Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
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.
Read an excerpt of an address delivered by Larry Summers, the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard University, at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research on February 19, 2019.
Read it here.
Abstract:
The recent surge in nationalism and tribalism brings renewed salience to questions of identity within and across borders. Notably, it exposes the tension between bounded social identities, on the one hand, and universalist yearnings and commitments, on the other. Liberal democracy—and the ostensible universalism on which it is based—is struggling to resolve this tension. I turn instead to the cosmopolitan tradition. I argue that cosmopolitanism—and a genuinely cosmopolitan (i.e., unbounded) social identity, in particular—represents not just an extension of scope from the national to the global, but a qualitative shift that permeates all identities, and serves to fundamentally protect and liberate particularist attachments from their otherwise inherent instabilities and contradictions. On this view, the promise of cosmopolitanism does not rest exclusively in what it can deliver beyond our borders, but also in its potential to fundamentally recast social identities within boundaries, resolving crises of identity at all levels of society.
Speaker Bio:
Abstract:
Venezuela finds itself mired in an unprecedented economic and political crisis. The economy has contracted nearly 50% since President Maduro took office in 2013, oil production has declined to levels below those last seen in 1950, and inflation has reached an estimated annual rate of over 1.3 million percent. Millions have fled abroad in search of a better life, making Venezuela’s migration crisis the second worst in the world after Syria’s. In 2019, the ruling Maduro regime faces new challenges at home from an opposition that has declared it illegitimate, and from abroad due to diplomatic non-recognition by over 50 governments and the imposition of U.S. sanctions on the Venezuelan oil industry. This talk will examine the apparently intractable political and economic crisis facing Venezuela, the role of the military in keeping the present government in power, and the impact of the latest domestic and international pressures on the Maduro regime
Speaker Bio:
Larry Diamond breaks down Beijing’s efforts to direct “sharp power” against institutions in the United States in this podcast. Listen here.
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ABSTRACT: The United States has been the world’s dominant power for more than a century. Now many analysts believe China is taking its place. Is China an emerging superpower? Should the United States gear up for a new cold war in Asia? In this seminar, I show that China actually lags far behind the United States by the most important measures of national wealth and power—and will probably fall further behind in the coming decades. The most likely threat to American security, therefore, is not a confident Chinese peer competitor, but a deeply insecure China that lashes out after failing to live up to the global hype about its rise. I will discuss how the United States can contain this threat without starting a cold or hot war with Beijing.
PROFILE: Michael Beckley is an assistant professor of political science at Tufts University and a fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. His research focuses on the rise of China and has received “best article” awards from the American Political Science Association and the International Studies Association and has been featured by numerous media, including CNN, Fox News, the Financial Times, the New York Times, NPR, and the Washington Post. Previously, Professor Beckley worked at the U.S. Department of Defense, the RAND Corporation, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He currently consults for the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, the Joint Staff, and the National Intelligence Council. He holds a PhD in political science from Columbia University and his first book, Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower, was published last fall by Cornell University Press. Part of his talk is based on a Foreign Affairs web article that was named one of the ten “best of 2018.”Image
Stanford’s Global Digital Policy Incubator (GDPi), the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the HANDA Center for Human Rights and International Justice, UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center, and the Civic Space Initiative invite you to participate in a roundtable discussion with Clément Voule, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association, on the role of technology companies in defending freedom of assembly and association online.
In recent years, the right to free assembly and association online has been challenged from numerous sides, often under the pretext of national security, public order, morality, and prevention of abuse. These restrictions include blocking of groups and websites focused on minority groups, large-scale Internet shutdowns, mass online harassment and doxing campaigns, and the use of facial recognition software to identify protesters. Violations of offline rights are spilling over into online spaces, where their impact ripples through entire societies. This creates an urgent need for the protection of these rights in new domains. The United Nations is seeking input from the private sector, academic experts, and the broader public on how to protect these shrinking spaces.
Participants are invited to share cases in which individual and collective rights to peacefully assemble online were violated. The conversation will inform the Special Rapporteur’s report to the United Nations Human Rights Council on threats to free assembly in the digital realm and how they can be addressed.
Lunch will be provided prior to the event.
We Look forward to your attendance at this special event.
CDDRL
Encina Hall, C152
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Stephen Stedman is a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), an affiliated faculty member at CISAC, and professor of political science (by courtesy) at Stanford University. He is director of CDDRL's Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy, Development and Rule of Law, and will be faculty director of the Program on International Relations in the School of Humanities and Sciences effective Fall 2025.
In 2011-12 Professor Stedman served as the Director for the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy, and Security, a body of eminent persons tasked with developing recommendations on promoting and protecting the integrity of elections and international electoral assistance. The Commission is a joint project of the Kofi Annan Foundation and International IDEA, an intergovernmental organization that works on international democracy and electoral assistance.
In 2003-04 Professor Stedman was Research Director of the United Nations High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change and was a principal drafter of the Panel’s report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility.
In 2005 he served as Assistant Secretary-General and Special Advisor to the Secretary- General of the United Nations, with responsibility for working with governments to adopt the Panel’s recommendations for strengthening collective security and for implementing changes within the United Nations Secretariat, including the creation of a Peacebuilding Support Office, a Counter Terrorism Task Force, and a Policy Committee to act as a cabinet to the Secretary-General.
His most recent book, with Bruce Jones and Carlos Pascual, is Power and Responsibility: Creating International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2009).
Encina Hall, C150
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305
Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.
Abstract:
Why were Islamists less polarizing in Tunisia than their counterparts in Egypt after the downfall of the autocratic regime in 2011? While the electoral processes that brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Egypt rapidly polarized society, the Muslim Brothers in Tunisia formed a coalition with secular groups to pry power from the old power centers immediately after the removal of Ben Ali. Different approaches focused on Tunisians’ liberal culture and their proximity to Europe. Scant attention paid to both the historical and political-strategic conditions that shaped boundaries of interactions between Islamists and non-Islamists. I argue that the historical relations between the state and Islamists affect the distribution of power between them on the one hand, and their secular opponents on the other. In Tunisia, Islamist and non-Islamist forces believed in the necessity of conciliation (or were forced to do so by political circumstances). They, therefore, reached across ideological lines and struck deals to hold democratic institutions.
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Abstract:
Ever since the Millennium Message, Putin's first presidential speech on January 1, 2000, the Kremlin's political architects have cultivated a narrative of Russia as a unique nation on a righteous path toward restored greatness. The process of myth-making is intertwined with the policies involved in remaking Russia as a global power, as the regime builds legitimacy through careful messaging on Russian nationhood, history, morality, and geopolitical strength, using law and policy to embed those concepts as institutions and persuade citizens that Russia needs autocracy to survive. This talk traces the Kremlin's cooptation of culture and history to tell a certain story about Russia and its citizens, and examines public opinion polls to assess the degree to which the strategy is working, as well as street protests and radical performance art that attempts to claim spaces of agency for citizens who don't fit into the mythic mold.
Speaker Bio:
Alice E.M. Underwood is a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law and a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. She is a Weiland Fellow at Stanford and a former Title VIII Fellow at the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and has published with Intersection, The Russia File, Russian Life, and Harvard International Review.Image
