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. 

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.

Abstract:

Does formalization really matter for developing economies? Informality has been considered as a negative economic factor as it has been associated with low productivity, high barriers to growth (dead capital), low government revenues and lack of access to credit and property rights. The remedy has been often sought in the formalization of informal economic activities, firms, workers and transactions. However, is formalization anyway a good option for development and growth in such hostile institutional settings like the ones existent in most developing countries including the Middle East? Will formalization save small entrepreneurs from rampant corruption, high interest rates, dependent judiciary, and weak rule of law? or are there alternative means to render the present informal settings more productive and developmental?

Speaker Bio:

Speaker Bio:

Yael Zeira is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. In fall 2013, she will be Croft Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Mississippi. Her research agenda explores the sources and dynamics of political conflict and violence in the context of the Middle East, with a focus on the political behavior, attitudes and identities of ordinary individuals during times of conflict. Her book project investigates the logic of individual participation in political conflict and violence using original survey and interview research on the Palestinian national movement. Other projects include a field study examining the effect of international legal decisions on the conflict attitudes of individuals in war-torn societies, as well as a new study assessing the impact of family law on women and girls in the Islamic world. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Politics at New York University in fall 2012.

Speaker Bio:

Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), resident in FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, effective July 2010. He comes to Stanford from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of Johns Hopkins University, where he was the Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy and director of SAIS' International Development program.

Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues relating to questions concerning democratization and international political economy. His book, The End of History and the Last Man, was published by Free Press in 1992 and has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His most recent books are The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy, and Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap between Latin America and the United States.

Francis Fukuyama was born on October 27, 1952. He 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 from 1979-1980, then again from 1983-89, and from 1995-96. In 1981-82 and in 1989 he was a member of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State, the first time as a regular member specializing in Middle East affairs, and then as Deputy Director for European political-military affairs. In 1981-82 he was also a member of the US delegation to the Egyptian-Israeli talks on Palestinian autonomy. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. He served as a member of the President's Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004.

Dr. Fukuyama is chairman of the editorial board of a new magazine, The American Interest, which he helped to found in 2005. He holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), and Kansai University (Japan). He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, member of the Board of Governors of the Pardee Rand Graduate School, and member of the advisory boards for the Journal of Democracy, the Inter-American Dialogue, and The New America Foundation. He is a member of the American Political Science Association and the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.