Joshua Cohen's Program on Global Justice (PGJ), which explores issues at the intersection of political norms and global political-economic realities, has joined CDDRL Center Director Larry Diamond has announced.  Cohen, a professor of political science, philosophy, and law, came to Stanford from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) in 2006 to launch a new program on global justice at FSI.

The aim of his program, Cohen said, "is to build dialogue and research that integrates political values - toleration, fairness, and the common good - into discussions about human rights, global governance, and access to such basic goods as food and clean water."  "These issues of global politics are all ethically consequential," Cohen points out, "and addressing them well requires a mix of philosophical thought with the best current social-scientific research."

CDDRL Director Diamond and Associate Director for research Kathryn Stoner joined in saying "We are delighted to welcome Josh Cohen to our team.  His path-breaking work bridges the normative, empirical, and policy dimensions of our Center's ongoing concerns for democracy, equitable economic development, and the rule of law."

Under Cohen, the Global Justice Program's largest effort has focused on the Just Supply Chains project. As globalization of production creates a need for new models of fair treatment for workers in global supply chains, fresh thinking is also needed on the role of unions, the rights of workers to associate, and the role of trade agreement in promoting just working conditions.

Cohen, Diamond, and Terry Winograd, Stanford professor of computer science, have also initiated a the new Program on Liberation Technology which brings together Stanford colleagues from computer science and applied technology with social scientists to explore ways that new information technologies can improve economic, political, and social conditions in low income countries, and materially improve human lives. As Cohen and Diamond note, Liberation Technology "seeks to understand how information technology can be used to defend human rights, improve governance, empower the poor, promote economic development, and pursue of variety of other social goods."  

A prolific author, Cohen has written extensively on issues of democratic theory, especially the theory of deliberative democracy, and implications of that idea for personal liberty. He is the author with Joel Rogers of On Democracy (1983), Rules of the Game (1986), and Associations and Democracy (1995). A volume of his selected papers, Philosophy, Politics, Democracy is forthcoming from Harvard University Press, and his Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals, is forthcoming from Oxford University press.  

Cohen is also the editor of Boston Review, a bi-monthly magazine of political, cultural, and literary ideas, and has edited 18 books that grew out of forums that appeared in the Review. He moderated the Global Poverty and Development Course offered by Google.org in 2007 for google.com employees. The ten week-course addressed issues ranging from growth and globalization to education and urbanization, and can still be watched on YouTube.

Diamond, Stoner-Weiss, and Cohen are part of the distinguished Stanford faculty group who lead the Just Supply Chains each summer.  This highly competitive program each year selects from 600-800 applicants some 30 rising leaders from major transitioning countries such as Russia, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Kenya, and Zimbabwe and brings them to Stanford to examine and foster linkages among democracy, sustainable economic development, and good governance. As Diamond and Cohen point out, in today's challenging environment, putting new information technologies to socially, politically, and economic constructive uses is a powerful tool and of growing interest to many of these rising leaders from transitioning countries.   

Stephen D. Krasner, the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations, and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Hoover Institution, has been named deputy director of FSI, announced FSI Director Coit D. Blacker, the Olivier Nomellini Professor in International Studies. Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at FSI and the Hoover Institution, and professor, by courtesy, of political science and sociology, has been named director of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL).

Krasner succeeds political science Professor Michael McFaul, former deputy director of FSI and CDDRL director, who has joined the Obama administration as special assistant to the president for National Security Affairs and senior director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council.  Diamond will direct CDDRL while McFaul is on leave.

"We are delighted that Steve Krasner and Larry Diamond are assuming these leadership roles at this dynamic time in FSI's growth and development," said Blacker. "Steve and Larry's exemplary scholarship, research, and teaching, and their passionate commitment to the expansion of democracy and good governance, are a wellspring of inspiration to Stanford faculty and students, and to current and aspiring leaders the world over."

Krasner served as deputy director of FSI and CDDRL director from January 2003 to January of 2005. He then served as director of policy planning at the U.S. Department of State from February 2005 through April of 2007. In that role, Krasner was the driving force behind foreign assistance reform designed to more effectively target American foreign aid. He was also involved in activities related to the promotion of good governance and democratic institutions around the world.

Among extensive publications, Krasner is the author of Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investment and American Foreign Policy (1978), Structural Conflict: The Third World Against Global Liberalism (1985), and Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (1999). Publications he has edited include Problematic Sovereignty: Contested Rules and Political Possibilities (2001). He taught at Harvard and UCLA before coming to Stanford in 1981.

Krasner received a BA in history from Cornell University, an MA in international affairs from Columbia University, and a PhD in political science from Harvard. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Diamond is the founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy, the co-director of the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy, and has been coordinating CDDRL's democracy program. His newest book, The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World (Times Books, 2008), explores the sources of democratic progress and stress and the prospects for future democratic expansion.

