broad range of threats to democratic governance, including authoritarian encroachment, ethnic prejudice in public goods allocation, and misinformation. 

​My dissertation won APSA's Ernst B. Haas Award for the best dissertation on European Politics. I am currently working on my book project, Engineering Extremism, with generous funding from the William F. Milton Fund at Harvard.

My published work has appeared in the American Political Science Review,  Governance,  International Studies Quarterly, Public Administration Review, and the Virginia Journal of International Law, along with an edited volume in Democratization (Oxford University Press). My research has been featured in KQED/NPR, The Washington Post, and VICE News.
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I received my Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley in 2020. I was a Predoctoral Research Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University and the Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet. I hold a B.A. (Magna Cum Laude; Phi Beta Kappa) from Cornell University and an M.A. (with Distinction) from the University of California, Berkeley.

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Conference on Democracy and its Discontents

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The Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective is holding a conference on Democracy and its Discontents on October 8-10 in Budapest, Hungary. The conference, co-hosted with Central European University, will bring together scholars of American and European politics to examine topics such as democratic backsliding, inequality, and money in politics. Saskia Sassen of Columbia University will deliver the keynote address. 

Democracy and its Discontents Agenda
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American Democracy Conferences

At Stanford, key diplomat describes changing face of NATO

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NATO is reassessing its fundamental relationship with Russia and focusing on new threats not imagined at its inception in the wake of World War II, a key U.S. diplomat told Stanford students and faculty.

Douglas Lute, America’s ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, said Washington and Moscow found a way to collaborate since the collapse of the Soviet Union. But that has changed under President Vladimir Putin, he said.

“It’s clear today that we don’t have the partnership with Russia that we had for two decades,” Lute said. “NATO does not wish to be an enemy of Russia, but Russia has to understand that it will defend its 27 allies.”

He warned Russia that the tactics being used in Crimea “don’t play on NATO territory; these allies will be defended as the treaty demands.”

 

Lute’s talk on Tuesday capped his two-day visit at Stanford. He spent the day before lecturing in the International Policy Studies course “America’s War in Afghanistan: Multiple Actors and Divergent Strategies” taught by Karl Eikenberry. Eikenberry, a former ambassador to Afghanistan, is now a consulting professor at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and an affiliate of several of the institute’s centers.

Ambassador Lute spoke to the class about the White House and National Security Council perspective on the war in Afghanistan, drawing on his experience in both the Bush and Obama administrations. 

During his talk on Tuesday, Lute said that as NATO celebrates its 66th year, it is transitioning to an alliance that must now face “hybrid warfare,” such as cyber attacks and unconventional forces.

That will call for a Special Forces-type base in Europe that can defend the 28 nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance from hybrid assaults, he said.

“A cyber attack on a NATO ally could rise to the level of requiring a mutual defense response,” he said.

Lute’s talk was sponsored by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, The Europe Center, the Center for International Security and Cooperation, and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

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Why democracy is worth fighting for -- now more than ever

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Larry Diamond
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Is democracy heading toward a depression? CDDRL Director Larry Diamond answers in a recent Foreign Policy piece, assessing the challenges of overcoming a global, decade-long democratic recession. With much of the world losing faith in the model of liberal democracy, Diamond believes the key to setting democracy back on track involves heavy reform in America, serious crackdowns on corruption, and a reassessment of how the West approaches its support for democratic development abroad. 

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Incentives and Norms on the Ground: EU Accession, NGOs, and Human Rights

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How can international organizations influence behavior at the level of the individual?  This paper tests whether incentive-based and norm promoting strategies have effects that trickle down to individuals and affect their behavior at the ground level.  The study uses a hard case, that of discrimination against the Roma (commonly known by the disfavored term  "Gypsies"), and spans three towns, Murska Sobota and Novo mesto in Slovenia and Cakovec in Croatia.  Levels of discrimination were estimated via trust games played with money, which are particularly appropriate because the Roma are widely stereotyped as cheaters and thieves.  The findings suggest that the EU accession process, widely regarded as an exceptionally strong incentive-based mechanism of rights diffusion, does not severely reduce discrimination on the ground.  Instead, they suggest that ground level organizing aimed at improving relations between Roma and non-Roma helps reduce discrimination.
 
 
Speaker Bio: 
 
Ana Bracic is a postdoctoral fellow at CDDRL. She received her PhD from NYU in May 2013, and was a Junior Visiting Fellow at the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School in 2012-13. Her research aims to identify and understand mechanisms that tangibly improve the lives of people whose rights are violated, whether through measures are best applied at the state level or on the ground. Her dissertation consists of three related projects: a micro-level fieldwork study of discrimination against the Roma in Slovenia and Croatia, a macro-level study of cross-country diffusion of human rights practices, and a macro-level comparison of physical integrity rights violations in failed and stable autocracies. Her work has been funded in part by the American Political Science Association.

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Ana Bracic Postdoctoral Fellow Speaker CDDRL
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Development Aid Confronts Politics: The Almost Revolution

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Speaker bio:

Thomas Carothers is vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is the founder and director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Program and oversees Carnegie Europe in Brussels.

