This talk will describe the role of data analysis in political transitions to democracy. Transitions require accountability of some form, and in the aggregate, accountability is statistical. In this talk, I will present examples of using several different kinds of data to establish political responsibility for large-scale human rights violations.

Patrick Ball, Ph.D., is the Director of the Human Rights Program at the Benetech Initiative which includes the Martus project and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG). Since 1991, Dr. Ball has designed information management systems and conducted statistical analysis for large-scale human rights data projects used by truth commissions, non-governmental organizations, tribunals and United Nations missions in El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Haiti, South Africa, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Perú, Timor-Leste, Sierra Leone, and Chad.

Our talk will present an innovative software platform we are developing for use at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal/Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia and other international tribunals. The VirtualTribunal takes the archival records of the tribunal, supplements them with other multimedia resources, and converts them into an educational, training, and legacy resource through the construction of modules aimed at specific user groups. We are working with the Khmer Rouge Tribunal to implement the Virtual Tribunal as an educational resource for Cambodian schools, universities, law schools, and judicial training centers, as well as a means for preserving the historical and human legacy of these trials documenting the trauma of the Khmer Rouge regime.

David Cohen is the Director of the War Crimes Studies Center and the Sidney and Margaret Ancker Distingusihed Professor for the Humanities at UC Berkeley. The War Crimes Studies Center supports and reports on the work of war crimes and human rights tribunals in Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Cambodia, East Timor, Bosnia, and Indonesia as well as engaging in a variety of national and regional human rights projects in Southeast Asia. The Virtual Tribunal is a partnership between the War Crimes Studies Center and the Department of Computer Science at UC Berkeley and the Hoover Library and Archive at Stanford.

A potential solution for weak or failing states is to enact a delegation agreement whereby a host relinquishes authority over some governance function to an external actor. Through case studies in Melanesia, I find that these arrangements can be implemented as treaties, rather than contracts, so that the external actor can in such cases remain somewhat exempt from the normal procedure or law of the host state. I also generate hypotheses about the conditions under which host states and external actors enact these self-enforcing equilibria: host states request these agreements either where a failure of law and order requires assistance to reestablish control over the use of force, or where a budgetary crisis necessitates funding to provide public goods. External actors agree to them where the host state poses a transnational security threat, and where the reputational and actual costs of the mission are low, as judged against alternative methods for resolving the threat. The next step in this project, then, is to test these hypotheses in other cases to see if similar agreements are enacted in different regions, and, if so, whether the same incentives also explain the decisions elsewhere.

Aila M. Matanock is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Stanford. Her current research is on effective governance for minimizing conflict, and on bringing violent groups into elections in conflicted states. Before coming to Stanford, she was employed by the RAND Corporation as a research assistant and summer associate on non-proliferation and counterterrorism projects. She received an undergraduate degree magna cum laude in Social Studies from Harvard University, while also working with the Belfer Center's Managing the Atom Project and with the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Seminar summary:

In her presentation, "Learning to Share: Under What Conditions do States Delegate Governance?" Aila Matanock seeks to define the concept of delegated governance and to identify the circumstances under which it arises. Drawing from field research with political elites in Australia and the Melanesian micro-states, she presents the variation in degrees of shared governance arrangements, from strict delegation to semi delegation, contracting and monitoring.

She defines delegated governance as an arrangement between a host state and an external actor that involves sharing in the decision function of the host state. She emphasizes the incentives of both host state and external actor as a framework for identifying the set of conditions under which we might expect to observe delegated governance. She argues and finds, in the Melanesian cases, that host states are more likely to seek delegation agreements if (1) they have lost their monopoly over the use of force (and there is no civil war or major ethnic cleavage); or (2) they are suffering from a severe budgetary crisis. External actors, for their part, enter into such agreements based on the costs they believe they will incur: reputational gains within the international community and domestic support for the delegation arrangement decrease an external actor's cost perception and increase its likelihood of entering into such an agreement. Matanock concludes that the Melanesian cases inform us that governance delegation is not an infrequent phenomenon. It is likely to emerge where lawlessness threatens both the host and external actor, but is constrained by the level of violence and the cleavages in society.

Matanock's presentation prompted questions about the scope and generalizability of the argument (To what extent do these findings reflect a special relationship between Australia and the Melanesian states? Would this apply in larger states such as Cambodia and Liberia, where the costs to an external actor might be greater?); the specific factors leading to the choice of delegated governance over other options (such as contracting, monitoring,...); and the power relationship between external actor and host state.

The stated purpose of the Trade Act of 1974 was to promote free trade. Section 301 authorized the U.S. President to impose retaliatory trade sanctions if negotiations were unsuccessful in reducing unreasonable limits on trade. The Act was reinforced in 1984, became known as “Super 301”, and made annual assessment and retaliatory measures mandatory.

Because of trade imbalances, four emerging Asian countries gave the US firms access to cigarette markets: Japan (1987), Taiwan (1987), South Korea (1989) and Thailand (1990). These forced market opennings were called the “Second Opium War” by local protestors in these countries, challenging U.S. export of unwelcome and unhealthy products.