Diamond's other published works include Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq (Times Books, 2005), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1998).

In May 2007, Diamond was named "Teacher of the Year" by the Associated Students of Stanford University for teaching "that transcends political and ideological barriers." At Stanford Commencement ceremonies in June 2007, he was honored with the Dinkelspiel Award for Distinctive Contributions to Undergraduate Education and cited, inter alia, for "the example he sets as a scholar and public intellectual, sharing his passion for democratization, peaceful transitions, and the idea that each of us can contribute to making the world a better place."

Diamond received a BA, MA and PhD from Stanford, all in sociology.

Krasner and Diamond are part of the distinguished Stanford faculty group who lead the Draper Hills Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development Program each summer, which brings to Stanford some 30 rising leaders from major transitioning countries such as Russia, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Kenya to examine and foster linkages among democracy, sustainable economic development, and good governance.

The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University is pleased to announce its new class of %fellowship1%. This year’s fellows – 26 outstanding civic, political, and economic leaders from 23 countries in transition – have been selected from more than 800 applications. They will be on the Stanford campus for three weeks, from July 28 to August 15, 2008.

Since its inception, the Summer Fellows Program has created a network of more than 90 emerging leaders from 30 transitioning countries including Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, China, Russia, Nigeria, Kenya, and Rwanda. Draper Hills Summer Fellows are former prime ministers and presidential advisors, senators and attorneys general, journalists and civic activists, academics and members of the international development community. They are united in their dedication to improving or establishing democratic governance, economic growth, and the rule of law in their countries.

The three-week program is led by an interdisciplinary (and all-volunteer) team of leading Stanford University faculty associated with the center. Class sessions, however, are not only led by CDDRL-affiliated faculty and researchers but also by the fellows themselves, who focus discussions on the concrete challenges they face in their ongoing development work. In this way, fellows have the opportunity to learn from one another’s rich experiences in the field of international political and economic development.

One of the selected fellows, an opposition politician from Singapore, was prevented from leaving her home country shortly before the program began.

FSI senior fellow Stephen Stedman reviews John Bolton's book, Surrender Is not an Option, in the July/August issue of the Boston Review. "The memoir reads like an international relations primer done in the style of a modern morality tale," he writes. "Imagine Kenneth Waltz's classic Man, the State, and War as written by Ayn Rand."

One of the more remarkable underreported stories of 2008 was a speech in which the State department’s legal adviser John Bellinger admitted that there “are also realities about the International Criminal Court that the United States must accept.” He also stated that the Bush administration would work with the Court to maximize its chances of success in Darfur. Bellinger did not say that the United States might actually join the Court, but acknowledged that it enjoyed widespread international support and legitimacy, and that the United States could fruitfully cooperate with it on areas of mutual benefit.

Neither mea culpa nor volte-face, the speech nonetheless indicates the distance the administration has traveled in seven years. While Bellinger’s oratory went largely unnoticed by foreign policy wonks and the attentive public alike, it did not escape the scrutiny of John Bolton, who dismissed it as Clinton-era “pabulum” and reflective of “the yearning the Rice State Department has for acceptance” by academics and foreign intellectuals. He added ominously, “the fight resumes after Jan. 20.”

Bolton has been a powerful influence on Republican foreign policy for the last twenty years. Before his appointment as ambassador to the United Nations in 2005—which was achieved without Senate confirmation—Bolton dominated arms-control policy in the first Bush term. He killed the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, negotiations with North Korea, and the Biological Weapons Convention verification protocol. During the Clinton years, he campaigned tirelessly from his Heritage Foundation perch for missile defense and against global governance, which he seems to equate with global government. In 1998, when then-Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan released a report critical of both the United Nations secretariat and member states for the failure to prevent genocide in Srebrenica, Bolton chastized Annan for having the temerity to criticize governments for what they did or did not do in the former Yugoslavia. He added menacingly: “I think if he continues down this road, ultimately it means war, at least with the Republican Party.”

Bolton came of age politically during Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. The future policy heavyweight was a high schooler in Baltimore at the time. He honed his conservatism at Yale College and Yale Law School, ducked Vietnam through a National Guard posting (“looking back, I am not terribly proud of this calculation”), and got his first taste of Washington as an intern to Spiro Agnew. During the Bush Sr. presidency, Bolton was Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs in James Baker’s State Department, and was one of the first people who Baker called when he needed a posse of chad-disputing lawyers in Florida in November 2000. Bolton’s name keeps showing up in various articles about the fight inside the Republican Party for the soul of John McCain’s foreign policy.

