Stanford University

The Commitment to Public Services in India

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Abstract:

There is a wide diversity in the provision of public services in India. In some states one can go for miles without seeing a functional school or public health centre, where roads are poorly maintained, and electricity has not yet been introduced. In other places, governments tend to function remarkably in extending basic public services to all, with tremendous consequences to human lives. In this talk, Vivek Srinivasen will explore why some parts of India have developed an impressive social commitment to such services unlike others. In this context, he will also discuss the remarkable changes in Bihar and other parts of North India in the recent years.

 Speaker Bio: 

Vivek Srinivasen joined the Liberation Technology Program as the manager in February 2011 after completing his Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. Prior to this, Srinivasen worked with campaigns on various socio-economic rights in India, including the right to food, education and the right to information. Based on these experiences he has written (and co-authored) extensively on issues surrounding the right to food, including Notes from the right to food campaign: people's movement for the right to food (2003), Rights based approach and human development: An introduction (2008), Gender and the right to food: A critical re-examination (2006), Food Policy and Social Movements: Reflections on the Right to Food Campaign in India (2007).

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Vivek Srinivasen Program Manager Speaker Program on Liberation Technology, Stanford University
Seminars

India's Multiple Revolutions

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Abstract: 

India has been in the throes of four major transformations since the 1980s. They are in the arenas of foreign policy, economic development strategies, the process of social mobilization and the growing challenges to Indian secularism. Exogenous shocks, in considerable measure, explain the dramatic and closely linked changes in the realms of foreign and security policies. The spurt in social mobilization, however, stemmed from mostly domestic sources and specifically the deepening of adult franchise.  It represents one important facet of the maturation of India’s democracy. Finally, the very success of social mobilization, in part, accounts for the assault on Indian secularism. The first two, of course represent conscious policy choices. The second two, however, can be traced to a complex interplay of various social forces. The evolution of these four features of India’s democracy will, in large measure, shape the future of the country in this new century.

Speaker Bio: 

Sumit Ganguly is a professor of political science and holds the Rabindranath Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University, Bloomington. He has previously taught at James Madison College of Michigan State University, Hunter College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the University of Texas at Austin. Professor Ganguly has been a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, a Visiting Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, a Guest Scholar at the Center for Cooperative Monitoring in Albuquerque and a Visiting Scholar at the German Institute for International and Area Studies in Hamburg.

He was also the holder of the Ngee Ann Chair in International Politics at the Rajaratnam School for International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore in the spring term of 2010.  Additionally, he is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. Professor Ganguly serves on the editorial boards of Asian Affairs, Asian Security, Asian Survey, Current History, the Journal of Democracy, International Security and Security Studies. A specialist on the contemporary politics of South Asia is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of 20 books on the region.  

His most recent books are India Since 1980 (with Rahul Mukherji), published by Cambridge University Press and Asian Rivalries: Conflict, Escalation and Limitations on Two-Level Games (with William Thompson) published by Stanford University Press. He is currently at work on a new book, Deadly Impasse: India-Pakistan Relations at the Dawn of a New Century for Cambridge University Press.

His article on corruption in India was just published in the January 2012 issue of the Journal of Democracy, and he is currently writing a new book with Bill Thompson entitled The State of India (for Columbia University Press) which seeks to assess India's prospects and limitations of emerging as a great power.

CISAC Conference Room

Sumit Ganguly Professor of Political Science Speaker Indiana University, Bloomington
Seminars

Anoop K. Sarbahi

616 Serra Street
Encina Hall West, Room 462
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6044

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Affiliated Postdoctoral Scholar
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Anoop Sarbahi is currently a visiting scholar in the Department of Political Science at Stanford. Previously, in addition to being a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford, Anoop has also held pre- and post-doctoral positions at Harvard University and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He received his PhD in Political Science from UCLA in December 2011. He also holds an MPhil degree in Development Studies from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai.

Anoop’s PhD dissertation is stimulated by the prevalence of a multitude of long-enduring ethnic insurgencies in a vast stretch of landmass extending between Northeast India and the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Drawing from these cases, which are often referred to as peripheral civil wars, his dissertation offers a nuanced understanding of civil war outcomes. His findings – based on a new dataset on 166 peripheral rebel groups and in-depth analysis of three ethnic secessionist movements in Northeast India – demonstrates that the social embeddedness of a peripheral rebel group is a better predictor of conflict outcome than more commonly studied correlates. He is currently revising the dissertation into a book manuscript and the cross-case empirical analysis presented in this work is forthcoming in Comparative Political Studies.

