Stanford University

The End of Neoliberalism and the Rise of the Human-Security State

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Abstract

Paul Amar will discuss his book The Security Archipelago, winner of the 2014 Charles Taylor Book Award of the American Political Science Association. The book provides an alternative historical and theoretical framing of the refashioning of free-market states and the rise of humanitarian security regimes in the Global South by examining the pivotal, trendsetting cases of Brazil and Egypt. Addressing gaps in the study of neoliberalism and biopolitics, Amar describes how coercive security operations and cultural rescue campaigns confronting waves of resistance have appropriated progressive, antimarket discourses around morality, sexuality, and labor. Homing in on Cairo and Rio de Janeiro, Amar reveals the innovative resistances and unexpected alliances that have coalesced in new polities emerging from the Arab Spring and South America's Pink Tide. These have generated a shared modern governance model that he terms the "human-security state."

 

Speaker Bio

paul amar 1

Paul Amar, Associate Professor in the Global & International Studies Program, is a political scientist with affiliate appointments in Feminist Studies, Sociology, Comparative Literature, Middle East Studies, and Latin American & Iberian Studies. At UCSB he currently serves as Chair of Middle East Studies, Coordinator of the Campus Cluster on Security Studies, and member of the Graduate Studies Council. In addition, he serves as coordinator of scholarly  projects for the Arab Council of the Social Sciences, based in Beirut. Before he began his academic career, he worked as a journalist in Egypt, a police reformer in Brazil, and as a conflict-resolution and economic development specialist at the United Nations. His books include:  Cairo Cosmopolitan (2006); New Racial Missions of Policing (2010); Global South to the Rescue (2011); Dispatches from the Arab Spring (2013); The Middle East and Brazil (2014), and The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics and the End of Neoliberalism. This most recent book was awarded the Charles Taylor Award for "Best Book of the Year" in 2014 by the Interpretive Methods Section of the American Political Science Association.

 

*This event is co-sponsored with CDDRL's Program on Arab Reform and Democracy and the Mediterranean Studies Program.*

 

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Reuben Hills Conference Room
2nd Floor East Wing E207
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, California 94305

Paul Amar Associate Professor, Global and International Studies Program University of California, Santa Barbara
Seminars
Arab Reform and Democracy Speaker Series

Arab Activism and the Paradoxes of Political Aid

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*This event is co-sponsored with CDDRL's Program on Arab Reform and Democracy and The Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.*

Abstract

European and US-based scholars and practitioners have debated the purposes and sometimes the (limited) macro-effects of programs designed to promote transitions from authoritarianism to democracy in Middle East countries. Yet this discussion often lacks analysis of on-the-ground experiences or ignores the cumulative wisdom of local counterparts and intermediaries. This seminar is based on Carapico’s ground-breaking study Political Aid and Arab Activism: Democracy Promotion, Justice, and Representation (Cambridge University Press, 2013) which explores two decades’ worth of projects sponsored by American, European, and other transnational agencies in four key sub-fields: the rule of law, electoral design and monitoring, female empowerment, and civil society. Specifically in the seminar Carapico will discuss controversies and contradictions surrounding projects in Egypt, Palestine, and Iraq (the three main cases) and Jordan, Morocco, Yemen, Algeria, Tunisia, and Lebanon (where democracy brokers also work) to help explain why so many feminists and other advocates for justice, free elections, and civic agency concluded that foreign funding is inherently political and paradoxical.

Speaker Bio

sheila carapico color Sheila Carapico

Sheila Carapico, Professor of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Richmond, has been exploring Arab activism since studying in Cairo and traveling around the region in 1971/72. She lived in Sana’a from 1977 through 1980, mainly researching community development initiatives and foreign aid interventions. Subsequently she worked as a consultant for the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the Netherlands Embassy, Human Rights Watch, and several other agencies in Yemen, Egypt, and Lebanon. She was a Fulbright research scholar and visiting fellow at the Sana’a University Women’s Studies and Social Research Center for two years during the ‘democratic opening’ in Yemen in the early 1990s. She served as Visiting Chairperson in the Department of Political Science at the American University in Cairo for all of 2010 and the ‘Arab spring’ semester of 2011, and returned to AUC as a visiting faculty member in the spring of 2013. In addition to Political Aid she is the author of Civil Society in Yemen: A Political Economy of Activism in Modern Arabia (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and other works on the comparative and international politics of the Arabian Peninsula and the Arab world. She is a contributing editor of Middle East Report.      

 

 

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Sheila Carapico Professor of Political Science Department of Political Science, University of Richmond
Seminars
Arab Reform and Democracy Speaker Series

CDDRL Senior Honors Program Information Session

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This event is open to Stanford undergraduate students only. 