All of this makes it imperative to read his memoirs, which clarify the stakes in the forthcoming election. Although it is hard to imagine Bolton in a McCain administration—his memoirs offend so many within his party, across the aisle, and overseas, that Bolton could not win Senate confirmation for capitol dog-catcher—Bolton will be plotting, pressing, and pushing to force McCain’s foreign policy back to the unilateralism of George Bush’s first term, when the war on terror meant never having to say you’re sorry. And there are important national security posts that do not require Senate approval.

The memoir reads like an international relations primer done in the style of a modern morality tale—imagine Kenneth Waltz's classic Man, the State, and War as written by Ayn Rand.

To Bolton, the United Nations is a “target rich environment,” and I had a front row seat to watch his gunslinging. In 2005 I served as Special Adviser to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. I was responsible for developing member-state support for his efforts to overhaul the United Nations. In that capacity, I was in Brussels in March 2005 when President Bush nominated Bolton as Ambassador to the United Nations. One high-ranking EU official recoiled in horror, and, to share his agita, repeated two of Bolton’s more famous lines: that “UN headquarters could lose ten floors and no one would know the difference,” and that “there was no United Nations.” How in the world, the official asked, could such a man be Ambassador to the United Nations?

Amidst nodding heads and shared pained looks, I offered that if I could pick the ten floors, I would agree with Bolton. Moreover, I said, any sentient being who spends time in Turtle Bay—the Manhattan site of the United Nations—will at some point in frustration say to themselves that there is no United Nations. Bolton’s sin was to say it publicly. Finally, I suggested that John Bolton was irrelevant: “If the President of the United States and the Secretary of State want a strong, effective United Nations, then Bolton will have to deliver. If they don’t, you could have John Kerry as the U.S. ambassador, and nothing will happen.”

Oh well; win some, lose some. Which is what Condoleeza Rice is rumored to have told a friend who asked how John Bolton could have possibly been nominated for the position under her watch.

Or more accurately, I was half right, half wrong. Reading this book, one can almost feel sorry for how unsuited Bolton was for his new job. For four years he had been the point man for breaking American commitments abroad, insulting allies and enemies alike, ditching the ABM Treaty, and unsigning the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court (“my happiest moment at State”). In the heady days of the first Bush administration, when it believed the United States was so powerful it could get anything that it wanted without friends, partners, or institutions, Bolton was the “say no” guy, a job he performed with great brio. How could he know that in 2005 his big boss, the President, and his nominal boss, the Secretary of State, would actually decide that international cooperation was necessary, and that maybe we should start worrying about America’s free fall in world opinion? A pit bull in the first term, Bolton would be a yap dog in the second, grating on the Secretary of State, the President, and most American allies.

Almost sorry, for whatever else you say about John Bolton, he is not of the “we can disagree without being disagreeable” school of American politics. This is one of the nastiest, pettiest memoirs in the annals of American diplomatic history. Among the many targets of insults and catty remarks are former and present U.K. ambassadors to the United Nations Emyr Jones Parry, Adam Thomson (“I could never look at or listen to Thomson without immediately thinking of Harry [Potter] and all his little friends”), and John Sawers; recent U.K. foreign ministers; just about every UN civil servant mentioned; indeed, just about every U.S. civil servant mentioned, along with countless journalists and politicians.

The memoir reads like an international relations primer done in the style of a modern morality tale—imagine Kenneth Waltz’s classic Man, the State, and War as written by Ayn Rand. Bolton, usually singlehandedly, takes on what he calls the High Minded, the Normers (those who create international norms of behavior or try to “[whip] the United States into line with leftist views of the way the world should look”), the EAPeasers (career State Department officials who advocate negotiations with North Korea), the Risen Bureaucracy, the Crusaders of Compromise, the Arms Control True Believers, and the EUroids.

The book has the formulaic allegories typical of the genre—the young, innocent female (Kristen Silverberg, Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs) driven to tears after being berated by the cold-hearted career bureaucrat (Nicholas Burns); the noble knight (Bolton himself) fighting against the political higher ups who care only about “positioning themselves” (Rice) or their legacy (Colin Powell). And of course Bolton’s plaintive cries that the 2005-06 changes in administration policy occurred against the will of the President. One sees the peasants now: ‘If only the King knew what was happening, this would never go on.’

Now add a heaping dose of xenophobia. Foreigners, appeasing foreigners, foreigners claiming to know us better than we know ourselves: all loom large in Bolton’s memoirs. He insults the former Swedish foreign minister and President of the General Assembly Jan Eliasson as not only having “an ethereal Hammarskjöldian vision problem, but also a Gunnar Myrdal problem, yet another foreigner who ‘understood’ us better than we did ourselves.” (This is the Myrdal who shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics with Friedrich Hayek, and whose classic book on race, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, was cited in Brown v. Board of Education.) At one point in his belittlement of a Bush political appointee, a special assistant to Condoleeza Rice, no less, Bolton adds that she was “a naturalized citizen originally from Pakistan,” in case we wondered why she could not possibly understand America’s real foreign policy interests. In Bolton’s worldview Zbigniew Brzezinski is probably a naturalized American citizen originally from Poland; Henry Kissinger, a naturalized American citizen originally from Germany.

