In June 2013, Beatriz Magaloni, associate professor of political science and director of the Program on Poverty and Governance (PovGov) at the Freeman Spogli Institute’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law led the Stanford Bing Overseas Studies Program (BOSP) to Brazil. The three-week seminar entitled, “Rio de Janeiro: A Cultural and Political Social History,” drew 15 outstanding and diverse Stanford undergraduate students eager to experience life in Latin America’s largest country. The trip allowed the group to learn more about the political and social factors that have transformed - and continue to shape - life in economically marginalized sections of Rio.

Despite recent efforts to fight poverty and accelerate income redistribution, Brazil suffers from high levels of income inequality. In Rio, one of Latin America's largest cities, the results of this inequality are even more profound. There are roughly 763 favelas – urban slums- in Rio that are home to approximately 1.5 million people. The local government has tolerated, but never incorporated favelas into the formal city, leaving residents to organize public services such as electricity, running water or garbage collection in their neighborhoods. As a result of the virtual absence of the state, favelas have long been notoriously violent areas and breeding ground for criminal organizations, specially drug trafficking.

Students at Rocinha, with Paulo Amendoim, their local guide, showed them the highlights of the neighborhood including food, dance and pipa (kite flying).

In 2008, the state of Rio de Janeiro embarked on an unprecedented effort to take back the territories in favelas controlled by criminal organizations ahead of the upcoming World Cup and Summer Olympics, as well as securing favela citizens’ rights to freely move across their own communities. The Pacifying Police Units (UPPs) is at the center of the policy, with 24-hour patrolling and community policing every day. UPP officers focus on breaking down negative police stereotypes by working closely with the population – teaching classes, coaching sport teams, hosting events and organizing forums where community members can express their needs and concerns. The “pacification” process has already involved 31 favelas, with 70 more to come by the 2016 deadline.

Aligned with the ongoing research being carried out by Magaloni and her team at PovGov, the goal of the BOSP seminar in Rio was to introduce students to this important development and analyze how it has impacted the complex social dynamics found within the city. The students explored some of the implications to favela residents in terms of security, local governance, the preservation and dissemination of culture, as well as prospects for economic and social development in “pacified” territories.

The in-country seminar included an introduction to the Portuguese language and cultural activities, including field trips and lectures by experts on a variety of fields including: criminal violence, public security, local history and culture, social entrepreneurship, local governance and public policy. Speakers that participated in the program included: representatives of non-profit organizations such as Viva Rio and the Observatory of Favelas; officials from the Military State Police, including former UPP Commander Colonel Paulo Henrique; as well as university professors from Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro and Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, including criminal violence expert and director of the Laboratory for the Analysis of Violence, Dr. Ignacio Cano.

In order to provide students with a more inclusive perspective of the pacification process on the ground, the PovGov team - working alongside local guides and community leaders - planned visits to the “pacified” favelas of Rocinha, Complexo do Alemão and Morro Dona Marta. During these visits the students had the chance to visit the UPP headquarters, talk to the UPP captain, and participate in a community work initiative with Coral Tintas - one of Brazil’s largest paint manufacturing companies committed to improving favelas by providing free paint for locals to renew the facades of houses and buildings. The students also visited the BOPE headquarters, Rio’s elite squad police unit, and Jongo da Serrinha, an NGO that seeks to preserve the tradition of Jongo - a style of music and dance - through a children’s daycare and education center. Additional day-trips and sightseeing tours included: the Rio Art Museum, the Imperial Museum of History, as well as many of Rio’s famous beaches.

According to student participant Marilyn Travis ('16), “Going to Brazil this summer was the trip of a lifetime. We were very lucky to have gifted faculty and staff who worked hard to put together such a rich program. This opportunity has literally shifted my frame of mind on many issues I was previously naive about. I have gained a more global perspective and had the opportunity to contemplate the affects of mega events on marginalized people.”

To view images from the trip please click here.  

About the Program on Poverty and Governance

The Program on Poverty and Governance at CDDRL explores factors that affect good governance and poverty alleviation in Latin America, with a focus on Brazil and Mexico. Led by Beatriz Magaloni, associate professor of political science at Stanford University, the program conducts empirical research, bringing together experts from across the disciplines of political science, economics, law, medicine and education to increase understanding of the complex causal linkages between political institutions, the quality of governance, and the capacity of developing societies to meet basic human needs. One of the research platforms, “Governance and Criminal Violence,” studies ways to rebuild the social fabric in violent places where the society does not trust law enforcement and government institutions, with the Pacification of favelas of Rio as a case study.

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.