The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is currently accepting applications from eligible juniors due February 27, 2015 who are interested in writing their senior thesis on a subject touching upon democracy, economic development, and rule of law (DDRL) from any university department. CDDRL faculty and current honors students will be present to discuss the program and answer any questions.

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

 

CDDRL Class of 2015 Class of 2015 in front of the White House with Francis Fukuyama.

 

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Francis Fukuyama

Encina Hall, C148
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

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Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy
Research Affiliate at The Europe Center
Professor by Courtesy, Department of Political Science
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Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a faculty member of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also Director of Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy, and a professor (by courtesy) of Political Science.

Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His book In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir will be published in fall 2026.

Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation, and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004. He is editor-in-chief of American Purpose, an online journal.

Dr. Fukuyama holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), Aarhus University (Denmark), the Pardee Rand Graduate School, and Adam Mickiewicz University (Poland). He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Trustees of Freedom House, and the Board of the Volcker Alliance. He is a fellow of the National Academy for Public Administration, a member of the American Political Science Association, and of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.

(October 2025)

Global Populisms

A new project examining the global surge in populist movements and what it means for established democratic rules and institutions.
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Honors Program Director

Didi Kuo

Encina Hall, C150
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

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Center Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
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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.

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Workers and Revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia

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Abstract:

Arab workers participated prominently in the popular uprisings of 2011.  They shared the outrage of many of their compatriots over daily abuse by internal security forces, widespread corruption, and foreign policies subservient to U.S. interests. Their participation in those uprisings was also informed by struggles against the neoliberal economic restructuring of the region since the 1970s, which resulted in an indecent chasm between rich and poor, deteriorating working conditions and public social services, and high youth unemployment.

Egypt experienced a strike wave of unprecedented magnitude in the 2000s. Tunisia, with one exception, experienced less intense contestation by workers and others. Egyptian workers’ have had very limited influence on national politics in the post-Mubarak era.  Democratic development seems unlikely in the near future.  The Tunisian national trade union federation and its affiliates were the central force in installing procedural democracy. The nature of workers’ social movements in the 2000s partially explains these divergent outcomes.

Speaker Bio:

Joel Beinin

Joel Beinin is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History. He received his A.B. from Princeton University in 1970, his M.A. from Harvard University in 1974, and his A.M.L.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1978 and 1982. He also studied at the American University of Cairo and and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He lived in Egypt in 1969, 1980-81, 1985, 1986, 1994, 2004-05, and 2006-08 and in Israel in 1965-66, 1970-73, 1987, 1988, 1993, and 1993. He has taught Middle East history at Stanford University since 1983. From 2006 to 2008 he served as Director of Middle East Studies and Professor of History at the American University in Cairo. His research and writing focuses on workers, peasants, and minorities in the modern Middle East and on Israel, Palestine, and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

 

Beinin has written or edited nine books, most recently Social Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa; co-edited with Frédéric Vairel (Stanford University Press, 2011) and The Struggle for Worker Rights in Egypt (Solidarity Center, 2010). His articles have been published in leading scholarly journals as well as The Nation, Middle East Report, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Le Monde Diplomatique, and others. He has appeared on Al-Jazeera TV, BBC radio, National Public Radio, and many other TV and radio programs throughout North America, and in France, Egypt, Singapore, and Australia, and has given frequent interviews to the global media. In 2002 he served as President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America.

This event is co-sponsored by the Arab Studies Institute.

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Goldman Conference Room
4th Floor East Wing E409
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, California 94305

Joel Beinin Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History Stanford University
Seminars
Arab Reform and Democracy Speaker Series

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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'Protect your Republic Protest' in Anıtkabir, Ankara, Turkey. 14 April 2007.
Selahattin Sönmez, Wikimedia Commons
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State Fragility and Extreme Poverty: What Can be Done?

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Please note that this CDDRL seminar will be held on Wednesday. 

 

Abstract:

Recent estimates place half of the world’s poorest people in fragile and conflict-affected states by 2015. As the world moves towards the next phase of global development goals, which includes a central emphasis on eradicating extreme poverty, it will be necessary to understand the challenges for countries in the most difficult contexts. Is addressing and resolving fragility a condition (or precondition) for successfully addressing poverty?  Or, are there ways to significantly and sustainably reduce poverty even while countries remain fragile?

USAID is seeking to answer these questions as it recommits to working with its partners to end extreme poverty by 2030. And while we acknowledge that ending extreme poverty will not be easy, progress and gains already achieved over the past couple of decades have made us certain that it is possible. As the global community coalesces around this goal, USAID seeks to increase shared understanding of the nature of extreme poverty, where there has been success and why, and what we are already doing and will need to do differently to catalyze and invest in global solutions.