In the Bolton universe, you want Iran and North Korea to be referred to the Security Council, so that when it fails to unite behind a resolute strategy, the United States is then free to take the tough action it needs to take. And in the case of North Korea, Bolton is clear about what that would be: “unilateralist, interventionist, and preemptive.” Is it any wonder that when it came to Iran and North Korea, our allies and adversaries were loathe to refer them anywhere near Bolton?

Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 article “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” was prompted by the supporters of the Goldwater campaign. Bolton strides right off the pages of Hofstadter’s essay:

He is always manning the barricades of civilization . . . he does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

According to Bolton, we do not need diplomats who negotiate, seek common ground, and strive for cooperative solutions. We need litigators who will go to the wall defending American interests, who will understand that when others say no, they mean no, and that therefore compromise is illusion. But in a world where the United States needs international cooperation for its own peace and prosperity, what comes next? Bolton’s answers are laughable—we stick with our “closest friends in the United Nations”—Israel, Palau and the Marshall Islands. Or we forge a new alliance with Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand to overcome the parasitic and paralytic EU. The road to global primacy runs through . . . Wellington?

There are, of course, some glaring contradictions in the memoirs. Bolton is known as a sovereignty hawk and he spells out the content of that doctrine as “greater independence and fewer unnecessary restraints.” The job of civil servants, politically appointed or career, is “to implement the president’s policies.” So it comes as a double shock when we find Bolton handing a draft Security Council resolution to the Israeli ambassador, in case the ambassador wants to ask his Prime Minister to appeal directly to Bush or Rice to change President Bush’s policy on Lebanon.

Another example concerns Bolton’s recurring beratement of UN officials for forgetting that they work for the member states. He then describes how one Under-Secretary-General, American appointee Christopher Burnham, surreptitiously showed him budget documents that put the United States at an advantage in budget negotiations. It is hard to see how you can have it both ways. Either UN officials serve all member states equally or the organization is up for grabs to the most powerful state.

But it is the big betrayal that is at the heart of the book. Facing a quagmire in Iraq, a faltering coalition in Afghanistan, a nuclear armed North Korea, the possibility of a nuclear Iran, and a war against terror that was creating more, not fewer, terrorists, Condoleeza Rice convinced President Bush that maybe they should stop digging a bigger hole for American foreign policy. And that meant actually trying diplomacy in North Korea, Iran, and the Middle East.

The losers were John Bolton and his acolytes; the winners were the professionals like Nicholas Burns and Christopher Hill. Faced with defeat and repudiation of the failed policies he advocated, Bolton’s response is familiar and tiresome: the professionals had secretly hijacked the president’s policy; the Secretary of State cares more about appeasing foreigners than protecting American interests.

The moment of reckoning for Bolton and for the President that nominated him is not described in the book, but it took place two months after Bolton left the administration. When the United States and North Korea reached a deal in February 2007 that holds the promise of denuclearizing the country, Bolton tried to scuttle it. Asked by reporters whether he was loyal to the President, Bolton answered, “I’m loyal to the original policy.”

What did Bolton achieve at the United Nations? Very little, which was fine by him and fine by the cast of nonaligned Ambassadors who oppose a more effective international organization. I asked one of them in December 2006 if he was happy that Bolton was leaving. He said, “No, we’ve learned how to deal with Mr. Bolton.” When I sought clarification, he said, “Look, Bolton comes in and asks for the sun, the moon, and the stars, and we say ‘no.’ He then says, ‘I told you so’ and leaves. Everybody is happy.”

Which returns us to the question of why anyone would want to wade through these 500 self-serving pages. The best answer: to remind yourself of the stakes of this upcoming election and why the United States needs more old-fashioned diplomacy and less paranoia and arrogance. A McCain presidency might not eschew diplomacy, but in the political free-for-all that is the Republican party, Bolton and his minions are always there, ready to denigrate any agreement or compromise, to sabotage and subvert real diplomacy.

Asked by reporters whether he was loyal to the President, Bolton answered, "I'm loyal to the original policy."

To understand the stakes, consider the little known and even less appreciated record of American negotiations with North Korea since 1994. Between what was called the “Agreed Framework” that brought North Korea back into the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1994 and the end of 2000, the United States and North Korea reached twenty agreements on a wide array of issues. Certain of these agreements foundered in implementation, but an objective assessment shows that some of the noncompliance stemmed from constraints placed by American domestic politics.