Sarbahi’s expertise is particularly in geospatial and geostatistical analysis involving satellite imagery and geographical information systems (GIS). His research on drone strikes in Pakistan, co-authored with Patrick Johnston at RAND, has been widely cited in academic, policy and media publications. His other current research projects involve investigating the determinants of rebel recruitment, the effects of the post-World War II occupation and division of Germany, the impact of development on conflict dynamics in India and identifying and accounting for peripheral groups and regions within countries.

Sarbahi's research has received recognition and support from numerous sources, including the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, the Institute of Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) at the University of California, San Diego, and UCLA’s International Institute and Asia Institute.

Srinivasan speaks to using social media to create connections

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RRamesh Srinivasan, assistant professor at UCLA in design and media/information studies, delivered the Oct. 20 Liberation Technology seminar. The talk was entitled, “Layers of Networks: How the Street, Institutions, and Mediascape Converge in Egypt.” This wide ranging talk takes us through his fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan, India and other countries and culminates with his recent fieldwork in Egypt on the use of social media in the revolution. Through these journeys he argues that technology has the potential to act as a ‘bridge’ that could connect peoples across cultures.

Ramesh discusses his field experiments in India where he provided people in his fieldwork villages with video cameras to document any issue that was valuable to them, and discovered that the process of recording and watching the videos helped in developing broad social priorities. Similarly during his work in Kyrgyzstan and in Egypt he observed that a small sphere of bloggers used social media to create strong ties among themselves, and given the media ecology with the social media having connections with other media, they ended up having a broader reach among the international community. In essence, they served as bridges communicating across boundaries.

The key themes of the talk revolved around the concepts of bridges, interfaces and networks. Ramesh argued that he has sought to understand the role that technology could play in fostering meaningful dialogue among peoples who have different vocabularies and understandings with which they approach the world i.e. “What bridges will bring people together in terms of multi-cultural interaction?” Ramesh argued that technologies are culturally constructed, and culturally created and that technologies can serve as bridges if diverse cultural values or ontologies are considered in their design. Technologies can then act as bridges to connect people across networks.

The talk takes us through the complexities of social media serving as a bridge and discusses preliminary ideas for designing an online architecture that could provide a space for multiple voices and serve as a bridge across different cultures.

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The Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program on Democracy and Development is now accepting applications for the Class of 2014

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About the Program

Launched in 2005, the Draper Hills Summer Fellowship on Democracy and Development Program  is a three-week executive education program that is hosted annually at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. The program brings together a diverse group of 25-30 mid-career practitioners in law, politics, government, private enterprise, civil society, and international development from transitioning countries. This training program provides a unique forum for emerging leaders to connect, exchange experiences, and receive academic training to enrich their knowledge and advance their work.

For three weeks during the summer, fellows participate in academic seminars that expose them to the theory and practice of democracy, development, and the rule of law. Delivered by leading Stanford faculty from the Stanford Law School, the Graduate School of Business, and the Departments of Economics and Political Science, these seminars allow emerging leaders to explore new institutional models and frameworks to enhance their ability to promote democratic change in their home countries.

Guest speakers from private foundations, think tanks, government, and the justice system, provide a practitioners viewpoint on such pressing issues in the field. Past program speakers have included; Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy; Kavita Ramdas, former president and CEO of the Global Fund for Women; Stacy Donohue, director of investments at the Omidyar Network; Maria Rendon Labadan, Deputy Director of USAID; and Judge Pamela Rymer, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Fellows also visit Silicon Valley technology firms to explore how technology tools and social media platforms are being used to catalyze democratic practices on a global scale.

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

About the Faculty

The program's all-volunteer interdisciplinary faculty includes leading political scientists, lawyers, and economists, pioneering innovative research and analysis in the fields of democracy, development, and the rule of law. Faculty engage the fellows to test their theories, exchange ideas and learn first-hand about the challenges activists face in places where democracy is at threat. CDDRL Draper Hills Summer Fellows faculty includes; Larry Diamond, Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, Stanford President Emeritus Gerhard Casper, Erik Jensen, Francis Fukuyama, Steve Krasner, Avner Greif, Helen Stacy, and Nicholas Hope.

About our Draper Hills Summer Fellows

Our network of 186 alumni who graduated from the Draper Hills Summer Fellows program hail  from 57 developing democracies worldwide. Their professional backgrounds are as diverse as the problems they confront in their home countries, but the one common feature is their commitment to building sound structures of democracy and development. The regions of Eurasia, which includes the former Soviet Union and Central Asia, along with Africa constitute over half of our alumni network. Women represent 40% of the network and the program is always looking to identify strong female leaders working to advance change in their local communities.

