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.

In the past three decades, the number of democracies in the world has tripled, and democracy has become the only broadly legitimate form of government. But many of the regimes that have replaced dictatorships themselves suffer from many illiberal practices, or hold multiparty elections only as a façade to mask continuing authoritarian domination.

CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall, Room C144
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 724-7985 (650) 724-2996
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Visiting Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Business
milogram.jpg PhD

Eva Meyersson Milgrom is a senior research scholar at CDDRL and a visiting associate professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and the Public Policy Program. She is also an associate professor and senior research fellow at the School of Business at Stockholm University in Sweden.

Her current research focuses on the following topics: (1) implications of social behavioral theories on economic growth, in conjunction with Guillermina Jasso of New York University; (2) institutional change and its effects on promotion and demotion in Swedish private companies; inter-firm wage mobility in Sweden from 1979-1990; labor markets segregation (firm and individual characteristics) in collaboration with Illong Kwon of the University of Michigan along with Mike Gibbs and Kathy Lerulli; (3) equity considerations and the trade-offs between complementarities and influence costs within organizations; and (4) the structure of inequality and extremism. At Stanford, she has taught courses on international corporate governance and on managing diversity.

Her previous interdisciplinary work includes the following: In the summer of 2002, she organized a laboratory to provide an institutional analysis of economic growth based on firm-matched data from four Scandinavian countries. In fall 2002, she organized a conference that brought together scholars from diverse fields to analyze the phenomenon of suicide bombing and to discuss how this phenomenon affects current social science thinking and research. A book is in the works on this topic. Meyersson Milgrom also organized sessions on rational choice at the August 2002 meeting of the American Sociological Association.

Meyersson Milgrom previously served as a visiting scholar in the sociology departments at Stanford University (1998-2000) and Harvard University (2000-2001), and also served as a visiting associate professor at the Sloan School of Management, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2001-2002).

Her recent books published in Sweden include: The State as a Corporate Owner (1998, with Susannah Lindh) and Compensation Contracts in Swedish Publicly Traded Firms (1994). Her recently published articles include: "An Evaluation of the Swedish Corporate System" in Hans T:son Soderstom (January 2003); "Pay, Risk and Productivity" in Finnish Economic Papers (with Trond Petersen and Rita Asplund); "Equal Pay for Equal Work? Evidence from Sweden, Norway and the United States" in the Scandinavian Journal of Economics (vol. 4, 2001, with Trond Petersen and Vermund Snartland); and "More Glory and Less Injustice: The Glass-Ceiling in Sweden 1970-1990" in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility (Kevin T. Leicht, editor, with Trond Petersen).

Meyersson Milgrom was born in Sweden and received a PhD in sociology from Stockholm University.

CDDRL Senior Research Scholar

CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C147
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 724-6448 (650) 723-1928
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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
diamond_encina_hall.png MA, PhD

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 WorldWill 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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In its relations with Peru, the United States has historically placed greatest emphasis on fighting the war on drugs. As Sendero Luminoso, The Shining Path, led an insurgency against the Peruvian government in the 1980s and 1990s, the United States provided ample support against the terrorists located in the jungle, especially those participating in the drug trade. But Peru's victory over terrorism then was due more to improved police intelligence and increased public investment, rather than success in the war on drugs. Now, in the midst of economic troubles and a difficult transition back to democracy in Peru, the Shining Path has made a resurgence. The United States again faces a choice about how to proceed - to continue focusing on the war on drugs or to provide sustained levels of investment in Peru's economy and political institutions, thereby turning this war on terror into a war on poverty.

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SAIS Review
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Recent decades have witnessed a dramatic expansion of management education and practice. At the same time, the formalization of management practice has allowed for a widespread diffusion of management ideas across sectors and continents. This book provides an up-to-date summary of the development, refinement, and diffusion of managerial ideas, adding detail and explanation to commonly held conceptions about the explosion of management knowledge.

The contributors contend that management ideas do not flow automatically but are actively shaped and transformed by knowledge carriersbusiness schools, consultancies, and the media. Drawing on data from worldwide empirical studies, the chapters analyze how such carriers are organized, how they act and react, and how they shape and reshape knowledge. The book places the development and diffusion of management knowledge in a wider environmental and historical context and offers stimulating comparisons of European and American management traditions.

The combination of theory and practice will make this book a valuable resource for courses dealing with management, organizational and institutional theory, and globalization.

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Stanford University Press, in "The Expansion of Management Knowledge"
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This book compares sub-Saharan Africa and the former Soviet Union, two regions beset by the breakdown of states suffering from extreme official corruption, organized crime extending into warlordism, and the disintegration of economic institutions and public institutions for human services. The contributors not only study state breakdown but also compare the consequences of post-communism with those of post-colonialism.

This chapter looks at the processes of state formation in postcolonial Africa and the former Soviet Union and asks whether those processes make African and Eurasian states especially vulnerable to civil war. In particular, we ask whether the experience of Africa's postcolonial states suggests a similar historical trajectory for the new states that emerged in Eurasia at the beginning of the 1990s. We argue that, despite important differences between the two historical experiences, conditions surrounding state formation in Africa and post-Soviet Eurasia have inhibited the formation of stable and legitimate states and have made war more likely.

The chapter beings by outlining three broad explanatory factors that scholars have used in trying to explain civil wars since 1945: ethnicity, nationalism, and globalization. We argue that these explanations neglect what Klaus Gantzel referred to as "the historicity of war," by which he means "the structural dynamics which condition the emergence and behaviour of actors" in any given period (Gantzel 1997, 139). We then suggest that a focus on state formation is helpful in providing the historical context for understanding civil wars. After surveying the experience of state-building in postcolonial Africa and in Eurasia, we conclude with comparisons and contrasts between the regions.

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Woodrow Wilson Center Press, in "Beyond State Crisis: Postcolonial Africa and Post-Soviet Eurasia in Comparative Perspective"
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Stephen J. Stedman
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For the past several decades, the conventional - and, until recently, the predominant - perspective on development in the international donor community has been that countries are poor because they lack resources, infrastructure, education, and opportunity. By this logic, if rich countries could only transfer enough resources and technology, improve human capacity enough, and support health and education enough, development would occur. To be sure, greater public resources, better physical infrastructure, and stronger public health and education are essential for development. But they are not enough, and they are not most crucial factor.

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U.S. Agency for International Development in "U.S. Agency for International Development, Foreign Aid in the National Interest: Promoting Freedom, Security, and Opportunity"
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Larry Diamond
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Gail W. Lapidus reviews three competing arguments in an emerging "Who Lost Russia" debate and provides a reexamination of assumptions underlying American policy. She finds that most of these critiques exaggerate the impact of American policy and finds this trend to be a sobering illustration of the limits on America's ability to translate its political primacy and power into influence over the character and behavior of this former superpower.

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Prentice Hall, in "Eagle Rules? Foreign Policy and American Primacy in the Twenty-First Century"
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0-13-090987-4
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The excellent scholarly studies in Beyond State Crisis? offer both in-depth focus on specific countries and problems and useful comparative speculation regarding similarities and differences between the Eurasian and African experiences. They make a strong case for the serious scholarly comparison of the two regions... Any scholar interested in comparative studies and international relations will find a wealth of substantive detail and theoretical discussion by expert observers of state effectiveness and breakdown in this important book. - Perspectives on Political Science

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Woodrow Wilson Center and Johns Hopkins University Press in "Beyond State Crisis? Post-Colonial Africa and Post-Soviet Eurasia in Comparative Perspective"
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193036508X
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