The Bolton strategy killed the Agreed Framework, hoping through threats, sanctions, and use of force to end the North Korean regime. Unfortunately for Bolton—fortunately for the rest of us—our ally South Korea and our necessary partner China did not want to deal with the consequences: either a war or a collapsed, deadly state on their borders. In the end, they did not have to because North Korea left the NPT, developed a nuclear bomb, and tested it, bankrupting the Bolton policy and producing the sharp change of strategy that has born fruit in recent North Korean steps to end its nuclear program.

Writing about the successes of American negotiators in bringing North Korea and the United States back together in February 2007, former State Department negotiator Robert Carlin and Stanford Professor Emeritus John Lewis have described why Bolton and his crowd loathe diplomacy is loathed by Bolton and his crowd, and why it is so necessary:

Diplomats strive to put down words all of them can swallow and hopefully their superiors in [the] capital can stomach. Written agreements are difficult to reach. The pain often comes not so much in dealing with the other side but in dealing with your own. Unless you are dictating terms to a defeated enemy, you are going to have to compromise on something, probably several somethings, that will make many people unhappy. That was done for the February 13th agreement, and there is no shame to it.

John Bolton did much damage to American interests in the first Bush administration, but he was implementing the president’s policy. President Bush deserves the blame for putting Bolton in a position to continue hardming American interests even when the overall direction of policy changed.

Given that many countries treated the United States as radioactive in 2005; given that trust and confidence in the United States were at all time lows; given that our record was one of a violator of international law and human rights; President Bush, had he truly wanted to start to move the United States out of the hole he had been so assiduously digging, would have had to send to the United Nations an ambassador with extraordinary listening skills, who could work across various international chasms, rebuild respect for American diplomacy, and, yes, advocate agreements that would make a lot of people unhappy. Someone, in fact, a lot like our present Ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, a naturalized citizen originally from Afghanistan. Instead he sent . . . Yosemite Sam.

So back to January 20. A new American president will take office with grinding wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a nuclear-armed North Korea, an Iran headed that way, and crises in Sudan, Israel and Palestine, Lebanon, and Pakistan. Our foreign policy is anathema; our reputation in tatters. Throw in big issues like global warming, non-proliferation, catastrophic terrorism, and a potential pandemic of a deadly new influenza. It is hard to see how any of these crises or issues can be solved without sustained international cooperation and strong international institutions. Take global warming: protecting Americans from its ravages will depend on exercising sovereignty to strike deals with other countries whose domestic behavior threatens us and whose security our domestic behavior threatens. A narrow view of sovereignty as the ability to do as we damned well please will be—quite literally—the death of us all.

Surrender Is not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad
by John Bolton. Threshold Editions, $27.00 (hardcover)

 

With more than a million dollars in committed new funding, CDDRL’s Stanford Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development marches into its fifth year with a sustainable future and also a new name: the Draper Hills Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development. The program’s new name recognizes the generous commitments of William Draper III and Ingrid von Mangoldt Hills to fund the program and enable it to continue its bold vision.

William Draper made his gift to honor his father, Maj. Gen. William H. Draper, Jr.; Ingrid von Mangoldt Hills made her gift in honor of her late husband, Reuben W. Hills.

Maj. Gen. William H. Draper, Jr. was a chief advisor to Gen. George Marshall and chief diplomatic administrator of the Marshall Plan in Germany, where he worked to rebuild the German economy and sort out issues related to industry and agriculture, including decartelization, trade and commerce, price control, reparations and the restitution of assets removed from invaded countries. After the war he became the first under secretary of the Army and later, a special representative of President Harry Truman, for whom he coordinated American military, political, and economic policies in Europe and effectively served as the first ambassador to NATO.

Reuben W. Hills was a San Francisco philanthropist and president and chairman of the board of Hills Bros. Coffee. He was also vice president and director of the San Francisco Opera and trustee of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. In 1992 he and his wife Ingrid started a nonprofit organization, The Hills Project, to connect inner-city youth with visual and performing arts. The project reaches out to 3,300 children in San Francisco and Berkeley schools, offering field trips to the San Francisco Ballet, museums, artists’ studios, and other cultural institutions as well as visits by artists.

The funding commitments from William Draper III and Ingrid von Mangoldt Hills generously secure the future of the Draper Hills Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development program, which brings a group of approximately 30 civic, political, and economic leaders from transitioning countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, China, and Russia to Stanford every summer. Draper Hills Summer Fellows are former prime ministers and presidential advisors, senators and attorneys general, journalists and civic activists, academics and members of the international development community. Since the program was introduced in 2005, it has typically received more than 800 applications each year.

The generous support of Bill Draper and Ingrid von Mangoldt Hills enables CDDRL to continue to create a community of democratic activists dedicated to building new linkages among democracy, sustainable development, good governance, and the rule of law in transitioning nations.

