Stanford University

Corruption in Food Delivery: When are Vulnerable Populations Most Affected?

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Abstract:

In developing countries, the efficacy of subsidized food delivery systems is particularly challenged by corruption that can disproportionately affect less powerful areas or less powerful households, thereby steering aid away from the most vulnerable beneficiaries. In this paper, Sriniketh Nagavarapu and others examine how the identity of food delivery agents affects the take-up of vulnerable populations.  Specifically, they investigate the take-up of subsidized goods in Uttar Pradesh, India, under the Targeted Public Distribution System (TPDS), a system undermined by widespread corruption. Using rich household survey data from the first year of the TPDS, they establish that households from the historically disadvantaged Scheduled Castes exhibit lower take-up when facing non-Scheduled Caste delivery agents. After showing that several potentially reasonable explanations (e.g. discrimination or elite capture) are not consistent with the data, they assess the quantitative impact of the most plausible remaining explanation, which involves monitoring and enforcement.

Speaker Bio:

Sriniketh Nagavarapu is an assistant professor of economics and environmental studies at Brown University. His research is focused on environmental and labor economics in developing countries.  Specifically, he is interested in understanding how local institutions manage natural resources and service delivery, and how management effectiveness is shaped by market incentives and the nature of the institutions. His recent work in this area examines the management of fisheries by cooperatives in Mexico and the delivery of food assistance by government-appointed authorities in India. In other work, he has examined how the labor market mediates the link between ethanol production expansion and deforestation in Brazil. Nagavarapu received his Ph.D., M.A., and B.A. from Stanford University. At Brown, he is a faculty associate of the Population Studies and Training Center, Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences, and the Environmental Change Initiative.

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Sriniketh Nagavarapu Assistant Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies Speaker Brown University
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The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law

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From Oxford University Press:

There is a broad consensus among scholars that the idea of human rights was a product of the Enlightenment but that a self-conscious and broad-based human rights movement focused on international law only began after World War II. In this narrative, the nineteenth century's absence is conspicuous--few have considered that era seriously, much less written books on it. But as Jenny Martinez shows in this novel interpretation of the roots of human rights law, the foundation of the movement that we know today was a product of one of the nineteenth century's central moral causes: the movement to ban the international slave trade. Originating in England in the late eighteenth century, abolitionism achieved remarkable success over the course of the nineteenth century. Martinez focuses in particular on the international admiralty courts, which tried the crews of captured slave ships. The courts, which were based in the Caribbean, West Africa, Cape Town, and Brazil, helped free at least 80,000 Africans from captured slavers between 1807 and 1871. Here then, buried in the dusty archives of admiralty courts, ships' logs, and the British foreign office, are the foundations of contemporary human rights law: international courts targeting states and non-state transnational actors while working on behalf the world's most persecuted peoples--captured West Africans bound for the slave plantations of the Americas. Fueled by a powerful thesis and novel evidence, Martinez's work will reshape the fields of human rights history and international human rights law.


Features

  • Forces us to fundamentally rethink the origins of human rights activism
  • Filled with fascinating stories of captured slave ship crews brought to trial across the Atlantic world in the nineteenth century
  • Shows how the prosecution of the international slave trade was crucial to the development of modern international law
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Jenny Martinez
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0195391624
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Mexico’s Fight for Security

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Since 2006, more than 40,000 people in Mexico have died in drug-related homicides, and recent figures indicate that the pace and severity of drug-related violence is increasing. Experiencing a significant breakdown of its rule of law, the population of Ciudad Juárez alone suffered more than 3,000 homicides in 2010, making it the most dangerous city anywhere in the world. Dr. Poiré Romero will address the characteristics of the security situation in Mexico, the historical events and situations that made it what it is now, and the current strategy that the Federal Government is implementing to achieve security. Dr. Poiré’s talk will be completely off-the-record, and is by invitation only.

Speaker biography:

On September 9, 2011, Dr. Alejandro Poiré Romero was appointed as Director of Mexico´s National Security Agency by President Felipe Calderón. Prior to that, Dr. Poiré served as Secretary of the National Security Council and Cabinet, and has held a variety of cabinet-level positions since 2007. He also worked as an adviser to the National Institute of Statistics on the creation of the first National Survey on Political Culture and Citizenship Practices. He has published several academic pieces analyzing public opinion, campaign dynamics and voting behavior in Mexico, in addition to two books on Mexico’s democratic process, Towards Mexico’s Democratization: Parties, Campaigns, Elections, and Public Opinion and Mexico's Pivotal Democratic Election.

