Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Syrian graphic designer and activist Tareq Samman talks about the role of art in the Syrian revolution.
This event is sponsored by the Arab Studies Table at Stanford.
Study Room
Arrillaga Family Dining Commons
Transcript of Larry Diamond's address to the 2013 Annual Conference of the Israeli Political Science Association on May 2, 2013.
The Program on Human Rights at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), together with the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, are pleased to introduce the 2013 Summer Human Rights Fellows. These four remarkable Stanford undergraduates were selected from a competitive pool of applicants to spend the summer serving in organizations advancing human rights work around the world.
The Summer Human Rights Fellowship enables undergraduate students to gain practical experience at international organizations that promote, monitor, evaluate, or advance human rights work. In order to apply, potential fellows must identify their ideal placement and work with the partner to ensure there is a viable project that allows the student to contribute meaningfully to the organization’s work. This year, the fellows will be working on the ground in India, Jordan, and Guatemala with informal workers, at-risk children, trafficking victims, and using technology to advance social justice worldwide. Upon their return to Stanford next year, each of the Human Rights Fellows will participate in campus events to describe their work.
Below are the profiles of our four fellows highlighting their summer projects, interest in human rights and some fun facts. Click here to learn more about the fellowship program.
Major: Computer Science
Hometown: Plano, Texas
Tell us about your project. I'll be working with Visualizing Justice in Amman, Jordan. The mission of Visualizing Justice is to empower people worldwide to create visual stories for social justice and human rights. My mission for the summer is to exploit new software innovations in web development to augment Visualizing Justice’s data visualization capabilities, thus making their stories more expressive and accessible worldwide.
What first sparked your interest in human rights? I think there is a disconnect between the technologies we develop and the societies we live in, and that gap is most noticeable in the area of human rights. In particular, our innovations in technology have created an information overload problem. We are now inundated with information about various human rights issues, but struggle for a more nuanced or contextualized understanding of those issues. Also, the quality of the information has not kept up with the growth in quantity. If we can invest the time to build better tools and re-couple the quality of information with its quantity, then we, as a society, can make a lot more progress in the field of human rights.
What are your post-Stanford aspirations? I want to develop new tools that make it easier for individuals to create compelling data visualizations, especially those that lie outside the traditional domains of technology.
Fun fact about yourself: I can solve a Rubik's cube in under a minute.
Major: Human Biology
Hometown: Washington, D.C.
Tell us about your project. I’m traveling to Ahmedabad, India to work with Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), a union of 1.4 million informal economy workers, which provide community-driven socioeconomic services, including healthcare, local banking, social security, and housing to marginalized groups. Given my interest in public health, I will focus on SEWA’s initiatives responding to people's inherent right to a healthy life, working with the health team to analyze and document the changing role of front-line health workers who deliver care to expecting mothers. I aim to assess the effectiveness of services provided by three unique classes of health workers, and identify how their knowledge and skills can be harnessed to deliver primary health care to a broad swath of the rural and urban population.
What first sparked your interest in human rights? The day of my 16th birthday found me waiting in line at the DMV in Washington, DC. When I reached the front of the line, I was given one final form to fill out. I mindlessly scribbled my name and date of birth before I stumbled upon a question that I did not know the answer to: “Would you like to be an organ donor?” This was my first exposure to a human rights issue that I hope to pursue well into the future. Upon doing some research, I became hooked on the topic of organ donation. The future human biology major in me enjoyed reading about the dire need for kidneys in the US, but the humanitarian in me found another area of the debate more gripping – the black market for organs.
What are your post-Stanford aspirations? Find a job that allows me to combine my interests in medicine and human rights!
Fun fact about yourself: My parents made me take classes in juggling and unicycling growing up in case the whole college thing didn't work out.
Major: Human Biology (planned)
Hometown: Vienna, Austria
Tell us about your project. I will be traveling to Guatemala to work with Kids Alive, a nonprofit that works to rescue orphans and at-risk children. In Guatemala, they run a care home for girls who have been abandoned or abused – often in the form of forced labor and/or physical and sexual abuse. I will be working with the girls in the care home, and also evaluating a program that works to continue supporting the girls who have returned home.