Interest in democracy, economic development, and the rule of law is clearly on the rise. Just as global attention in 2005 remained riveted on establishing and protecting the fundamentals of democracy in transitioning societies—the parliamentary elections in Afghanistan, the constitutional vote in Iraq, the threat to civil liberties in Russia—these issues took on increasing prominence on the Stanford campus, for policymakers and students alike.

STANFORD SUMMER FELLOWS PROGRAM

The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), the Freeman Spogli Institute’s newest research center, hosted its first annual Summer Fellows Program on campus in August. This innovative program is designed to help emerging and established leaders of transitioning countries in their efforts to create the fundamental institutions of democracy, fight the pernicious problem of corruption, improve governance at all levels of society, and strengthen prospects for sustainable economic development. In contrast to other programs of democracy promotion, which seek to transfer ready-made models to countries in transition, the Stanford program provides a comparative perspective on the evolution of established democratic practices, as well as theoretical and practical background on issues of democracy and good governance, to assist with needed economic, political, and judicial reform.

The three-week 2005 leadership seminar attracted 32 participants from 28 countries for specialized teaching, training, and outreach, including leaders from the Middle East, North and Sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, and parts of the former Soviet Union, whose stability is so vital to the international system. The curriculum draws on the combined expertise of Stanford scholars and practitioners in the fields of political science, economics, law, sociology, and business and emphasizes the dynamic linkages among democratization, economic development, and the rule of law in transitioning countries.

DEMOCRACY, DEVELOPMENT, AND THE RULE OF LAW

In the fall quarter of 2005, a new undergraduate course, titled %course1% (PS/IR 114D), examining the dynamic and interactive linkages among democratic institutions, economic development, and the framework of law proved to be an all-star attraction for Stanford students. Conceived by the research faculty and staff at CDDRL as an important introduction to fundamental concepts and team-taught by a number of prominent Stanford scholars—including University President Emeritus Gerhard Casper (Stanford Law School), Larry Diamond (Hoover Institution), CDDRL Director Michael A. McFaul (Hoover Institution and Department of Political Science), and Peter B. Henry (Graduate School of Business), the course attracted a record number of students this fall. Encina Columns recently interviewed Kathryn Stoner, associate director of research and senior research scholar at CDDRL, the course convener, to glean a few highlights.

Q. WHY DID YOU CHOOSE TO OFFER THE COURSE AT THIS TIME?

A. CDDRL research staff and faculty decided to offer the course in the fall of 2005 as a launch for what we hope will become an honors program. We wanted to use PS/IR 114D as a gateway course into other courses taught by our faculty, as well. For example, Larry Diamond teaches a very popular course on democracy, and we thought our course would be a good way to introduce undergraduates to some of the basic themes of that course, while also introducing them to connections between democracy and economic development and the interplay of these with the rule of law.

Q. DID YOU ENVISION A QUARTER-LONG OR YEAR-LONG COURSE? WHY?

A. The course was always envisioned as just a quarter-long course. This is to provide a launch into the menu of other courses that are offered by our faculty.

Q. WERE YOU SURPRISED BY THE STUDENT RESPONSE?

A. We were very surprised to have 130 students in the course this fall. We ran the course as a “beta test” in the spring of 2005 with just 25 students, but apparently the buzz among undergraduates was good and our enrollment numbers jumped in September when we offered the course again. The political science department was caught a little off guard and we had to hustle to find enough teaching assistants to staff the course.

Q. WHO WERE YOUR MAIN LECTURERS AND WHAT WERE THEIR TOPICS?

A. We had 13 lecturers in all including Gerhard Casper, on what rule of law means and why people choose to follow law or not; Larry Diamond, on meanings of democracy and Iraq; Avner Greif, on how economic institutions are established historically; and Jeremy M. Weinstein, on international aid and development in Africa, to name but a few.

Q. WHAT TOPICAL THEMES HAVE YOU EXPLORED WITH YOUR STUDENTS?

A. The Iraq lecture by Larry Diamond was particularly topical and the students clearly learned a lot from him. They also enjoyed Jeremy Weinstein’s lecture on debates on aid policy in Africa. He set it up in an engaging way so that students had to decide whether “conditionality” was a good idea in providing aid to Africa or not.

Q. DID YOU FIND THAT PARTICULAR ISSUES HAD SPECIAL "RESONANCE" FOR STANFORD STUDENTS?

A. I think that there is growing interest among Stanford undergraduates in how democracy can be promoted and to what extent the United States should be involved in this project. Many students in our course are interested in doing some sort of work in the development field, so they wanted to explore cases of when democracies have become consolidated versus situations where they slid back into dictatorship. They are also particularly interested in when or whether force is appropriate in promoting or establishing democracy in the Middle East and Afghanistan, for example.