A sea change occurred in the decades that followed the cigarette market opening in Taiwan. Of particular interest are changes in areas marketing skills and market share; lower cigarette prices; paradoxical increased smuggling; increased youth consumption; evolution of the powerful tobacco industry lobby; and a sharp increase in tobacco-related cancer deaths. Accompanying the increased cigarette consumption, a special, unusual habit of chewing betel quid started and grew into a mainstream practice among adult males (nearly one out of four). Oral and esophageal cancer increased sharply soon after the market opened. At the same time, the patriotic protectionists, NGOs, and government galvanized an anti-smoking movement, which gradually transformed Taiwan's culture so that smoking in public is no longer socially acceptable. A new term, “de-normalization,” was coined about the favorable effect of market opening.

 The ironic outcome of Super 301 is that while the market was forced open solely by the US, in only ten years, US market share, once leading, shrunk to a distant fifth, after Japan, UK, Germany and domestic producers. The trade imbalance was little affected by the opening of the cigarette market.

Dr. Wen's colloquium continues the colloquium series on tobacco control in East Asia, sponsored by the Asia Health Policy Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, in coordination with FSI’s Global Tobacco Prevention Research Initiative.

Seymour Martin Lipset famously claimed that the more well-to-do a nation is, the greater the chance that it will sustain democracy.  This "law" fits the experience of several countries in Northeast and Southeast Asia.  Formerly authoritarian South Korea and Taiwan grew rich and became stable democracies with active civil societies, as Lipset would have expected.  His "law" fits the Philippines and Thailand as well- -poor countries with tenuous holds on democracy where uncivil societies have mobilized to defend elite hegemony against mass-based electoral challenges.

The case of Indonesia, in contrast, limits Lipset's Law.  Poor yet stably democratic, Indonesia is free of regime-threatening social conflicts.  Arguably, despite its poverty, its democracy is already consolidated.  India's record of sustaining democracy is another case in point.  These poor yet successfully democratic polities amount to large stakes in the heart of modernization theory.

Prof. Thompson will contend that Indonesia's democracy is neither middle-class-based nor dominated by big business, but is instead still characterized by traditional cross-cutting ethno-religious cleavages that limit the impact of money politics, reduce the risk of populism, foster elite consensus, and thereby encourage democratic stability. He will link his argument not only to Lipset's Law but to the intellectual legacies of Alexis de Tocqueville, Antonio Gramsci, and Barrington Moore among other students of democracy and modernity.

Mark R. Thompson is a professor of political science at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany.  A Chicago native, he took his first degree in religious studies at Brown University followed by postgraduate work at Cambridge University and the University of the Philippines.  Fascinated by Philippine people power, he wrote his dissertation at Yale University on the anti-Marcos struggle (Yale University Press, 1996).  After moving to Germany, he witnessed popular uprisings in East Germany and Eastern Europe, inspiring him to conceptualize democratic revolutions in essays later published as a book (Routledge, 2004).  He is in residence at Stanford from February through April 2009.

C. Holland Taylor is an expert on Islam and the process of Islamization in Southeast Asia, having lived, studied and worked in the Muslim world, from Iran to Indonesia, over a period of more than four decades.  

Mr. Taylor established LibForAll Foundation (www.libforall.org) in 2003, together with former Indonesian president Kyai Haji Abdurrahman Wahid, whom the Wall Street Journal has called "the single most influential religious leader in the Muslim world" and "easily the most important ally the West has in the ideological struggle against Islamic radicalism." Under their leadership, LibForAll has grown into the leading NGO developing and operationalizing successful counter-extremism strategies worldwide.

Their inspiration lay in the heroic example of President Wahid's own 16th century Javanese ancestors, whose deft use of soft and hard power defeated Muslim extremists, and guaranteed freedom of religion for all Javanese, two centuries before the Bill of Rights led to the separation of church and state in the U.S.

Based on lessons derived from this struggle, LibForAll is forging a Global Rahmatan lil ‘Alamin ("Blessing for All Creation") Counter-Extremism Network of top Muslim opinion leaders in the fields of religion, education, pop culture, government, business and the media, who are joining to proclaim, with one voice, that radical Islam has no theological validity, and thereby mobilize the "great silent majority" of moderate, peace-loving Muslims to reject the extremists' ideology of hatred and violence. 

This strategy has resulted in a number of world-class achievements, causing Wall Street Journal foreign columnist Bret Stephens to proclaim: "LibForAll is a model of what a competent public diplomacy effort in the Muslim world should look like."

In his presentation, Mr. Taylor will explain key elements of LibForAll's ground-breaking strategy and present examples of world class achievements, including: a "musical jihad" against religious hatred and terrorism; development of the first part of a unique 26-episode counter-extremism television/video series (Ocean of Revelation); and convening an historic religious summit where top Muslim leaders condemned the evils of Holocaust denial - generating worldwide publicity that effectively countered the December 2006 Holocaust denial conference in Tehran.

Mr. Taylor's work with LibForAll follows a career as a successful entrepreneur and global telecom executive, during which he served as CEO of USA Global Link, and was credited by numerous leading publications as one of the essential catalysts in the deregulation of the global telecommunications industry.