What first sparked your interest in human rights? Throughout high school, I volunteered at a care home in Romania for women and girls who had experienced abuse. This first exposure to drastic poverty sparked my interest in social work and development, and led me to explore different aspects of human rights. Later in high school, I taught summer school in the Dominican Republic to at-risk children, where exposure to obvious injustice solidified my passion to fight for human rights. As a Christian, I believe that I have a responsibility to help those less fortunate – and fighting for human rights is an obvious way to do this!
What are your post-Stanford aspirations? I hope to study international human rights law and eventually work combatting human trafficking around the world.
Fun fact about yourself: I get to spend my vacations in Seoul, South Korea where my family currently lives.
Major: Economics
Hometown: New Delhi, India
Tell us about your project. I am going to be working with Apne Aap: Women Worldwide, an anti-trafficking NGO based in Forbesganj, India. Forbesganj is in close proximity to the Indo-Nepalese border, which has led to its emergence as a source, transit center, and destination for women trafficked for prostitution. I have spent the past two quarters designing an interactive human rights education curriculum focused on sex trafficking, which I will use in Forbesganj to engage with at-risk girls who are the daughters of sex workers in the red light district, as well as 12-14 year-old girls belonging to the Nutt (lower-caste) community. Simultaneously, I will be working with older men, women and community leaders, with the goal of making preliminary headway into a community-wide anti-trafficking strategy.
What first sparked your interest in human rights? I cannot count the number of times that I have been verbally harassed, whistled at or sung to by strange men in the course of my fairly “normal” existence as a middle-class girl in India. My passion for wanting to ensure that women are able to demand and access a life of dignity is a consequence of having grown up in a society that normalizes aggression against us. This prompted me to intern at the National Human Rights Commission of India, where I spent my time reading reports on trafficking, examining anti-trafficking legislation, and talking to activists and victims of human rights violations. I realized we critically need to place greater focus on the prevention of violations and develop a true, nuanced appreciation for the concept of human rights – a change I am hoping to effect through this fellowship.
What are your post-Stanford aspirations? A few years down the line, I hope to work as a policymaker advancing women’s rights in India.
Fun fact about yourself: I am one of two—I have a twin sister named Anima, who attends medical school in India.
Bio:
Emily Arnold-Fernández is the executive director of Asylum Access, an innovative international nonprofit that transforms the human rights landscape for refugees in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Using a unique combination of grassroots legal assistance and broader advocacy and strategic litigation efforts, Emily leads a team of refugee rights advocates to make human rights a reality for refugees, so they can live safely, work, send children to school and rebuild their lives.
Emily was a fall 2012 Social Entrepreneur in Residence at Stanford's Program on Social Entrepreneurship.
Abstract:
For the last half-century, the international response to refugees has been internment. Today, the average time in a refugee camp has reached 17 years.
When refugees reach “safety,” we imprison them behind barbed wire fences, often for years, sometimes for generations. We relegate them to starvation rations if aid runs low or politics intervenes. They almost never have adequate access to police, courts, or other mechanisms that could protect them from crime or ensure justice for victims. Adults are not allowed to go out and get a job, to feed their families and fill their days. Children grow up knowing no other life.
And refugees are protesting. Recently, a riot broke out in Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan after Syrian refugees attempted to leave the camp without permission. Hundreds of other refugee protests never make the news.
Answers to this problem have so far focused on supporting so-called “urban refugees” – refugees who have chosen to leave camps, usually illicitly, to move to the city. But what if we brought the city to the refugees?
Building cities, not camps, in refugee arrival zones has the potential to transform refugee response. Developing urban centers that can attract and support both locals and refugees creates the conditions for refugees to meet their own needs and make choices about their own lives, while also growing the regional and national economy and increasing opportunities for locals to thrive.
Building a city in place of a camp won't be easy. It requires convincing and coordinating multiple actors to make long-term investments in a refugee arrival area. National and local governments must work with development funders to implement roads, high-volume sanitation systems, and other infrastructure. Corporations must be invited, and at times incentivized, to locate factories, IT centers or other labor-intensive operations in the new location. Underemployed local populations in other urban centers must be made aware and take advantage of opportunities in the emerging city, so that refugees do not vastly outnumber the local population. This (correctly) sounds complex, but coordinating diverse actors for rapid development in the context of a mass influx lies exactly within the UN refugee agency's area of expertise.
