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.

Transitions to Democracy

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?

Ethical and Economic Case for Global Redistribution

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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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Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on Global Justice

Human Rights and Global Business

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Chip Pitts Lecturer in Law Speaker Stanford Law School
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Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on Global Justice

If Citizenship is Political Community, then Which Communities Count? Borders and boundaries in France and Indonesia

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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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Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on Global Justice

Applying the Odious Debts Doctrine While Preserving Legitimate Lending

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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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Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on Global Justice

International Law, Fifth Edition

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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.

Proven in the classroom, clearly organized, and with a distinctively accessible style, International Law offers

  • a comprehensive and effective blend of current issues and materials with basic international law principles and concepts
  • a balanced combination of relevant cases, excerpts, notes, questions, and other interdisciplinary materials representing a variety of perspectives and disciplines
  • an analysis of the relationship between international and domestic law and public and private law
  • treatment of such substantive topics as International Dispute Resolution, Criminal Law, Human Rights, Environmental Law, and the Use of Force
  • a complete teaching package, including a Teacher's Manual and a biannual Document Supplement
  • Reflecting the many recent developments in this area of the law, the Fifth Edition features:
  • a new co-author, Allen S. Weiner, who brings extensive first-hand knowledge of international legal institutions
  • a new chapter on International Criminal Law that includes current materials on extradition and rendition, the international crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, torture, and the emergence of international tribunals, including the International Criminal Court
  • new cases, including Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, Sanchez-Llamas v. Oregon, Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, American Insurance Assoc. v. Garamendi, Republic of Austria v. Altmann, Case Concerning Israel s Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (International Court of Justice), and Prosecutor v. Krstic (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia)
  • an updated case study in Chapter 1 on the international law and policy implications of the September 11 attacks and the U.S. and world response to the attacks and to terrorism in general, with other materials on the war on terrorism throughout the book
  • expanded treatment of active areas of litigation, including the Alien Tort Statute and suits against foreign government officials and state agencies
  • an extensive updating of the European Union sections, including the implications of the addition of twelve new member states and the failure to pass the new Constitution
  • major revisions to the environmental law chapter that reflect the rapid developments in this area e.g., the Kyoto Protocol and efforts to combat global warming

Table of Contents

  1. What Is International Law?
  2. The Creation of International Norms Treaties, Customary Law, International Organizations, and Private Norm-Creation
  3. International Law in the United States
  4. International Dispute Resolution
  5. States and Other Major International Entities
  6. Foreign Sovereign Immunity and the Act of State Doctrine
  7. Allocation of Legal Authority Among States
  8. International Human Rights
  9. Law of the Sea
  10. International Environmental Law
  11. Use of Force and Arms Control
  12. International Criminal Law
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Africa's Revolutionary Deficit

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Somalia is once again on the front page--and the news isn't pretty. Since 2003, the country's seaside capital of Mogadishu has served as an arena for a battle of gladiators, pitting U.S.backed warlords against guntoting Islamic revolutionaries. With no capable or legitimate state to counter it, the Union of Islamic Courts emerged victorious last June, only to be felled in December by an enfeebled transitional government, formed in exile and backed by the Ethiopian military. A recent spate of assassinationstyle killings and suicide bombings herald the arrival of a new resistance movement intent on ejecting these foreign forces and the African Union troops now being dispatched to the country. Caught in the midst of this violent morass is Somalia's longsuffering population of 8.5 million, seeking order from whomever can provide it, simply hoping that the bully who comes out on top will care enough to reverse the country's economic collapse.

Somalia may be garnering headlines today, but the country's strife parallels the bloodshed in far too many of Africa's struggling nations.

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Explaining Democratic Survival Globally (1946-2002) - Institutional and Non-institutional Causes

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This research aims at explaining the apparently higher breakdown rate of presidential democracies over parliamentary ones. It shows that the alleged greater negative effect of presidential regimes on democratic breakdown than parliamentary democracies would disappear, not just when military legacy is considered, but also when the effectiveness or power of legislatures is taken into account.

Speaker Bio

Ming Sing is Associate Professor at the Department of Public and Social Administration, City University of Hong Kong. He is a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California, San Diego (2006-07).

His current research interests are comparing political culture in Asia and institutional engineering in the world. He joined the Asiabarometer Survey Team in 2006 exploring political culture of all Asian societies in relation to democracy He has been doing research on institutional and non-institutional factors shaping global democratic breakdown longitudinally.

He has published on various aspects of democratization in Hong Kong and is the author and editor of three books: Hong Kong's Tortuous Democratization: a Comparative Analysis (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), and Hong Kong Government & Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). His third book (University of Hong Kong, 2007) focuses on the institutional engineering and governance problems in Hong Kong. He has also published articles in Government & Opposition, Democratization, East Asia, China Information, Chinese Law & Government, Journal of Contemporary Asia, International Journal of Public Administration and elsewhere.

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Ming Sing Associate Professor, City University of Hong Kong; Visiting Fulbright Scholar, UCSD Speaker
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