Stanford University

International Relations

FSI researchers strive to understand how countries relate to one another, and what policies are needed to achieve global stability and prosperity. International relations experts focus on the challenging U.S.-Russian relationship, the alliance between the U.S. and Japan and the limitations of America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.

Foreign aid is also examined by scholars trying to understand whether money earmarked for health improvements reaches those who need it most. And FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center has published on the need for strong South Korean leadership in dealing with its northern neighbor.

FSI researchers also look at the citizens who drive international relations, studying the effects of migration and how borders shape people’s lives. Meanwhile FSI students are very much involved in this area, working with the United Nations in Ethiopia to rethink refugee communities.

Trade is also a key component of international relations, with FSI approaching the topic from a slew of angles and states. The economy of trade is rife for study, with an APARC event on the implications of more open trade policies in Japan, and FSI researchers making sense of who would benefit from a free trade zone between the European Union and the United States.

Porous Sovereignty, Walled Democracy

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Professor Brown's fields of interest include the history of political theory, nineteenth and twentieth century Continental theory, critical theory, and cultural theory (including feminist theory, critical race theory, and postcolonial theory). She is best known for intertwining the insights of Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Frankfurt School theorists, Foucault, and contemporary Continental philosophers to critically interrogate formations of power, political identity, citizenship, and political subjectivity in contemporary liberal democracies. Brown's current work focuses on the relationship of political sovereignty to global capital and other transnational forces, including those associated with religion, law, culture and moral discourse.

Professor Brown received her Ph.D in Political Philosophy from Princeton University in 1983. Prior to coming to Berkeley in 1999, she taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz and at Williams College. Brown's books include Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory (Rowman and Littlefield, 1988), States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, 1995), Politics Out of History (Princeton, 2001), Left Legalism/Left Critique, co-edited with Janet Halley (Duke, 2002), Edgework: Critical Essays in Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, 2005), and Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, 2006). She has lectured widely in Europe and North America, has held a number of distinguished visiting lectureships, and has recently been a Senior Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and a UC Berkeley Humanities Fellow.

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Wendy Brown Professor of Political Science Speaker University of California, Berkeley
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Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on Global Justice

The Subject of Multiculturalism: Culture, Religion, Language, Ethnicity, Nationality, and Race?

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Professor Song is presently an Assistant Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California at Berkley. She is a graduate of K-12 public schools and Harvard College, where she majored in Social Studies. She received her M. Phil in Politics from Oxford University and her Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Prior to Berkeley, she taught in the Political Science Department at M.I.T.

Her fields of interest include political and legal theory and the history of modern political thought. Her research focuses on issues of citizenship, immigration and diversity.

Her book Justice, Gender and the Politics of Multiculturalism (Cambridge University Press, 2007), explores the justice of minority group rights and multicultural policies with a focus on their effects on the rights of women. Her current research examines different ideals of citizenship reflected in immigrant integration policies in North America and Western Europe.

Her recent publications include Majority Norms, Multiculturalism, and Gender Equality, in American Political Science Review(2005): La défense par la culture en droit American( The cultural defense in American law) Critique internationale (2005) andReligious Freedom v. Sex Equality in Theory and Research in Education (2006)

Co-sponsered with the Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop in Global Justice

Abstract:

Contemporary political theory debates about multiculturalism largely take for granted that it is "culture" and "cultural groups" that are to be recognized and accommodated. Yet, the discussion tends to draw on a wide range of examples involving religion, language, ethnicity, nationality, and race. My paper attempts to disaggregate the variety of claims typically associated with multiculturalism.

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Sarah Song Assistant Professor of Law and Political Science Speaker University of California at Berkeley
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Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on Global Justice

Ray Jennings

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Ray Salvatore Jennings is a practitioner scholar with extensive experience within war to peace transitions in over 20 countries including Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Indonesia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Macedonia, Peru, and Sierra Leone. Over the last twenty years, he has served as country director and senior consultant with the United States Institute of Peace, the United Nations, the United States Agency for International Development, the World Bank, and many non-governmental organizations. He has served as a Senior Fellow with the United States Institute of Peace, and as a Public Policy Scholar and an Eastern European Research Scholar with the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. He is currently conducting research with the Stanford University Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law on comparative cases of democratic breakthrough, teaching post-conflict reconstruction and transitional development at Georgetown and Syracuse Universities and is a social development consultant to the World Bank on Middle East and North African affairs. He is the author of numerous articles and is co-authoring a book on democratic breakthrough with Michael McFaul. His media appearances include CNN, CSPAN, NPR and the BBC.

Can Democracy Reach the Poor? A Presidential Perspective on Education, Poverty and Democracy in Latin America

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Dr. Alejandro Toledo was democratically elected President of Peru from July 2001-July 2006.

He was born in a small and remote village in the Peruvian Andes, 12,000 feet above sea level. He is one of sixteen brothers and sisters from a family of extreme poverty. At the age of six, he worked as a street shoe shiner and simultaneously sold newspapers and lotteries to supplement the family income.

Thanks to an accidental access to education, Dr. Toledo was able to go from extreme poverty to the most prestigious academic centers of the world, later becoming one of the most prominent democratic leaders of Latin America. He is the first Peruvian president of indigenous descent to be democratically elected in five hundred years.

He received a BA from San Francisco University in Economics and Business Administration. From Stanford University, he received a MA in Economics of Human Resources, a MA in Economics, and a PhD in Economics of Human Resources.

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution; a Stanford professor of political science, and sociology by courtesy; and coordinator of the Democracy Program at the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). A specialist on democratic development and regime change and U.S. foreign policy affecting democracy abroad, he is the founding co-editor of the Journal on Democracy.

He has written extensively on the factors that facilitate and obstruct democracy in developing countries and on problems of democracy, development, and corruption, particularly in Africa. He is the author of Squandered Victory:The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq; Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation; and Promoting Democracy in the 1990s.

He received a BA, MA, and PhD from Stanford University, all in Sociology.

For more information about this event, please refer to the article in The Stanford Report.

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Alejandro Toledo Speaker

Larry Diamond

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Stanford University
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Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and Sociology
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Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.

Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad.  A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has edited or coedited more than fifty books, including China’s Influence and American Interests (2019, with Orville Schell), Silicon Triangle: The United States, China, Taiwan the Global Semiconductor Security (2023, with James O. Ellis Jr. and Orville Schell), and The Troubling State of India’s Democracy (2024, with Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha Mistree).

During 2002–03, Diamond served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other organizations dealing with governance and development. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq.

Among Diamond’s other edited books are Democracy in Decline?; Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab World; Will China Democratize?; and Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, all edited with Marc F. Plattner; and Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran, with Abbas Milani. With Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, he edited the series, Democracy in Developing Countries, which helped to shape a new generation of comparative study of democratic development.

Download full-resolution headshot; photo credit: Rod Searcey.

Former Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Faculty Chair, Jan Koum Israel Studies Program
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Taiwan and the New U.S. Strategic Environment

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This is a CDDRL's Special Event within our Democracy in Taiwan Program.

Dr. Jaushieh Joseph Wu arrived in Washington, D.C. on April 15, 2007 to assume his responsibilities as Taiwan's chief representative to the United States.

Representative Wu began his government career in 2002 as Deputy Secretary-General to President Chen Shui-bian, a position he held until May 2004. From 2004 to April 2007, Representative Wu was the chairman of Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council, a ministry-level organization that coordinates and implements Taiwan's policies toward the People's Republic of China.

Prior to his government career, Representative Wu held a number of academic positions at his alma mater, National Chengchi University, including the chairmanship of the First Division of the Institute of International Relations, an adjunct research fellowship at the Election Study Center and an adjunct professorship in the Department of Political Science.

Dr. Wu received his undergraduate education at National Chengchi University in Taipei. He did his graduate work in political science at the University of Missouri in St. Louis in 1982, obtaining a master's degree in Political Science, followed by a Ph. D. in the same field from Ohio State University in 1989. His areas of specialization include Taiwan's political development, cross-strait relations, international relations, and Middle East politics. Among Dr. Wu's academic publications, he has authored Taiwan's Democratization: Forces Behind the New Momentum (Hong Kong, Oxford University Press, 1995), and edited Divided Nations: The Experience of Germany, Korea, and China (Taipei, Institute of International Relations, 1995) and China Rising: Implications of Economic and Military Growth of the PRC (Taipei, Institute of International Relations, 2001).