To build a successful city also requires a policy framework and enforcement infrastructure that can ensure resources are equitably distributed. Refugees currently in urban areas often experience deep discrimination, exploitation, and poverty when their rights are not effectively protected. Refugees must be able to access resources and opportunities equitably with locals if the new city is to live up to its promise.
These and other challenges must be explored and overcome: Refugee camps may be built in a day (or at least a matter of weeks), but transforming our response from internment to urban center will take careful planning, piloting of iterations, and a willingness to learn from mistakes. The possibilities if we get it right are enormous: In place of segregated, aid-dependent camps, we'll have integrated, emerging urban economies offering opportunities for millions.
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
As Jordan strives to build a university system in line with its ambitious economic goals, tribal violence on campus remains a stumbling block.
Lina Khatib is the co-founding Head of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. She joined Stanford University in 2010 from the University of London where she was an Associate Professor. Her research is firmly interdisciplinary and focuses on the intersections of politics, media, and social factors in relation to the politics of the Middle East. She is also a consultant on Middle East politics and media and has published widely on topics such as new media and Islamism, US public diplomacy towards the Middle East, and political media and conflict in the Arab world, as well as on the political dynamics in Lebanon and Iran. She has an active interest in the link between track two dialogue and democratization policy. She is also a Research Associate at SOAS, University of London, and, from 2010-2012, was a Research Fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School.
Lina is one of the core authors of the forthcoming Arab Human Development Report (2013) published by the UNDP, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Syria Justice and Accountability Center. She is also a founding co-editor of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, a multidisciplinary journal concerned with politics, culture and communication in the region, and in 2009 co-edited (with Klaus Dodds) a special issue of the journal on geopolitics, public diplomacy and soft power in the Middle East. She edited the Journal of Media Practice from 2007-2010.
Paul Wise is the Richard E. Behrman Professor of Child Health and Society, Professor of Pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine, and Senior Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He is Director of the Center for Policy, Outcomes and Prevention and a core faculty of the Centers for Health Policy and Primary Care Outcomes Research, at Stanford University.
Dr. Wise received his A.B. degree summa cum laude and his M.D. degree from Cornell University, a Master of Public Health degree from the Harvard School of Public Health and did his pediatric training at the Children's Hospital in Boston. His former positions include serving as the Director of Emergency and Primary Care Services at the Children's Hospital, Boston, Director of the Harvard Institute for Reproductive and Child Health at Harvard Medical School, and Special Assistant to the U.S. Surgeon General. Prior to moving to Stanford University, Dr. Wise was Vice-Chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities in the Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, the academic and research base of Partners in Health.
Rajaie Batniji is a resident physician in internal medicine at Stanford and a CDDRL affiliate. His research examines the selection of priority diseases and countries in global health, and he is interested in global health financing and the priority-setting process of international institutions. His work has also examined social determinants of health in the Middle East. At FSI, Dr. Batniji is co-investigator on Global Underdevelopment Action Fund projects explaining U.S. global health financing and political causes of public health crisis.
Dr. Batniji received his doctorate in international relations (D.Phil) from Oxford University where he studied as a Marshall Scholar. He also earned a M.D. from the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine and M.A. and B.A. (with distinction) degrees in History from Stanford University. Dr. Batniji was previously based at Oxford's Global Economic Governance Program, and he has worked as a consultant to the World Health Organization.
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
Dr. Paul Wise is dedicated to bridging the fields of child health equity, public policy, and international security studies. He is the Richard E. Behrman Professor of Child Health and Society and Professor of Pediatrics, Division of Neonatology and Developmental Medicine, and Health Policy at Stanford University. He is also co-Director, Stanford Center for Prematurity Research and a Senior Fellow in the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, and the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University. Wise is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been working as the Juvenile Care Monitor for the U.S. Federal Court overseeing the treatment of migrant children in U.S. border detention facilities.