Q. WHAT PROVED MOST GRATIFYING TO YOU? DID YOU GAIN NEW INSIGHT?

A. I always gain new insights when I interact with smart students who are deeply interested and engaged in these issues. I also find it a real privilege to actually sit down and listen to my colleagues deliver lectures on areas of their expertise. That is truly a treat.

Q. WHAT'S NEXT? WILL YOU OFFER THIS COURSE AGAIN?

A. Yes, we intend to offer the course every fall quarter. We are also currently planning to launch an honors program, perhaps this spring. As part of that we will offer a seminar for juniors interested in writing theses on the general themes of democracy, development, and the rule of law in the developing world.

In a 1999 article profiling six of “China’s bright young stars,” the New York Times described Junning Liu as “one of China’s most influential liberal political thinkers.” Today, sitting in a delegate-style conference room, Liu wants to add a point to Thomas C. Heller’s discussion of risk assessment and the role of law in doing business. If assets are not protected by legal institutions, Heller argues, foreign direct investment becomes a riskier prospect and economic growth suffers as a result. Except, he points out, in China. The legal system doesn’t manage risk but China is growing extremely fast.

“There are more businesspeople in Chinese prisons than dissidents,” Liu says evenly, with a suggestion of a smile. “So you see … Chinese people mind the situation more than you [the foreign investors] do.”

Liu is one of 26 change-makers from developing democracies who were selected from more than 800 applicants to take part in this year’s Stanford Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development Program, which is offered by FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). His colleagues in the program are presidential advisors and attorneys general, journalists and civic activists, academics and members of the international development community. They traveled to Stanford from 21 countries in transition, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, China, Russia, Egypt, and Nigeria. And like their academic curriculum during the three-week program, which examines linkages among democracy, economic development, and the rule of law, their professional experiences and fields of study center on these three areas, assuring that each fellow brings a seasoned perspective to the program’s discussions.

“For most of the fellows … democracy is seen not as a luxury or an option, but rather as a necessity for achieving broad-based development and a genuine rule of law.”The curriculum for the first week focused on democracy, with leading comparative democracy scholars Michael A. McFaul, Larry Diamond, and Kathryn Stoner team-teaching the morning seminars. Using selected articles and book chapters as starting points for discussion, McFaul, Diamond, and Stoner-Weiss began the weeklong democracy module with an examination of what democracy is and what definition or definitions might apply to distinguish electoral democracy, liberal democracy, and competitive authoritarianism. Another question discussed was whether there was such a thing as Islamic democracy, Asian democracy, Russian democracy, or American democracy.

As the week progressed, fellows and faculty discussed institutions of democracy, electoral systems, horizontal accountability, development of civil society, democratic transitions, and global trends in democracy promotion. Fellows led sessions themselves in the afternoons, comparing experiences and sharing insights into how well political parties and parliaments constrained executive power and how civil society organizations contributed to democratic consolidation and/or democratic transitions.

In addition to discussing their personal experiences with democracy promotion, fellows met with a broad range of practitioners, including USAID deputy director Maria Rendon, IREX president Mark Pomar, MoveOn.org founder Joan Blades, Freedom House chairman and International Center on Nonviolent Conflict founding chair Peter Ackerman, International Center on Nonviolent Conflict president Jack DuVall, Otpor cofounder Ivan Marovic, A Force More Powerful documentary filmmaker Steve York, and Advocacy Institute cofounder David Cohen. Guest speakers talked about their fieldwork, offered practical advice, and answered fellows’ questions. This component grounded the classroom discussions in a practical context. “It was important for our visiting fellows to interact with American practitioners, both to learn about innovative techniques for improving democracy practices but also to hear about frustrations and failures that Americans also face in working to make democracy and democracy promotion work more effectively,” explains McFaul. “We Americans do not have all the answers and have much to learn from interaction with those in the trenches working to improve governance in their countries.”

The following two weeks would focus in turn on development and the rule of law, but democracy continued to serve as the intellectual lynchpin of the program, with economies and legal institutions analyzed vis-à-vis their relationship to the development of democratic systems.

“For most of the fellows, who come from national circumstances which once suffered (or still do suffer) prolonged authoritarian rule, democracy is seen not as a luxury or an option, but rather as a necessity for achieving broad-based development and a genuine rule of law,” says Diamond. “Unless people have the ability to turn bad rulers out of office, and to hold rulers accountable in between elections through a free press and civil society, countries stand a poor prospect of controlling corruption, protecting human rights, correcting policy mistakes, and ensuring that government is responsive to the needs and aspirations of the people.”

Among the fellows, this idea of democracy as a “necessity,” a fundamental platform from which to pursue economic and legal reforms, was widely recognized. “It appears that like-minded people were selected to participate,” notes Sani Aliyu, a broadcast journalist and interfaith mediator from Nigeria. “Each of us is interested in the development of humanity, and it appears that we have accepted that democracy seems to be the vehicle through which human development can be accessed reasonably. We share this."