 

Speaker Bio: 

Alex Thier
Alex Thier is USAID’s assistant to the Administrator for Policy, Planning, and Learning (PPL). The PPL Bureau is USAID’s center for policy development, strategic planning, learning and evaluation, and partner engagement. From June 2010‐ June 2013, Thier served as assistant to the administrator for Afghanistan and Pakistan affairs, overseeing USAID’s two largest missions in the world.
Before joining USAID, Thier served with the U.S. Institute of Peace as senior rule of law adviser and director for Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2005‐ 2010. While at the Institute, he co‐authored The Future of Afghanistan (2009) as well as The Next Chapter: The United States and Pakistan, the 2008 report of the Pakistan Working Group. Thier also served as director of the Institute’sConstitution Making, Peacebuilding, and National Reconciliation project, during which he advised numerous governments and civil society organizations engaged in ongoing constitutional drafting and national reconciliation exercises. Thier was also a principal staffer on the Institute’s Genocide Prevention Task Force, and a coauthor of its final report, Preventing Genocide: A Blueprint for U.S. Policymakers. The recommendations from this report formed the backbone of President Barack Obama’s 2011 Directive on Mass Atrocities.
Thier previously served as director of the Project on Failed States at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. From 2002 to 2004, he was legal adviser to Afghanistan’s Constitutional and Judicial Reform Commissions in Kabul, where he assisted in the development of a new constitution and judicial system. He has also worked as a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group, a legal and constitutional expert to the British Department for International Development, and as an adviser to the Constitutional Commission of Southern Sudan.
From 1993 to 1996, Thier worked as a U.N. and NGO official in Afghanistan and Pakistan during the Afghan civil war. He also served as coordination officer for the U.N. Iraq Program in New York.
An attorney, Thier was a Skadden fellow and a graduate fellow at the U.S. National Security Council’s Directorate for Near‐East and South Asia. He received the Richard S. Goldsmith award for outstanding work on dispute resolution from Stanford University in 2000.
Thier has a J.D. from Stanford Law School, a master’s degree in law and diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and a Bachelor’s Degree from Brown University.
Discussion Paper: Ending extreme poverty in fragile contexts
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Philippines Conference Room

Encina Hall, 3nd Floor
616 Serra St
Stanford, CA 94305

Alex Thier Assistant to the Administrator for Policy, Planning, and Learning Assistant to the Administrator for Policy, Planning, and Learning United States Agency for International Development
Seminars

What we have Learned about Iraq from the Ba`th Party Archives

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Abstract:

Determining the specificities of everyday political life in one of the 20th century's most notorious dictatorships – Iraq under Saddam Hussein – is possible as a result of the availability of more than ten million internal security force and Ba`th party documents recovered after the overthrow of the Iraqi regime in 2003. The documents associated with this collection, which is currently housed at Stanford's University's Hoover Institution, provide a rich picture of the everyday practices of Iraq's highly repressive autocracy.  Using data from these captured documents, I provide empirical evidence about the political practices of citizens living under highly difficult political circumstances.

 

Speaker Bio:

blaydes logo

Lisa Blaydes is an Associate Professor of Political Science and a faculty affiliate of the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University.  She is the author of Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s Egypt(Cambridge University Press, 2011).  Her articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review,International Studies Quarterly, International Organization, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Middle East Journal, and World Politics. She holds degrees in Political Science (PhD) from the University of California, Los Angeles and International Relations (BA, MA) from Johns Hopkins University.

Encina Hall 

Philippines conference room - 3rd floor Central 

Room C330

616 Serra St.

Stanford, CA

Lisa Blaydes Associate Professor of Political Science and Faculty Affiliate Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University
Seminars

Celebrating a decade of impact

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In August, CDDRL’s Draper Hills Summer Fellows program marked its 10-year anniversary by welcoming 20 of its alumni back to Stanford for a weeklong reunion.

Supported by Ingrid Hills and Bill and Phyllis Draper, the program brings practitioners from across the developing world to Stanford for a three-week intensive academic training program on democracy, good governance and rule of law reform. 

From Afghanistan to Venezuela, the program’s alumni form a network of over 250 leaders working under some of the most adverse conditions.

Fellows apply the academic lessons - taught by leading Stanford faculty - to practical problems in their countries. Many learn how to use technology to expose corruption, draw on case studies to improve the quality of public administration and borrow examples from history to build institutions in the aftermath of revolution.

An alumni network program - supported by the Omidyar Network - host’s global workshops, Stanford reunions and a robust communication platform to connect this global community of democratic leaders.