Wise received his A.B. degree summa cum laude in Latin American Studies and his M.D. degree from Cornell University, a Master of Public Health degree from the Harvard School of Public Health and did his pediatric training at the Children’s Hospital in Boston. His former positions include Director of Emergency and Primary Care Services at Boston Children’s Hospital, Director of the Harvard Institute for Reproductive and Child Health, Vice-Chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School and was the founding Director or the Center for Policy, Outcomes and Prevention, Stanford University School of Medicine. He has served in a variety of professional and consultative roles, including Special Assistant to the U.S. Surgeon General, Chair of the Steering Committee of the NIH Global Network for Women’s and Children’s Health Research, Chair of the Strategic Planning Task Force of the Secretary’s Committee on Genetics, Health and Society, a member of the Advisory Council of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, NIH, and the Health and Human Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Infant and Maternal Mortality.
Wise’s most recent U.S.-focused work has addressed disparities in birth outcomes, regionalized specialty care for children, and Medicaid. His international work has focused on women’s and child health in violent and politically complex environments, including Ukraine, Gaza, Central America, Venezuela, and children in detention on the U.S.-Mexico border.
300 Pasteur Drive
Grant 101
Stanford, CA 94305-5109
Rajaie Batniji is a resident physician in internal medicine at Stanford and a CDDRL affiliate. His research examines the selection of priority diseases and countries in global health, and he is interested in global health financing and the priority-setting process of international institutions. His work has also examined social determinants of health in the Middle East. At FSI, Dr. Batniji is co-investigator on Global Underdevelopment Action Fund projects explaining U.S. global health financing and political causes of public health crisis.
Protecting Health: Thinking Small. Sidhartha Sinha and Rajaie Batniji. Bulletin of the World Health Organization 2010; BLT.09.071530 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20865078
Health as human security in the occupied Palestinian territory. Rajaie Batniji, Yoke Rabai’a, Viet Nguyen-Gillham, Rita Giacaman, Eyad Sarraj, Raija Leena Punamaki, Hana Saab, and Will Boyce. Lancet 2009 373:1133-43 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19268352
Misfinancing global health: the case for transparency in disbursements and decision making. Devi Sridhar and Rajaie Batniji. Lancet 2008; 372: 1185-91 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18926279Coordination and accountability in the World Health Assembly. Rajaie Batniji. Lancet 2008; 372: 805 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18774416
Barriers to improvement of mental health services in low-income and middle-income countries. Benedetto Saraceno, Mark van Ommeren, Rajaie Batniji, Alex Cohen, Oye Gureje, John Mahoney, Devi Sridhar and Chris Underhill. Lancet 2007; 370:1164-74 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17804061
An Evaluation of the International Monetary Fund's Claims about Public Health. David Stuckler, Sanjay Basu, Rajaie Batniji, Anna Gilmore, Gorik Ooms, Akanksha A. Marphatia, Rachel Hammonds, and Martin McKee. International Journal of Health Services 2010; 40:327-32 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20440976
Reviving the International Monetary Fund: concerns for the health of the poor. Rajaie Batniji. International Journal of Health Services 2009; 39: 783-787 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19927415
Mental and social aspects of health in disasters: relating qualitative social science research and the sphere standard. R Batniji, M van Ommeren, B Saraceno. Social Science & Medicine 2006; 62:1853–1864 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16202495
Averting a crisis in global health: 3 actions for the G20. Rajaie Batniji & Ngaire Woods, 2009. Global Economic Governance Programme, http://www.globaleconomicgovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/averting-a-crisis-in-global-health.pdf.
Report of a High-Level Working Group, 11-13 May 2008. Rajaie Batniji, Devi Sridhar and Ngaire Woods, Global Economic Governance Programme, 2008, http://www.globaleconomicgovernance.org/project-health
The Program on Human Rights (PHR) at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is looking forward to an exciting quarter with a continued focus on human trafficking and human rights education. We encourage you to read our newsletter below to learn more about our exciting courses, research initiatives, and new staff on board for the spring quarter.
Human Trafficking:
Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship: PHR has selected four undergraduate fellows at Stanford who will complete internships this summer in Bihar, India (human trafficking education); Ahmedabad, India (the Self Employed Women’s Association-SEWA); Guatemala (KidsAlive International); and Amman, Jordan (Visualizing Justice). The fellows are currently preparing for their summer positions. Look out for more details on our newest Human Rights Fellows next week!