Carothers is a leading authority on international support for democracy, rights, and governance and on comparative democratization as well as an expert on U.S. foreign policy. He has worked on democracy-assistance projects for many public and private organizations and carried out extensive field research on international aid efforts around the world. In addition, he has broad experience in matters dealing with human rights, the rule of law, civil society building, and think tank development in transitional and developing countries.

He is the author of six critically acclaimed books as well as many articles in prominent journals and newspapers. Carothers has also worked extensively with the Open Society Foundations (OSF), including currently as chair of the OSF Think Tank Fund and previously as chair of the OSF Global Advisory Board. He is an adjunct professor at the Central European University in Budapest and was previously a visiting faculty member at Nuffield College, Oxford University, and Johns Hopkins SAIS.

Prior to joining the Endowment, Carothers practiced international and financial law at Arnold & Porter and served as an attorney adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State.

Carothers is the co-author (with Diane de Gramont) of Development Aid Confronts Politics: The Almost Revolution (Carnegie, 2013) and author of Confronting the Weakest Link: Aiding Political Parties in New Democracies (Carnegie, 2006); Promoting the Rule of Law Abroad: In Search of Knowledge (Carnegie, 2006); Uncharted Journey: Promoting Democracy in the Middle East, co-edited with Marina Ottaway (Carnegie, 2005); Critical Mission: Essays on Democracy Promotion (Carnegie, 2004); Funding Virtue: Civil Society Aid and Democracy Promotion, co-edited with Marina Ottaway (Carnegie, 2000); Aiding Democracy Abroad: The Learning Curve (Carnegie, 1999); and Assessing Democracy Assistance: The Case of Romania (Carnegie, 1996).

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Thomas Carothers Vice President for Studies Speaker Carnegie Endownment for International Peace
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The Changing Field of Power in Post-Martial Law Taiwan

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Professor Gold will make a presentation that is part of a larger book project that applies the theory of fields as elaborated by Pierre Bourdieu, Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam to the remaking of Taiwan since the end of martial law in 1987. He argues that political democratization is only one part of the larger dispersal of all forms of power (what Bourdieu terms “capital”) away from the tight centralized control of the mainlander—dominated KMT to broader segments of Taiwan’s society. This talk will look at this process of the breakdown and reconstruction of the old order of various fields, in particular the political, economic and cultural fields, and the effect of this on the overarching field of power.

 

Speaker Bio:

Thomas B. Gold is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Executive Director of the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies, whose executive office is at Berkeley and teaching program at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He received his B.A. in Chinese Studies from Oberlin College, and M.A. in Regional Studies – East Asia and PhD in Sociology from Harvard University. He taught English at Tunghai University in Taiwan. He was in the first group of U.S. government-sponsored students to study in China, spending a year at Shanghai’s Fudan University from 1979-1980. Prof Gold’s research has examined numerous topics on the societies on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. These include: youth; guanxi; urban private entrepreneurs (getihu); non-governmental organizations; popular culture; and social and political change. He is very active in civil society in the United States, currently serving on the boards of several organizations such as the Asia Society of Northern California, International Technological University, Teach for China, and the East Bay College Fund.  His books include State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle, and the co-edited volumes Social Connections in China: Institutions, Culture, and the Changing Nature ofGuanxi, The New Entrepreneurs of Europe and Asia: Patterns of Business Development in Russia, Eastern Europe and China, and Laid-Off Workers in a Workers’ State: Unemployment With Chinese Characteristics.  

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Thomas B. Gold Professor of Sociology Speaker UC Berkeley
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Introducing the 2013-14 pre and postdoctoral fellows

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The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is pleased to introduce our 2013-14 pre and postdoctoral scholars. Selected from upwards of 100 applicants, these scholars will spend the year in residence at CDDRL to pursue their research, work closely with faculty and connect to an innovative learning community. Hailing from Yale University, New York University, Georgetown University and Stanford these scholars bring diverse backgrounds and expertise to enrich the ranks at CDDRL. Please read the Q&A's below to learn more about our new scholars, their research and what brought them to CDDRL. 

Ana Bracic

Hometown: Slovenska Bistrica, Slovenia

Academic Institution: New York University

Discipline and expected date of graduation: PhD, May 2013

Research Interests: Human rights, Gender and Ethnic Discrimination, State Failure, International Organizations, and using Quantitative and Experimental Methods.

Dissertation Topic/Title: Essays on Human Rights

What attracted you to the CDDRL Pre/post-doctoral program? I am excited to become a post-doctoral fellow at the Center because my work closely fits the scholarly agenda of CDDRL. While human rights form the core of my dissertation, I touch on several other topics central to CDDRL—I evaluate the efficacy of a strong mechanism for promotion of democracy, I explore how much worse human rights abuses are in failed states, and I examine the conditions under which ground level NGO action can decrease discrimination against a vulnerable population. The faculty affiliated with the Center have a great deal of expertise in areas relevant to my research efforts - ranging from human rights and consolidation of democracy to field experiments - and I very much look forward to their guidance and advice.