Access to life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical treatments is a nagging problem for millions of Latin Americans. In several countries of the region, judicial actions for the protection of basic rights have proved to be instrumental for gaining access to such goods. Brazil and Colombia are, allegedly, the two Latin American countries with the largest number of right to health cases. Everaldo Lamprea suggests that dismantling right to health litigation in order to reduce public costs--as was recently proposed by the Colombian government-- would be a catastrophic event for many Colombians, trapped in a heavily privatized and deregulated health system where many life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical treatments are out of the reach of most pockets. Lamprea will suggest that a more reasonable governmental reaction should include an analysis of the role played in the current health-sector crisis by global actors such as International Financial Institutions and BigPharma companies

On November 5-6  2010, the global Network of Democracy Research Institutes (NDRI) convened a conference in Quito, Ecuador, on "Political Clientalism, Social Policy, and the Quality of Democracy: Evidence from Latin America, Lessons from Other Regions." The meeting was cosponsored by three NDRI member institutes: the Washington-based International Forum for Democratic Studies (IFDS) of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Ecuador's Grupo FARO, and the Program on Poverty and Governance at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL).

The conference aimed to explore, in comparative framework, the modus operandi of political clientalism in the realm of social policies as well as the strategies that might be employed to combat it. The conference brought together 21 scholars and practitioners from around the world, including several from South America, particularly the Andean region. Participants from CDDRL included; Larry Diamond, Beatriz Magaloni, Francis Fukuyama, and Simeon Nichter.

Please see the attached conference report, which summarizes the main issues and key findings discussed at the meeting. The papers presented at the conference will be compiled into a volume edited by Diego Abente, deputy director of the International Forum for Democratic Studies at NED.

Why have militarized crackdowns on drug cartels had wildly divergent outcomes, sometimes exacerbating cartel-state conflict, as in Mexico and, for decades, in Brazil, but sometimes reducing violence, as with Rio de Janeiro's new 'Pacification' (UPP) strategy?  CDDRL-CISAC Post Doctoral Fellow Benjamin Lessing will distinguish key logics of violence, focusing on violent corruption--cartels' use of coercive force in the negotiation of bribes. Through this channel, crackdowns can lead to increased fighting unless the intensity of state repression is made conditional on cartels' use of violence--a key difference between Mexico and Brazil.

Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is pleased to announce that undergraduate senior honors student, Anna Barrett Schickele, received the Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research. This university award is given to the top ten percent of honors theses in social science, science, and engineering.

Schickele's thesis entitled, "One Drop At A Time," examines the factors that inform farmers' decisions to use modern irrigation systems in the Lurín Valley of Peru, where she spent several months conducting fieldwork with a Lima-based NGO. Schickele — a public policy major —was able to collect primary data through interviews with farmers and fieldworkers to inform her research study that includes policy recommendations to the NGO community and government officials.

Anna Schickele (center) with Francis Fukuyama (left) and Larry Diamond (right).

Martin Carnoy, the Vida Jacks Professor of Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, served as Schickele's thesis advisor together with Rosamond L. Naylor, the director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment at FSI.

"Ana's thesis is an important contribution to our understanding of the barriers and openings for stimulating agricultural development among subsistence farmers," said Carnoy. "Her original insights make the thesis particularly valuable for those addressing development issues in the world’s poorest regions."

In August, Schickele will begin a research position at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

CDDRL's best thesis award was given to Kabir Sawhney, a management science and engineering major, who wrote his thesis on the effect of regime type and the propensity to default on sovereign debt. Advised by Professor of Political Science Gary Cox, Swahney cited the cases of Romania in the 1980s and more recently of Greece to conclude that the quality of government — rather than regime type alone — determines whether a country chooses to default. 

After graduation. Sawhney will join the consulting firm Accenture as an analyst in their San Francisco office.  

Three honors students' received fellowships from Stanford's Haas Center of Public Service to pursue public service-related work after graduation. Keith Calix and Imani Franklin both received the Tom Ford Fellowship in Philanthropy and will be working in New York for grant-making foundations, and Lina Hidalgo received the Omidyar Network Postgraduate Fellowship to work with an international organization.     

The CDDRL Undergraduate Senior Honors Program is an interdisciplinary honors program led by Francis Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at FSI. The program recruits a diverse group of talented students interested in writing original theses on topics impacting the field of democracy, development, and the rule of law. During the year-long program, students write their thesis in consultation with a CDDRL faculty member, participate in research workshops, and travel to Washington, D.C. for "honors college."

The nine members of the graduating class of 2013 CDDRL undergraduate honors students include: