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.

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Jeffrey S. Kopstein is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Toronto. He holds a BA, MA, and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. He has held fellowships at Harvard University, Princeton University, and has also been an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow. He has written extensively in the fields of European politics, transatlantic relations, and political economy. His publications include various books and edited volumes, including Growing Apart? America and Europe in the 21st Century (Cambridge 2007) Comparative Politics: Interests, Identities, and Institutions in a Changing Global Order (Cambridge, 2000, 2005), and The Politics of Economic Decline in East Germany, (Chapel Hill, 1997). Recent scholarly articles have appeared in World Politics, Comparative Politics, Theory and Society, Political Theory, German Politics and Society, Slavic Review and The Washington Quarterly. Jeffrey Kopstein's research has been supported by grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, The National Science Foundation, and the National Council for European and Eurasian Research. In 2006 he was the recipient of the University of Torontos Faculty of Arts and Science Outstanding Teaching Award.

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Jeffrey Kopstein Professor Speaker University of Toronto; Director, Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies
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Jeremy Weinstein is an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University and an affiliated faculty member at CDDRL and CISAC. Previously, he was a research fellow at the Center for Global Development, where he directed the bi-partisan Commission on Weak States and US National Security. While working on his PhD, with funding from the Jacob Javits Fellowship, a Sheldon Fellowship, and the World Bank, he conducted hundreds of interviews with rebel combatants and civilians in both Africa and Latin America for his forthcoming book, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence. He has also worked on the National Security Council staff; served as a visiting scholar at the World Bank; was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; and received a research fellowship in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution. He received his BA with high honors from Swarthmore College, and his MA and PhD in political economy and government from Harvard University.

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Jeremy M. Weinstein Professor Speaker CDDRL
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Michael A. McFaul
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For the last two decades, Soviet and the Russian leaders worked with Western leaders to integrate the former Soviet empire, and above all else Russia, into the western community of states. Disputes over NATO expansion, the wars in Chechnya, or the bombing campaign against Serbia periodically slowed the process of integration. Nonetheless, leaders in both Russia and the West never let the long-term economic, security, and even ideological benefits of integration be jeopardized by these intermittent disagreements.

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Thoroughly updated to keep pace with the many new developments in international law, the Fifth Edition of this popular casebook covers the core topics, basic doctrines, and a broad range of foreign policy issues relevant to the contemporary public international law course. Reflecting the many recent developments in this area of the law, the Fifth Edition features SCICN Co-Director Allen S. Weiner as a new co-author who brings extensive first-hand knowledge of international legal institutions.
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Do international factors, including democracy promotion policies of Western actors, play a significant role in encouraging or discouraging transitions to democracy? If so, when and how do external incentives, financial and technical aid, socialization techniques, diplomacy or demonstration effects influence domestic decision-makers to attempt to transition to democracy? What combination of domestic conditions and external factors are most likely to lead to the weakening of non-democratic regimes and their replacement with democratic governments?

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Branko Milanovic is lead economist in the World Bank research group and visiting professor at the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Previously, he was a World Bank country economist for Poland and a research fellow at the Institute of Economic Sciences in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. He received his Ph.D. in Economics in 1987 from Belgrade University.

Milanovic is an expert in economies in transition, income distribution, and globalization.

Recent publications include: Worlds Apart: Measuring International and Global Inequality (Princeton, 2005); Income and Influence: Social Policy and Emerging Economies, with Ethan Kapstein (Russell Sage, 2002); Inequality and Poverty During the Transition From Market Economy (World Bank, 1998).

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Branko Milanovic Lead Economist Speaker World Bank
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Chip Pitts Lecturer in Law Speaker Stanford Law School
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Excerpt from page 4 of John R. Bowen's "If Citizenship is Political Community, then Which Communities Count? Borders and boundaries in France and Indonesia":

But these acts of invoking citizenship as participatory membership in order to support citizenship as the territorial state can open the door to other, alternative claims about political community, claims that challenge the postulates of territorial boundedness and legal uniformity.

It is these challenges to the national model that I wish to address, doing so by looking at some current developments in the two places where I continue to work, France and Indonesia. In France efforts to strengthen territorial control and internal uniformity have the upper hand, but they have encountered claims that cities should run their own affairs and that long-term residents must be fully incorporated into the political community. In Indonesia it is rather arguments based on participatory membership that are on the rise, and they draw on pre-national institutions of local control and Islamic norms; in turn, however, they are challenged by those in the state and the army who privilege a logic of the territorial state. The objects of debate are in some sense, mirror images - in France, external borders; in Indonesia, internal boundaries - but both debates concern the legitimacy of alternative ideas of political community.

About the Author

John R. Bowen is the Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. His research explores broad social transformations now taking place in the worldwide Muslim community, including special emphasis on Muslim life in Indonesia. His research focuses on the role of cultural forms (religious practices, aesthetic genres, legal discourse) in processes of social change. In most of his work he has looked outward from a longterm research site in the Gayo highlands of Sumatra, Indonesia, to the broader transformations taking place in the Indonesian nation and elsewhere around the globe.

Sponsored by the Program on Global Justice and the Stanford Humanities Center

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John Bowen Dunbar Van Cleve Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology Speaker Washington University, St. Louis
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Abstract of Seema Jayachandran's "Applying the Odious Debts Doctrine while Preserving Legitimate Lending":

Odious debts are debts incurred by the government of a nation without either popular consent or a legitimate public purpose. While there is some debate within academic circles as to whether the successor government to a regime which incurred odious debts has the right to repudiate repayment, in the real world this is currently not an option granted legitimacy either by global capital markets or the legal systems of creditor states. There are compelling reasons to reform the law of odious debts to allow for such a repudiation in citizens of a tyrant to repay their oppressor's personal debts, but the burden of odious-debt servicing can perpetuate the cycle of state failure which has direct national security consequences. In addition, a properly designed odious debt reform could function as an alternative sanctions mechanism to trade sanctions with fewer harmful implications for the general population of the targeted state. Classical proponents of odious debt reform advocate for recognition of a legal rule under which successor governments could challenge the validity of debts incurred by prior regimes against the odious debt legal standard in a judicial-style forum. We make the case for an alternative "Due Diligence" model of reform which provides far greater ex ante certaining for lenders both as to which investments from subsequent invalidation. The Due Diligence Model also solves certain time-consistency problems inherent to the Classical model.

Seema Jayachandran is assistant professor of economics at Stanford University. She received her PhD in economics from Harvard University. She specializes in development economics, labor economics, and political economy.

Sponsored by the Program on Global Justice and the Stanford Humanities Center

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Seema Jayachandran Assistant Professor of Economics Speaker Stanford University
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