Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Michel Oksenberg Conference Room
Despite the early prospects for bipartisan unity on terrorism initiatives, government gridlock continues on most major issues in the wake of the 2004 elections. In this fully revised edition, political scientists David W. Brady and Craig Volden demonstrate that gridlock is not a product of divided government, party politics, or any of the usual scapegoats. It is, instead, an instrumental part of American government-built into our institutions and sustained by leaders acting rationally not only to achieve set goals but to thwart foolish inadvertencies. Looking at key legislative issues from the divided government under Ronald Reagan, through Clinton's Democratic government, to complete unified Republican control under George W. Bush, the authors clearly and carefully analyze important crux points in lawmaking: the swing votes, the veto, the filibuster, and the rise of tough budget politics. They show that when it comes to government gridlock, it doesn't matter who's in the White House or who's in control of Congress. Political gridlock is as American as apple pie, and its results may ultimately be as sweet in ensuring stability and democracy.
This report on the United Nations is a call for action. It is a call for concrete action now. In December 2004, the U.S. Congress, at the behest of Representative Frank Wolf, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Appropriations for Commerce, Justice, and the State, mandated the establishment of a bipartisan Task Force on the United Nations. The legislation stipulated that the Task Force, to be organized by the United States Institute of Peace, should report to Congress within six months with its conclusions and recommendations on how to make the United Nations more effective in realizing the goals of its Charter. Task Force members, experts, and staff have worked energetically to carry out this mandate. This has involved extensive research, numerous interviews and meetings with organizations, and fact-finding missions around the world.
In the coming years, few if any countries will more preoccupy the foreign policy attention of the United States than Iran. The United States has long lacked a viable and coherent policy toward Iran. Perhaps for the first time since the fall of the Shah's regime in 1979, the United States seems determined to try to forge one. The United States must move swiftly to chart a bold, new course that addresses all three of America's principal national interests with Iran. Our policy should seek to halt the development of an Iranian nuclear bomb, to end the regime's support of terrorist groups, and to help the democratic movement in Iran. Each of these goals is vital, but they are also intertwined. Compared to autocracies, democracies are more transparent about their foreign policy intentions and their military capabilities. Only when we have a government in Iran that is truly accountable to its people and to the rule of law will we be able to achieve a permanent and verifiable halt to that country's pursuit of nuclear weapons and its support of international terrorism.
Among the different types of capital resources, venture capital as practiced in Silicon Valley is broadly acknowledged as being an important constituent of a high technology, entrepreneurial habitat. In the past two decades, policy makers from different regions have learned much from its experience.
The IT industry attributes its success partly to venture capital investments in early, risky, stages. Looking ahead, other industries will emerge in the knowledge economy. Within Taiwan and Mainland China, information related industries still dominate investment, yet in Silicon Valley emerging industries including biotechnology, medical instruments and nanotechnology have recently been attracting as much venture capital as the IT industry.
Today, venture capitalists from Silicon Valley and Taiwan are probing what they perceive as growing investment opportunities in Mainland China, On the other hand, the immaturity of its private equity market and the undeveloped state of exit mechanisms there is causing venture capitalists to hesitate to made large investments. Currently, Taiwan's venture capital faces low price-earnings ratios in its 1,400 publicly listed companies. This has contributed to a decline in VC investment. The Taiwan government expects to further liberalize the financing environment to bolster it as a regional center for domestic and international corporations.
This conference will address the influence of the system of capital on regional innovation and entrepreneurship in the United States, Taiwan, and Mainland China. The focus will be on the venture capital industry, corporate venturing and other institutions of capital related to regional industrial development.
Here are some questions to be addressed in this conference:
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1 Chung Shan N. Road, Sec. 4, Taipei, Taiwan
Since the September 11 attacks, a number of U.S. and European strategists have stepped forward to call for a fundamental paradigm shift in how the United States and Europe engage the broader Middle East - that wide swath of the globe, predominantly Muslim and overwhelmingly authoritarian, stretching from Morocco to Afghanistan. The West, they have argued, must abandon the chimera of stability offered by an autocratic status quo and instead put the weight of Western influence on the side of positive democratic change. Washington and Brussels must join forces in a partnership with reformers in the region to promote democratic transformation and human development as an antidote to those radical ideologies and terrorist groups that seek to destroy Western society and values.