During the reunion, alumni attended sessions led by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Michael McFaul who has just returned back to Stanford after serving as U.S. ambassador to Russia.

While back on campus, some alumni found the occasion to reflect on the program and its impact on their professional and personal lives. Their inspiring stories are testament to the incredible work they are doing to build democratic systems in some of the most complex corners of the world.

Fighting for Democracy in Ukraine

When the EuroMaidan protests started in November 2013 in Kiev, Andriy Shevchenko (09’) was in Independence Square calling for the resignation of Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych. It was there that he reflected on the lessons from the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program on social mobilization as he helped translate the demands of protesters into political action.

Shevchenko, who was elected to parliament in 2006, is one of nine fellows from Ukraine who are part of a new generation of leadership working to move their country away from Russian influence and towards greater European integration. Working as journalists, civil society leaders and politicians, these fellows are pushing for democratic institutions and political accountability in a country transitioning towards democracy.

Before joining politics, Shevchenko was a journalist and founded the first independent 24-hour news channel – 5th Channel – which covered the events surrounding Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution.

Shevchenko describes the program as “one of the greatest experiences of his life” because of the knowledge, friendships and inspiration he gained from his participation in the program. Leaving the program with an expanded interest in human rights, Shevchenko now serves as the first deputy chairman of the Human Rights Commission in Ukraine.

While the struggle for democracy continues in Ukraine, Shevchenko will draw on the program’s teachings and the strength of the peer community during these challenging times.

Empowering Women through Education in Afghanistan

Sakeena Yacoobi (08’) understands firsthand how education can change a life. After receiving her degree in the U.S., Yacoobi returned to Afghanistan with a mission to empower women and children through access to quality education. In 1995, Yacoobi founded the Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL) and set off to change the system of education – often operating underground due to threats from the Taliban – by training a network of teachers and opening women’s learning centers.

Yacoobi was overwhelmed with interest from women seeking education and in decades AIL has set up 300 learning centers in 12 provinces, serving over 11 million people in Afghanistan. Training is at the heart of AIL’s model and Yacoobi has applied much of what she has learned from the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program to offer civic education to AIL’s students.

As the country emerges from over three decades of conflict, Yacoobi credits the Program and its curriculum in democracy and leadership for inspiring Afghan citizens to be more civic minded and involved in democratic processes - such as voting. Recognizing the current political struggles that Afghanistan faces, Yacoobi hopes that these important lessons will help to build a greater democratic culture for the country’s future generations. 

Building New Institutions of Democracy in Argentina

Laura Alonso (12’) never envisioned herself as a politician. With an esteemed career in civil society as the head of the Argentine chapter of Transparency International, she had always operated outside of the political system. But one day she realized that she might be more effective inside government. 

In 2009, Alonso was elected as a member of Congress for the city of Buenos Aires and began to advocate for greater transparency and reform Her push for better governance has often put her at odds with her party and the subject of attacks, but she continues to defend her reform agenda.

Re-elected to a second term of Congress in 2013, Alonso has set out to improve the quality of democracy in Argentina by strengthening institutions that deliver public services and to help steer the country in a different direction. From time to time, she has been able to reflect on the case studies taught in the Draper Hill’s Summer Fellows Program by Francis Fukuyama to inform her policymaking.   

While Alonso is unsure of what her future may hold - may it be in politics or elsewhere - she will continue to raise her voice when necessary to make the government more accountable to the people of Argentina.

Defending Civil Society in Russia

Anna Sevortian (06’) served as the Russian director for Human Rights Watch when the crackdown on civil society began in 2011. Non-profit organizations (NGO’s) receiving foreign funding were labeled as foreign spies and forced to register their operations with the Russian government.

Sevortian describes this repressive environment as reminiscent of Soviet times when propaganda and inspections were common practice. Cut off from funding, many NGO’s supporting important social needs have been forced to shut their doors.

A longtime journalist, Sevortian spent three years at Human Right’s Watch in the height of this crackdown documenting worsening conditions for civil society and also covering Belarus, Ukraine and the North Caucuses.

It was during this period that one of the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program’s founding faculty members - Michael McFaul - was serving as U.S. ambassador to Russia and Sevortian was able to raise human rights concerns to him directly.

Sevortian now serves as the executive director for the newly launched EU-Russia Civil Society Forum in Berlin, a platform designed to amplify the voice of civil society. Despite the deteriorating situation in Russia, Sevortian hopes to use the forum to help encourage the growth and development of civil society in Russia and Europe. 

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2008 Draper Hills Summer Fellow Alumni Sakena Yacoobi from Afghanistan asks a question to one of the guest lecturers during the tenth anniversary reunion program.
Rod Searcey
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