Previous Draper Hills Summer Fellows have served as presidential advisors, senators, attorneys general, lawyers, journalists, civic activists, entrepreneurs, academic researchers, think-tank managers, and members of the international development community. The program is highly selective, receiving several hundred applications each year.

Please see the alumni section of the website for a complete listing of our program alumni.

Our Summer Fellows include:

  • The former Prime Minister of Mongolia
  • Political activists at the forefront of the 2011 Egyptian revolution
  • Advocate for the high court of Zambia
  • Deputy Minister of the Interior of Ukraine
  • Peace advocate and human rights leader in Kenya
  • Journalists advocating for a greater role for independent media
  • Leading democratic intellectual in China
  • Social entrepreneur using technology for public accountability in India

 

 Funding

Stanford will pay travel, accommodation, living expenses, and visa costs for the duration of the three-week program for a certain portion of applicants. Participants will be housed on the Stanford campus in residential housing during the program. Where possible, applicants are encouraged to supply some or all of their own funding from their current employers or international nongovernmental organizations.

 

 




 
 
 
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Human Trafficking: The Current Anti-trafficking Model and Networks of Service

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Cindy Liou is a staff attorney at Asian Pacific Islander Legal Outreach. Cindy currently practices law in the areas of human trafficking, immigration law, family law, and domestic violence. She is the coordinator for the Human Trafficking Project at the agency. Before working at API Legal Outreach, Cindy practiced intellectual property litigation and handled a variety of pro bono cases at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. Cindy graduated from Stanford Law School and received her double degree in Political Science and Business Administration with a minor in Human Rights from the University of Washington. Before becoming an attorney, Cindy consulted for the Corporate Social Responsibility Department of Starbucks Coffee Company.

CISAC Conference Room

Cindy Liou Staff attorney Speaker Asian Pacific Islander Legal Outreach
Helen Stacy Director Commentator Program on Human Rights
Seminars
Human Trafficking
Sanela Diana Jenkins Human Rights Speaker Series on Human Trafficking

Human Trafficking From a Victim's Perspective

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Ms. Hong is originally from India. She was taken from her family and became a victim of human trafficking when she was seven years old. By age eight, her slave owner, sold her into illegal adoption. Rani married Trong Hong in 1992.  Trong is also a survivor of human trafficking. As a child in Vietnam, he was recruited to become a child soldier.

In 2002, Ms. Hong’s testimony before the Washington State legislature helped pass a law that had been stalled for four years, making it the first state in the nation to pass anti-trafficking legislation. Ongoing testimony for the next nine years aided passage of numerous laws that helped Washington State become the national model for anti-trafficking legislation. 

Bechtel Conference Center

Rani Hong Human Trafficking Survivor, Founder Speaker Tronie Foundation
Helen Stacy Director Host Program on Human Rights
Seminars
Human Trafficking
Sanela Diana Jenkins Human Rights Speaker Series on Human Trafficking

Collecting, Protecting, and Analyzing Human Rights Data

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Abstract 
There will be a discussion of two different examples of liberation technology, one used to collect and protect human rights data, and the other used to analyze it. Martus is a software program that encrypts and remotely backs up data, designed for and used widely by human rights monitors and advocates to protect witness reports and other sensitive human rights data. the focus will be on the security design of Martus and how we addressed the inevitable tradeoffs with usability, as well as the reasons for and consequences of our choice to make Martus free and open source. The legitimacy of human rights advocates is based on their claim to speak truth about a human rights situation, but our ability to know the truth of what is happening on the ground is often severely limited. Founding conclusions on anecdotes or observable events alone can misinterpret both trends over time and the relative distribution of violence with respect to regions, ethnicity or perpetrators. Through the careful application of rigorous statistical methods, the limitations of incomplete data can sometimes be overcome, enabling scientifically-based claims about the total extent and patterns of human rights violations. Also discussed will be how this kind of analysis is enabled by technology, including computational statistical methods, and tools like R and version control to make the analysis auditable and replicable.

Jeff Klingner is a computer scientist with the Human Rights Data Analysis Group at Benetech, where he codes and runs data analysis addressing a variety of human rights questions, including command responsibility of high-level officials in Chad and Guatemala, and mortality estimation in several countries, including India, Sierra Leone, and Guatemala. His technical focus is on data deduplication, machine learning, data visualization, and analysis auditability and replicability. He earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University.

Wallenberg Theater

Jeff Klingner Computer Science Consultant Speaker Benetech
Seminars
Liberation Technology Seminar Series
Program on Liberation Technology
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