An intensive global search is on for the "rule of law," the holy grail of good governance, which has led to a dramatic increase in judicial reform activities in developing countries. Very little attention, however, has been paid to the widening gap between theory and practice, or to the ongoing disconnect between stated project goals and actual funded activities. Beyond Common Knowledge examines the standard methods of legal and judicial reform. Taking stock of international experience in legal and judicial reform in Latin America, Europe, India, and China, this volume answers key questions in the judicial reform debate: What are the common assumptions about the role of the courts in improving economic growth and democratic politics? Do we expect too much from the formal legal system? Is investing in judicial reform projects a good strategy for getting at the problems of governance that beset many developing countries? If not, what are we missing?
Scott Horton is a leading authority on international law regarding torture. He led an American Bar Association investigation into standards of treatment for detainees which was published in April 2004. He was a consultant for those representing Guantanamo Bay detainees, advising them on the legal implications of officially sanctioned torture. He contributed to the recent book, "The Torture Papers: the Road to Abu Ghraib."
An attorney and human rights defender, Scott represented Andrei Sakharov, Elena Bonner and other leaders of the human rights movement in the formerly communist world for more than twenty years. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and an advisor to its Center on Preventive Action, the president of the International League for Human Rights, chair of the New York City Bar's Committee on International Law, and an adjunct professor at Columbia University Law School. He has appeared as a commentator on international law issues on BBC's Panorama, ABC's 20/20 and Nightline, the CBS Evening News, NBC Dateline, CNN's Paula Zahn Show, PBS's NOW with Bill Moyers and as a frequent guest on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer.
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Marina S. Ottaway specializes in democracy and post-conflict reconstruction issues. She is a Senior Associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the Democracy and Rule of Law Project, a research endeavor that analyzes the state of democracy around the world and the efforts by the United States and other countries to promote democracy. Her new book, Democracy Challenged, a comparative study of semiauthoritarian regimes in Africa, the Caucasus, Latin America, and the Middle East, was published in January 2003. Her current works focus on political transformation in the Middle East and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan.
She is also a lecturer in African Studies at the Nitze School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Ottaway carried out research in Africa and in the Middle East and taught at the University of Addis Ababa, the University of Zambia, the American University in Cairo, and the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.
She received her undergraduate educatin at University of Pavia, Italy and her Ph.D. from Columbia University. Ottaway's selected Publications include, Democracy Challenged: The Rise of Semi-Authoritarianism (Carnegie, 2003); Funding Virtue: Civil Society Aid and Democracy Promotion, edited with Thomas Carothers (Carnegie, 2000); Africa's New Leaders: Democracy or State Reconstruction? (Carnegie, 1999)
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Dr. Hilton Root, an academic and policy specialist in international political economy and development joined the Faculty of Pitzer, a member of Claremont Colleges, as Freeman Fellow from June 2003 to June 2005. Before joining, he served the current administration as US Executive Director Designate of the Asian Development Bank, and as senior advisor on development finance to the Department of the Treasury. Dr. Root was Director and Senior Fellow of Global Studies at the Milken Institute and was a Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Initiative on Economic Growth and Democracy at the Hoover Institution. His areas of expertise are international economics, economic development and policy reform, and Asian affairs.
As a policy expert, Dr. Root advises the Asian Development Bank, the IMF, the World Bank, the UNDP, the OECD, the US State Department, the US Treasury Department and USAID. He has completed projects in 23 countries. The analytical framework he contributed to the World Bank's Asian Miracle study, 1993, was part of the effort to put institutions on the development agenda. While at the ADB as chief advisor on governance, he was the principal author of the ADB's Board-approved governance policy. He presided over a committee on governance indicators at the OECD and initiated the restructuring of the Sri Lanka civil service as an advisor to President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga. He was one of the principal contributors to the design of the Millenium Challenge Account of the Bush administration.
As an academic, he has taught at the University of Michigan, California Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University. Dr. Root has written and lectured extensively, publishing six books and more than 100 articles. He is a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal Asia, the International Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. He has published and presented in both the English and the French languages and has been translated into many languages including Chinese, Korean and Japanese.
He has been awarded honors for The Key to the East Asian Miracle: Making Shared Growth Credible (with J. Edgardo Campos), which won the 1997 Charles H. Levine Award for best book of the year by the International Political Science Association. The Social Sciences History Association awarded him the 1995 best book prize of its Economic History Section for The Fountain of Privilege: Political Foundations of Markets in Old Regime France and England. From the American Historical Association he received the Chester Higby Prize, 1986, for the best article among those published during the previous two years. He is on the board of a number of organizations and journals including the Open Society Institute, Center for Public Integrity and Review of Pacific Basin Markets and Policies. Dr. Root received his doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1983.
Encina Basement Conference Room