Stephen Stedman is a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), an affiliated faculty member at CISAC, and professor of political science (by courtesy) at Stanford University. He is director of CDDRL's Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy, Development and Rule of Law, and will be faculty director of the Program on International Relations in the School of Humanities and Sciences effective Fall 2025.

In 2011-12 Professor Stedman served as the Director for the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy, and Security, a body of eminent persons tasked with developing recommendations on promoting and protecting the integrity of elections and international electoral assistance. The Commission is a joint project of the Kofi Annan Foundation and International IDEA, an intergovernmental organization that works on international democracy and electoral assistance.

In 2003-04 Professor Stedman was Research Director of the United Nations High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change and was a principal drafter of the Panel’s report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility.

In 2005 he served as Assistant Secretary-General and Special Advisor to the Secretary- General of the United Nations, with responsibility for working with governments to adopt the Panel’s recommendations for strengthening collective security and for implementing changes within the United Nations Secretariat, including the creation of a Peacebuilding Support Office, a Counter Terrorism Task Force, and a Policy Committee to act as a cabinet to the Secretary-General.

His most recent book, with Bruce Jones and Carlos Pascual, is Power and Responsibility: Creating International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2009).

Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.

I am a teaching fellow in Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE) at Stanford University. I teach courses focused on democracy, citizenship, and the politics of development. My research focuses on party systems, ideology, nostalgia, and corruption during transitions from authoritarian rule, especially in North Africa. My book manuscript focuses on the question of why democratization in Tunisia failed to address the social and economic grievances that precipitated it. My work has appeared in the Journal of Democracy, MERIP Middle East Report Online, and Washington Post Monkey Cage. 

I received my PhD in political science (with specialties in comparative politics, quantitative methods, and political economy) from Yale University in December 2020. I have a BA in international relations from Tufts University, an MS in applied economics from Johns Hopkins University, and an MA and MPhil in political science from Yale. I have spent more than three years living in Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia. My CV is available here.

An Egyptian-Canadian raised in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Canada, Salma Mousa received her PhD in Political Science from Stanford University in 2020. A scholar of comparative politics, her research focuses on migration, conflict, and social cohesion.  Salma's dissertation investigates strategies for building trust and tolerance after war. Leveraging field experiments among Iraqis displaced by ISIS,  American schoolchildren, and British soccer fans, she shows how intergroup contact can change real-world behaviors — even if underlying prejudice remains unchanged.   A secondary research agenda tackles the challenge of integrating refugees in the United States. Combining a meta-analytic review, ethnographic fieldwork, and field experiments with resettlement agencies, this project identifies risk factors and promising policies for new arrivals.  Salma has held fellowships at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Stanford’s Immigration Policy Lab, the Freeman Spogli Institute, the Stanford Center for International Conflict and Negotiation, the McCoy Center for Ethics in Society, and the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. Her work has been supported by the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL), the Innovations for Poverty Action Lab (IPA), the King Center on Global Development, the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS), the Program on Governance and Local Development (GLD), and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies. Her research has been featured by The Economist, BBC, and Der Spiegel,  on the front page of the Times of London and on PBS NOVA.