Jeremy M. Weinstein, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and an associate professor of political science, will take on a new role as chief of staff to Samantha Power, the United States ambassador to the United Nations.

As Power’s top aide, Weinstein will be the ambassador’s principal policy adviser. He will play a central role in advancing her strategic priorities and U.S. foreign policy objectives at the U.N. He will also help Power manage the mission’s staff in New York and Washington. 

Jeremy Weinstein

He begins the job this week, as the continuing turmoil in the Middle East dominates foreign policy discussions.

“Recent world events pose critical challenges to the United Nations, a global institution that reflects our shared commitment to promoting peace, security, and human dignity,” said Weinstein, who will take a public service leave from Stanford where he is also the Ford-Dorsey Director of African Studies. “I am honored to join Ambassador Power’s excellent team at this important moment for the United States and the world.”

Weinstein and Power served together from 2009 to 2011 on the National Security Council, where he was the director of development and democracy and she was the special assistant to the president and senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights.

“Jeremy and I worked closely together during our time at the White House on issues that are central to our work in New York, including human rights, democracy, global development, and anti-corruption, including the launch of the Open Government Partnership,” Power wrote to her staff in announcing Weinstein’s appointment. “I am thrilled to have him join the team.”

Weinstein, 38, has focused his scholarly research on civil wars and political violence; ethnic politics and the political economy of development; and democracy, accountability and political change.

He received the Karl Deutsch Award this year from the International Studies Association. The award recognizes scholars younger than 40 – or are within 10 years of receiving a doctorate – who have made the most significant contributions to international relations and peace research.

“Jeremy's appointment is great news for the U.S. government and a welcome continuation of the FSI faculty's tradition of bipartisan public service,” said FSI Director Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar. “His experience in both international relations and the study of political institutions – along with his considerable creativity and energy – will serve him well in this crucial position, and we look forward to his return.”

Weinstein obtained a bachelor’s with high honors from Swarthmore College, and a master’s and doctorate in political economy and government from Harvard University. He joined the Stanford faculty in 2004, and was honored in 2008 with the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching.

According to a common view in Mexico today, the attempt to transform Mexican political institutions according to liberal values since the nineteenth century has been a complete failure. On this view, the reasons for this failure are, primarily, that liberal values and ideas were “foreign” and “imported”, such that they could hardly have taken root in a society that had recently emerged from three centuries of colonial rule and was, therefore, backwards and “traditional”. Scholars often complain that liberals failed to realize the values of freedom and equality, that there is no rule of law, no public culture of toleration, and no effective enforcement of fundamental individual rights either civil or political.

Many resource dependent states have to varying degrees, failed to provide for the welfare of their own populations, could threaten global energy markets, and could pose security risks for the United States and other countries.  Many are in Africa, but also Central Asia (Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan), Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Burma, East Timor), and South America (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador) Some have only recently become – or are about to become – significant resource exporters.  Many have histories of conflict and poor governance.  The recent boom and decline in commodity prices – the largest price shock since the 1970s – will almost certainly cause them special difficulties.  The growing role of India and China, as commodity importers and investors, makes the policy landscape even more challenging.

We believe there is much the new administration can learn from both academic research, and recent global initiatives, about how to address the challenge of poorly governed states that are dependent on oil, gas, and mineral exports.  Over the last eight years there has been a wealth of new research on the special problems that resource dependence can cause in low-income countries – including violent conflict, authoritarian rule, economic volatility, and disappointing growth.  The better we understand the causes of these problems, the more we can learn about how to mitigate them.

There has also been a new set of policy initiatives to address these issues: the Kimberley Process, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, the World Bank’s new “EITI plus plus,” Norway’s Oil for Development initiative, and the incipient Resource Charter.  NGOs have played an important role in most of these initiatives; key players include Global Witness, the Publish What You Pay campaign, the Revenue Watch Institute, Oxfam America, and an extensive network of civil society organizations in the resource-rich countries themselves.

Some of these initiatives have been remarkably successful.  The campaign against ‘blood diamonds,’ through the Kimberley Process, has reduced the trade in illicit diamonds to a fraction of its former level, and may have helped curtail conflicts in Angola, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.  Many other initiatives are so new they have not been have not been carefully evaluated.

This workshop is designed to bring together people in the academic and policy worlds to identify lessons from this research, and from these policy initiatives, that can inform US policy towards resource-dependent poorly states in the new administration.

On May 10-11, 2010 the Program on Good Governance and Political Reform in the Arab World at CDDRL held its international inaugural conference. In line with the Arab Reform Program's vision, the conference featured internationally renowned scholars, activists, and practitioners from the Arab world, Europe and the United States. Over the two days, conference participants engaged in multidisciplinary debates addressing hard politics as well as soft politics, and analyzing political reform from different angles, with panels on the economy, state systems, the media, civil society, political opposition, youth politics, and the role of international actors. Problems facing political reform in the Arab world today were discussed and scrutinized, as were possible paths forward. The conference debates unearthed the need for a deep understanding of the problems facing political reform in the region that is driven by an analysis of long-term and often ignored issues that are at the core of political developments. The debates also highlighted that problems and prospects for reform are different in each Arab country because each country has its own unique set of issues and because within each country different ethnic groups, classes, and locales have different takes on and stakes in political developments. The conference closed with a speech by Dr. Saad Eddin Ibrahim.

Egyptian activists made history in February 2011 when they overturned a thirty-year dictatorship, in part thanks to their mastery of social media.

On April 4, the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University together with the Cloud to Street Initiative, will be holding a Digital Townhall meeting to connect activists who were leading the protest movement in Cairo with researchers at Stanford, Harvard, and the University of British Columbia. This will be an opportunity to hear directly from activists about their experiences leading protests, using social media to influence events, and what assistance they could use to increase their influence going forward. 

The format will include a panel of four activists speaking by live video feed, with participants in North America sending questions by chat. You may log in to the conversation from any internet connection, or you may join us in person from the CISAC conference room in Encina Hall.

Early in the Supreme Court oral arguments in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., Justice Kennedy alerted the plaintiffs' lawyer that, for him, "the case turns on this:... 'No other nation in the world permits its court to exercise universal civil jurisdiction over alleged extraterritorial human rights abuses to which the nation has no connection." That statement, quoting an amicus brief filed for one of the defendants, is true when taken literally, but is misleading inasmuch as it fails to take into account that analogous suits are allowed in teh civil-law world of Continental Europe if one knows how to go beyond the literal, as transposing from one legal system into another requies. Universal jurisdiction for jus cogens violations has found a fooring in the criminal law of civilian States for reasons tied to deep systemic attributes not shared by the United States legal order.