What do you hope to accomplish during your year-long residency at the Center? My central aim is to complete the next phase of my research project on discrimination against the Roma in Central and Eastern Europe, while writing a book manuscript that stems from the same project. I hope to build relationships and potentially develop collaborations with members of the academic community at CDDRL and Stanford more generally.

Please state a fun fact about yourself! I used to compete in ballroom dancing.

 

Adi Greif

Hometown: Stanford, CA

Academic Institution: Yale University

Discipline and expected date of graduation: Political Science, Spring 2014

Research Interests: International Relations, Middle East, Colonialism, Gender Politics, Islamic Law, Demography

Dissertation Topic/Title: "The Long-Term Impact of Colonization on Gender"

What attracted you to the CDDRL Pre/post-doctoral program? Improving gender equality is correlated with improved economic growth, democratization and rule of law. In addition to these research themes, CDDRL's focus on both scholarship and policy-relevance is important to me. I hope that understanding the processes leading to changes in gender equality over time will help us pursue better policies for advancing gender equality.

What do you hope to accomplish during your year-long residency at the Center? I hope to turn my thesis into multiple articles. I also intend to write a short monograph analyzing the relationship between opinions on gender, religion and political party affiliation in the Middle East through use of satellite data to proxy for religious piety.

Please state a fun fact about yourself! I live in the same housing complex that I lived in as a child.

 

Alexander Lee

Hometown: Los Angeles, CA

Academic Institution: Stanford University

Discipline and expected date of graduation: PhD, Political Science, September 2013

Research Interests: Historical Political Economy, Development, Colonialism, South Asia, Identity Politics, Terrorism

Dissertation Topic/Title: "Diversity and Power: Caste in Colonial India"

What attracted you to the CDDRL Pre/post-doctoral program? Much of my work is on the historical origins of underdevelopment, and I'm interested in exploring contemporary policies that can alleviate these inequalities.

What do you hope to accomplish during your year-long residency at the Center? I hope to develop my dissertation into a book, particularly by adding material on the post-colonial period.

Please state a fun fact about yourself! I make a very good chana masala.

 


Hesham Sallam

Hometown: Cairo, Egypt

Academic Institution: Georgetown University

Discipline and expected date of graduation: Political Science; 2013-2014

Research Interests: Democratization, Identity Politics and Distribution, Authoritarian Elections, Political Islam; Political Economy of Authoritarianism

Dissertation Topic/Title: “Indispensible Arbiters: Islamist Movements, Economic Liberalization, and Authoritarian Rule in the Arab World”

What attracted you to the CDDRL Pre/post-doctoral program? What I find most appealing about CDDRL is its demonstrated commitment to advancing innovative, rigorous research on questions pertaining to the challenges of democratization and other related topics that speak directly to my current work. It hosts a distinguished set of scholars whose work has been highly influential in informing and guiding my own research. As home to the Arab Reform and Democracy Program, CDDRL also offers a great opportunity for engaging with scholars and practitioners who share my strong interest in developing research agendas that could enhance understanding of the Arab uprisings, their origins and the dynamic political and social struggles they encompass.

What do you hope to accomplish during your year-long residency at the Center? During my residency at the Center, I look forward to finishing my dissertation writing, along with a number of related research projects pertaining to the relationship between contentious politics and formal electoral competition in the aftermath of the Arab uprisings.

Please state a fun fact about yourself! I’m a dedicated bikram yogi and a strong believer that every great idea begins with a deep backward bend.

 


Anna West

Hometown: Bay Area

Academic Institution: Stanford University

Discipline and expected date of graduation: Anthropology, June 2015

Research Interests: Critical ethnographic approaches to development and the state, the role of traditional authorities in post-colonial democracies, global health, citizenship, human rights, and discourses of participation and community in Southern Africa, particularly Malawi.

Dissertation Title: "Health Promotion, Citizenship, and Rural Governance in Malawi"

What attracted you to the CDDRL Pre/post-doctoral program?  I am drawn to CDDRL's focus on the complex intersections between development and governance, and to the Center's embrace of both theoretical and policy dimensions of scholarship on these themes. My dissertation research in Malawi examines how modular global health interventions engage local power structures, patronage systems and political cultures. In particular, I focus on traditional authorities' involvement in rural health promotion and examine the continuing salience of chiefly governance for local and national discourse on community participation, human rights and citizenship. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research to trace the salience of health promotion strategies for the formation and consolidation of ideas, values and processes of governance and democracy in Malawi. I look forward to stimulating conversations with faculty and visiting scholars through the Center's Programs on Poverty and Governance and Human Rights and the CDDRL-affiliated Center for Innovation in Global Health.

What do you hope to accomplish during your year-long residency at the Center? I will be returning from 18 months of fieldwork in Malawi this fall and am excited to join CDDRL's diverse community of scholars. I aim to complete a draft of my dissertation during my fellowship year. As a social and cultural anthropologist, I especially look forward to sharing my findings and seeking feedback from faculty mentors and fellows in other disciplines with shared interests in the quality of and contestations around democratic processes in post-colonial African states.

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Do International Regimes Punish Heretics More Than Infidels? A Study of the Democratization Clause in International Agreements

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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.

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