Eleonora Pasotti is Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Santa Cruz and Postdoctoral Fellow at CDDRL. Her work has been concerned with the relationship between democracy, personal power and electoral law. Pasotti's research at CDDRL is directed toward three aspects of this relationship: how proportional and majoritarian electoral systems interact with clientelistic networks; how institutions shape the cost structure of political mobilization; and how institutions of vote mobilization, from clientelism to mass campaigning, distort the normative goal of democracy. Her previous work has been based largely on the politics of Naples, Italy, but has broad comparative implications for the study of clientelism, patronage politics and populism in the developing world as well. Prior to joining the faculty at Santa Cruz, Eleonora completed a PhD in Political Science at Columbia University under the direction of Charles Tilly, Jon Elster, and Ira Katznelson. She also holds an MSc in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Anders Åslund joined the Institute for International Economics in 2006. He has served previously as the director of the Russian and Eurasian Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace since 2003 and as codirector of the Carnegie Moscow Center's project on Economies of the Post-Soviet States. He joined the Carnegie Endowment as a senior associate in October 1994. He is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. His work examines the transformation of formerly socialist economies to market-based economies. While the central areas of his studies are Russia and Ukraine, he also focuses on the broader implications of economic transition.

Åslund has served as an economic adviser to the governments of Russia and Ukraine and to President Askar Akaev of Kyrgyzstan. He was a professor at the Stockholm School of Economics and director of the Stockholm Institute of East European Economics. He has worked as a Swedish diplomat in Kuwait, Poland, Geneva, and Moscow. He is a member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and an honorary professor of the Kyrgyz National University. He is co-chairman of the Economics Education and Research Consortium and chairman of the Advisory Council of the Center for Social and Economic Research (CASE), Warsaw.

He is the author of Building Capitalism: The Transformation of the Former Soviet Bloc (Cambridge University Press, 2001), How Russia Became a Market Economy (Brookings, 1995), Gorbachev's Struggle for Economic Reform, 2d ed. (Cornell University Press, 1991), and Private Enterprise in Eastern Europe: The Non-Agricultural Private Sector in Poland and the GDR, 1945-83 (Macmillan, 1985) and editor or coeditor of several books, including with CDDRL Director, Michael McFaul, Revolution in Orange: The Origins of Ukraine's Democratic Breakthrough (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2006).

This event is co-sponsored with the Center on Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Motoo Noguchi is a professor at UNAFEI (United Nations Asia and Far East Institute for the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders) in Tokyo, serving concurrently as senior attorney at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Legal Affairs Bureau.

He started his career as public prosecutor at the Ministry of Justice in 1985 and has accumulated considerable experience in criminal investigations and trials. He also has long experience in the provision of legal technical assistance for developing countries in Asia including Cambodia, firstly as professor at the Research and Training Institute of the Ministry of Justice, then as counsel at the Asian Development Bank, and currently as professor at UNAFEI. Noguchi was appointed in May 2006 to be one of three international judges of the Appeals Chamber of the Khmer Rouge Trials by the government of Cambodia. The trial will bring to justice members of the Khmer Rouge government accused of massacres in the 1970s. The United Nations created the tribunal in 2003 to try former Khmer Rouge Leaders.

Motoo Noguchi is a Graduate of University of Tokyo, Faculty of Law. He was a visiting scholar at University of Washington, Law School, USA from 1992-93 and a visiting professional at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands in 2005. He was a visiting fellow at Yale last fall and will be a visiting scholar at Stanford Law School during his stay at Stanford in January.

Vitali Silitski received his PhD in Political Science from Rutgers University. He worked as an associate professor at the European Humanities University in Minsk, Belarus, a position he was forced to leave in 2003 after publicly criticizing the government of President Alexander Lukashenka. Silitski is currently working on a book titled The Long Road from Tyranny: Post-Communist Authoritarianism and Struggle for Democracy in Serbia and Belarus. Vitali is also a freelance analyst for Freedom House Nations in Transit Report, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Oxford Analytica. In 2004-2005, he was a Reagan-Fascell Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy. Vitali will continue as a visiting scholar at CDDRL through early 2007.

Avner Greif is Professor of Economics and Bowman Family Endowed Professor in Humanities and Sciences at Stanford. His research interests include European economic history: the historical development of economic institutions, their interrelations with political, social and cultural factors and their impact on economic growth. Some of his publications are: "Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade", Cambridge University Press (March 2006); "Impersonal Exchange without Impartial Law: The Community Responsibility System," Chicago Journal of International Law (2004); "How Do Self-enforcing Institutions Endogenously Change? Institutional Reinforcement and Quasi-Parameters" (with David Laitin), the American Political Science Review (2003); "Analytic Narratives," Oxford University Press, 1998. Avner Greif received his Ph. D. in economics from Northwestern University, and his B.A. in economics and history - from Tel Aviv University.

Akbar Ganji will speak about the status of the Iranian democratic movement as well as the coherency of the Iranian regime. He will speculate about the implications of Iranian domestic politics for international security issues.

Akbar Ganji is Iran's most celebrated dissident and investigative journalist. He has won numerous prestigious awards in Europe and North America. His fifty-six day hunger strike turned him into a figure of international fame, with many heads of states and hundreds of the world's most renowned public intellectuals demanding his safety and freedom. Ganji first gained prominence in Iran as an investigative journalist when he helped uncover a government conspiracy to murder Iranian intellectuals. In response, the regime put him in prison for six years. Behind bars, Ganji continued to write and produced his famous Republican Manifesto where he argued in favor of a secular liberal democracy for Iran. Mr. Ganji is making his visit to the United States since being released from prison. He will speak in Farsi with consecutive translation in English.