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Joseph Wu Representative Speaker Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in Washington, D.C.
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Cohen leads Google.org course on global poverty and development

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In September Google.org launched the first of three courses on its main areas of philanthropic activity--Global Development, Global Health, and Climate Change. Joshua Cohen, director of the Program on Global Justice (PGJ) at FSI Stanford and professor of political science, philosophy, and law, is moderating the 10-week course, which focuses on understanding poverty and development at the global, national, local, and personal levels.

"Google has an extraordinary collection of creative employees," says Cohen. "This course on global poverty aims to enlist their energetic creativity in addressing one of our most commanding moral challenges."

The course on global poverty and development meets once a week at a Google headquarters. Each two-hour session features guest speakers on development-related issues such as education and health, equitable financial markets, globalization, and population mobility. On October 3, Rosamond L. Naylor, director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) at FSI Stanford, co-taught a session on productive agriculture for the 21st century with Frank Rijsberman, Google.org director of water and climate adaptation issues.

Cohen opens each session, synthesizing points from previous weeks, and then moderates the hour-long discussion between guest speakers and Google employees that follows the speaker presentations. The 200-person capacity of the room is superseded by participation from employees at more than 20 remote locations. On October 3, Google.org Executive Director Larry Brilliant joined the discussion as well.

In a related collaboration, Cohen may also be leading a small-group seminar, "Global Poverty 2.0," at Stanford for Google employees as well as graduate students and colleagues. Global Poverty 2.0 is expected to meet on Friday afternoons and draw on readings from history, sociology, political science, economics, and philosophy. Students would be required to make one presentation and also to submit a 3,000-word project proposal for dealing with some aspect of the large problem of global poverty.

Google.org is the philanthropic arm of Google and the umbrella for its commitment to devote employee time and one percent of Google's profits and equity toward philanthropy.

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Why being resource poor helps post-war development

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Desha is a doctoral candidate at Stanford, where she researches the effects of international organizations on local institution-building. She is devoting her fellowship at CDDRL to completing her dissertation, "Why being resource poor helps postwar development." For her dissertation, Desha carried out field work in Mozambique and Uganda. In addition, she is conducting a study on democracy promotion after regime change by investigating the impact of US intervention in Panama, where she also did field work. Another study investigates the effects of remittances on access to public goods in Mexico. Desha's advisors at Stanford include Jim Fearon, Steve Krasner, David Laitin, and Jeremy Weinstein.

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Desha Girod

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CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow 2008-2009
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Desha Girod is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law at Stanford University where she manages the program Evaluating International Influences on Democratic Development.  Her research focuses on the influence of external actors on political and economic development.  In 2009, she will join the faculty of the Department of Government at Georgetown University.
Desha Girod CDDRL Hewlett Fellow 2007-2008 Speaker
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Ukraine Imports Democracy

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The United States and the European Union spend roughly $1.5 billion per year on democracy promotion, but how effective are such external efforts? As the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine demonstrates, for such efforts to succeed, local actors must want democratic change; foreign attempts to "export" democracy are likely to fail in the absence of domestic consumers. In the Ukraine case, external assistance played a direct, causal role in restricting some aspects of President Leonid Kuchma's power while increasing some aspects of the opposition's power.

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Michael A. McFaul

Do Islamists have a commitment problem? Islamic political parties and Signalling democratic sincerity

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Professor Brown received his B.A. in political science from the University of Chicago and his M.A. and Ph.D. in politics and Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University. He teaches courses on Middle Eastern politics, as well as more general courses on comparative politics and international relations. Brown is author of Peasant Politics in Modern Egypt (1990); The Rule of Law in the Arab World: Courts in Egypt and the Gulf (1997); Constitutions in a Non-Constitutional World: Arab Basic Laws and the Prospects for Accountable Government (2001); and Palestinian Politics After the Oslo Accords: Resuming Arab Palestine (2003).

Professor Brown is the recipient of Fulbright grants to study in Egypt and the Gulf and teach in Israel. He recently served two years as Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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Nathan Brown Professor of Political Science and International Affairs Speaker The Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University
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