Dr. Poiré holds a PhD in Political Science from Harvard University, and a Bachelor’s degree in the same field from Mexico’s Autonomous Technological Institute (ITAM), where he has been a professor and the Political Science Department Chair. He has also been a visiting researcher and lecturer at several institutions in the USA, including MIT, and Latin America. 

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Alejandro Poiré Romero Director of Mexico’s National Security Agency Speaker
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Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program recruitment opens

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The Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program is recruiting rising leaders from around the world to join the 2012 program scheduled for July 22-August 10 at Stanford University. Entering its eighth year, the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program is run by the faculty and staff at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. The deadline to apply is December 12, 2011.

The program is funded by generous support from Bill and Phyllis Draper and Ingrid von Mangoldt Hills.

A life changing experience I will never forget. I leave a much more informed and networked civil society leader. -Titus Gwemende, Zimbabwe (Class of 2011)

Each year, the program brings together a group of 25 to 30 mid-career practitioners in law, politics, government, private enterprise, civil society, and development from emerging and aspiring democracies. The three-week program provides a unique forum for emerging leaders to connect, exchange experiences, and receive academic training to enrich their knowledge and advance their work. Academic sessions are taught by an interdisciplinary team of leading Stanford faculty who are joined by an all-star roster of outside guest speakers.

Fellows emerge from the training program better equipped with new techniques and approaches to build democracy and economic development in their home countries. The 2012 class of Draper Hills Summer Fellows will join a network of 186 alumni from 57 developing democracies worldwide.

Previous Summer Fellows have served as presidential advisors, senators, lawyers, journalists, civic activists, entrepreneurs, academic researchers, and development practitioners, among others. Strong candidates should have substantial practical experience and play important emerging roles in their country's economic and social development. The program seeks applicants from countries where democracy and development are not firmly established, in the regions of Africa, Asia, Eurasia, Latin America, and the Arab world. Successful applicants will have academic credentials necessary to participate and contribute to advanced academic sessions and a working knowledge of English.

The program is highly selective, receiving several hundred applications each year. To learn more about the program and to apply, please visit: http://draperhills.stanford.edu/. Applicants are encouraged to apply as early as possible, applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.

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A Revolution for Whom?: Measuring Political Bias in Venezuelan Land Reform using Maisanta

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Michael Albertus, post-doctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law will present a paper that details the first analysis of a distributive program – a Venezuelan land reform initiative known as Misión Zamora – at the individual level using data on revealed voter preferences and the receipt of particularistic benefits. Using data from a list of millions of voters that signed petitions to recall President Chávez, Albertus will match information on all recent land grant applicants to petition signers to measure the effect of political preferences on the likelihood of applying for land, receiving land, and being effectively rejected. He will present evidence for both strategic core voter targeting and punishment of opposition voters, although both of these effects are modified by local political actors. The lack of a complete property registry and ambiguity in key provisions of the Land Law have enabled considerable administrative discretion in the application of the program.

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Michael Albertus

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CDDRL Visiting Scholar, Winter-Spring 2026
CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow, 2011-2012
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Michael Albertus is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and the author of five books. His newest book, Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies, was published by Basic Books in January 2025. It tells the story of how land came to be power within human societies, how it shapes power, and how its allocation determines the major social ills that societies grapple with.

Albertus studied math, electrical engineering, and political science at the University of Michigan and earned degrees in all three in 2005. He then did a PhD in political science at Stanford University, completing in 2011. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Albertus joined the University of Chicago faculty in 2012 and has since been on sabbatical twice back at Stanford, including as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavior Sciences. In addition to his books, Albertus is also the author of over 30 peer-reviewed journal articles, including at flagship journals like the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and World Politics. He has taught courses to undergraduate, Masters, and PhD students on topics including inequality and redistribution, democracy and dictatorship, comparative politics, and political and economic development and policy in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula.

The defining features of Albertus' work are his engagement with big questions and puzzles and the ability to join big data and cutting-edge research methods with original, deep on-the-ground fieldwork everywhere from government offices to archives and farm fields. He has conducted fieldwork throughout the Americas, southern Europe, South Africa, and elsewhere. His books and articles have won numerous awards and shifted conventional understandings of democracy, authoritarianism, and the consequences of how humans occupy and relate to the land.

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Brenna Powell

Encina Hall
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Visiting Scholar, 2011-12
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Brenna Marea Powell received her PhD in Government and Social Policy from Harvard in 2011. She is interested in comparative racial and ethnic politics, conflict and inequality. Her research includes security and policing in divided societies, as well as racial politics in Brazil and the United States. She has been a graduate fellow at Harvard's Wiener Center for Inequality and Social Policy, and Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation. Prior to her graduate study, she spent five years working with the Stanford
Center on International Conflict and Negotiation on grassroots dialogue and community-based mediation programs in Northern Ireland. Brenna speaks Portuguese and received her BA from Stanford in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.