Stanford Human Rights Education Inititative (SHREI), a partnership with International Comparative Area studies and Stanford Program in Inter-Cultural Education continues this quarter, with the community college fellows preparing their lesson plans. This year’s topics are human trafficking and the media. For more information please click here.
New Faces at PHR: The program is excited to welcome Jessie Brunner as the new PHR assistant, carrying out many of the tasks previously undertaken by Nadejda Marques, who departed PHR at the end of Winter quarter. Following her undergraduate studies in journalism and Spanish at U.C. Berkeley, Brunner spent six years in the professional arena, first as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and then in public relations/marketing for two nonprofit organizations. She came to Stanford University this fall to undertake her master’s degree in international policy studies, concentrating in global justice. Her professional pursuits have long been coupled with passionate activism in the arenas of human rights advocacy, conflict resolution in Israel, and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and poverty reduction. Brunner was an active participant in the winter quarter’s Sanela Diana Jenkins Human Rights Speaker Series: The International Criminal Court: The Next Decade. Brunner recently returned from a study trip to Rwanda where she delved into issues of human rights, governance, and economic development through meetings with government officials, NGOs, and the business community.
“The recent news of General Bosco Ntaganda’s surrender to the International Criminal Court where he is standing trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity certainly urges reflection on last quarter’s Sanela Diana Jenkins Human Rights Speaker Series, in which students and community members alike heard from renowned experts both within and outside the Court,” said Brunner.
Brunner can be contacted at jbrunner@stanford.edu. She will hold office hours on Mondays and Wednesdays from 12 – 2 p.m. at Encina Hall, room C148.
For the latest in human rights news and to learn more about exciting events on campus, please follow us on Facebook.
We’re looking forward to engaging and interacting with you during the spring quarter!
The Arab Spring revolutions may not have delivered the democratic outcomes many had hoped for but they have emboldened a generation of young leaders working to shape a new vision for the Middle East. Breaking away from traditional molds, these Arab Spring youth are leading programs where young people are taking an active role in political systems, the social sector, and the business world.
In an effort to harness the potential of this group of change-makers, cultivate a new generation of leaders committed to advancing collaborative change, and connect them to a global network to strengthen their efforts, the American and Middle East Network for Dialogue at Stanford (AMENDS) was born.
On April 13-17, AMENDS will convene its second annual conference at Stanford bringing together 37 young people from the Middle East and the U.S. who are pioneering initiatives for social transformation.
Founded by two Stanford undergraduates in the wake of the Arab Spring, AMENDS provides a virtual and in-person forum for dialogue and collaboration.
“Two years after the Arab Spring, we think it is more important than ever that young leaders have a platform that amplifies their voices,” says AMENDS co-founder Khaled Al-Shawi (BA ’13) from Bahrain.
Among the talented 2013 delegates include: a young Egyptian women working to combat sexual harassment on the streets of Cairo through community patrol groups; an entrepreneur supporting innovative and creative start-ups in Lebanon; an American artist using slam poetry to bring together urban youth; and several young activists working on peace initiatives in the region.
A student organization housed at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, AMENDS held their inaugural conference last year. In such a short time, it has grown into a premier forum for young entrepreneurs and activists committed to social change. The group received over 300 delegate applications this year, signaling the vast untapped potential across the region and the importance of an initiative like AMENDS to support promising young talent.
“At last year’s conference, we were continually inspired by the conversations and collaborations that occurred between our delegates,” adds Elliot Stoller (BA ’13), another AMENDS co-founder from Chicago, Illinois. “This year, we hope to expand on that success by connecting with an even more global audience.”
Over five days, AMENDS delegates will participate in skill-building workshops, deliver a TED-style talk about their project, interact with Stanford faculty and scholars, and engage in networking sessions. Former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry will deliver a keynote address on April 15 and Prince Mouley Hicham ben Abdallah, a principal advisor to the organization, will address the delegates on April 13.
AMENDS participants connect to a larger network of change-makers to enhance their capacity, increase their professional networks, and heighten the visibility of their innovative projects. After the conference, AMENDS talks are posted online providing a global platform for delegates' ideas to have a much wider impact and resonance.
AMENDS talks will be held at Stanford University and are free and open to the public. To review the schedule, please visit: http://www.stanford.edu/group/amends/cgi-bin/annual-summit/2013-summit-schedule/.