As the program’s curriculum shifted to development issues for week two, the all-volunteer assemblage of Stanford faculty expanded to include professors and professional research staff from Stanford Law School, the Graduate School of Business, and the Department of Economics. Avner Greif established the context for the development module with an overview of institutional foundations of politics and markets, followed by discussions of growth restructuring in transitional economies with GSB professor Peter B. Henry and Stanford Center for International Development deputy director Nicholas Hope. Terry L. Karl analyzed corruption in developing economies and the “resource curse,” and Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy, joined Diamond, McFaul, and Karl in discussing how the spectrum of democratic to autocratic systems of government affected a country’s development.

Another salient component of the development module centered on the role of media in promoting democracy and development. The field trip to San Francisco, which included a session with KQED Forum host Michael Krasny, a briefing on international reporting at the San Francisco Chronicle, and a discussion of media strategies at the Family Violence Prevention Fund, provided particularly rich practical content, as did the fellows’ roundtable on maintaining media independence in semi-autocracies.

At KQED Radio, Cuban-born Raul Ramirez, the executive producer of Forum, talked with fellows about the concept of “civic journalism” and KQED’s goal of creating space for civic discussion. Forum host Michael Krasny and Ramirez, who runs workshops on civic journalism at the European Journalism Centre in Maastricht, then fielded a barrage of questions from fellows: How does KQED maintain independence from government and commercial funding? If Rush Limbaugh attacked you, would you respond in your program? Is it possible to have neutral, nonpartisan public radio? How do you manage to deal with political issues, particularly when you start to affect the power structures with your programming? Are there any words, like “terrorist,” that you are banned from using on the air?

“Discussion of this kind is of great importance to both media professionals and the audience,” notes Anna Sevortian, a journalist and research coordinator at the Center for Development of Democracy and Human Rights in Moscow. “It helps you to clarify how a particular newspaper, TV, or radio station is dealing with matters of public policy or of political controversy.”

The third week’s curriculum layered rule-of-law issues onto the conceptual modules of democracy promotion and economic development, drawing on the teaching caliber of constitutional scholar and Stanford president emeritus Gerhard Casper, Erik Jensen, Helen Stacy, Allen S. Weiner, Tom Heller, and Richard Burt. After establishing a theoretical framework through discussions of the role of law, constitutionalism, human rights, transitional justice, the role of law in business and economic development, and strategies for promoting the rule of law, fellows compared experiences defending human rights, met with American immigration and civil liberties lawyers, and had a session with Circuit Court Judge Pamela Rymer on judging in federal courts. Field trips to Silicon Valley-based Google and eBay again put into practical context the free market, rule-of-law components discussed theoretically in the classroom.

Despite the intellectual rigor of the coursework and discussion, and the exploration of practical applicability with guest speakers and field trips, the Stanford Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development Program was designed as much to stimulate connections among field practitioners and to provide a forum in which to exchange ideas. Weekend dinners, stretching late into the evening at the homes of Diamond and Stoner-Weiss, helped to gel the collegiality developing in the classroom. Led by Violet Gonda, a Zimbabwean journalist living in exile in London, and Talan Aouny, director of a major Iraqi civil society development program, the fellows organized a multicultural party, a potluck-style affair in which guests made a dish from their home country to share with their colleagues and friends of the program.

Program directors McFaul and Stoner-Weiss hope this social network will endure well into the weeks and months after the program. “We envision the creation of an international network of emerging political and civic leaders in countries in transition who can share experiences and solutions to the very similar problems they and their countries face,” says Stoner-Weiss. To ensure they fulfill their goal of building a small but robust global network of civic activist and policymakers in developing countries, CDDRL recently launched its Summer Fellows Program Alumni Newsletter. The newsletter is based on an interactive website that will allow the center to strengthen its network of leaders and civic activists and facilitate more groundbreaking policy analysis across academic fields and geographic regions, the results of which will be promptly fed back to its activist alumni in a virtual loop of scholarship and policymaking.

Earlier this year, CDDRL also moved to professionalize the Stanford Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development Program by hiring a program manager, Laura Cosovanu, an attorney with experience in foundations and other nonprofit organizations, to oversee its advancement. The logistical acrobatics Cosovanu performed throughout the three weeks quickly became the object of good-natured teasing for some of the fellows, all of whom seemed to realize and appreciate the work required to get fellows and faculty into the same room.

As Kenza Aqertit, a National Democratic Institute for International Affairs field representative from Morocco, told program faculty at the graduation dinner, “You’ve done a great job and you should be proud of all your efforts. Plus you’ve won so many friends in so many autocracies and semi-autocracies.