At CDDRL, Brenna is working with the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy and Security supported by the Kofi Annan Foundation and International IDEA. She is also working on a book project about post-conflict policing in Northern Ireland.

Human Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Latin America

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The Program on Human Rights and the Center for Latin American Studies are pleased to host the Conference "Human Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Latin America".

Indigenous peoples around the world have often been dispossessed of their land, leading to ongoing conflict over control and usage of land and resources. Indigenous peoples in Latin America are no exception; they are among the most disadvantaged and vulnerable peoples in the region. Indigenous peoples in Latin America rank highest on underdevelopment indicators such as incarceration, illiteracy, unemployment, poverty and disease. They face discrimination in schools and are exploited in the workplace. Their sacred lands and artifacts are plundered from them. In many Latin American countries, indigenous peoples are not even permitted to study their own language.

The Stanford Spring conference “Human Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Latin America,” brings scholars from all disciplines to examine the common trends, actors, challenges and changes among indigenous populations in Latin America and the Caribbean.

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Alejandro Toledo President of Peru from 2001 to 2006 Keynote Speaker
Eliane Karp-Toledo Anthropologist, Economist and former First Lady of Peru (2001 to 2006) Keynote Speaker
Conferences
CDDRL Conferences
Indigenous Peoples Rights

A Critique of Repressive Approaches to Combat Human Trafficking

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Alison Brysk is the Mellichamp Chair in Global Governance, Global and International Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She has authored or edited eight books on international human rights including the book From Human Trafficking to Human Rights. Professor Brysk has been a visiting scholar in Argentina, Ecuador, France, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands, South Africa, and Japan, and in 2007 held the Fulbright Distinguished Visiting Chair in Global Governance at Canada's Centre for International Governance Innovation.

 

Dr. Mohammed Mattar is the executive director of the Protection Project. He has worked in over 50 countries to promote state compliance with international human rights standards and has advised governments on drafting and implementing anti-trafficking legislation. He participated in drafting the United Nations model law on trafficking in persons and he authored the Inter-Parliamentarian Handbook on the appropriate responses to trafficking in persons. Dr. Mattar currently teaches courses on international and comparative law at Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins University (SAIS) and American University, and has authored numerous publications for law reviews and the United Nations on international human rights and Islamic law, trafficking in persons and reporting mechanisms.

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Alison Brysk Mellichamp Professor of Global Governance in the Global and International Studies Program Speaker UCSB
Dr. Mohammed Mattar Executive Director of the Protection Project Speaker Johns Hopkins University
Helen Stacy Director Host Program on Human Rights
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Human Trafficking
Sanela Diana Jenkins Human Rights Speaker Series on Human Trafficking

The Program on Human Rights welcomes new program manager

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The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law is pleased to announce that Nadejda Marques has joined the Program on Human Rights (PHR) to serve as the new program manager. In this capacity, Marques will coordinate a range of interdisciplinary initiatives and events, support new research projects, and spearhead PHR's outreach and fundraising efforts. Marques will work together with PHR Program Director and FSI Senior Fellow, Helen Stacy to support the conceptualization, design, and conduct of PHR's research initiatives, advancing the mission and visibility of PHR activities at Stanford University and beyond.

Marques joins the PHR from Boston where she worked as research coordinator for the Cost of Inaction Project at the François-Bagnoud Xavier Center for Health and Human Rights based at the Harvard School of Public Health. Working for the Cost of Inaction Project, Marques was responsible for researching and analyzing the cost of inaction of public programs and actions that help reduce the impact of HIV/AIDS on children in Angola.

"Nadejda Marques' training as an economist, her 15 years of work in human rights, including her work in the field in Angola and in founding the Brazilian human rights NGO Justiça Global bring valuable experience and expertise to the Program on Human Rights at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law," said PHR director Helen Stacy. "Even more importantly, Nadejda's commitment to bottom-up human rights reform means that she is acutely aware of human rights practice as a multi-faceted and inter-disciplinary activity. I am thrilled to welcome Nadejda to the Program on Human Rights as a thought partner to expand the reach and scope of our programming."

Marques holds degrees in economics (UNA, Brazil) and international finance (FGV, Brazil). She has worked as a special correspondent for the Washington Post in Latin America, and has taught languages and Latin American culture at Harvard, Bentley College, and the University of Massachusetts in Boston. For the past decade, Marques has worked in the field of human rights, most notably with Human Rights Watch in Brazil and Angola. Marques is fluent in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. She serves as a consultant and board member for leading human rights NGOs in Brazil and Angola.

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