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.

Ill Winds: Book Launch and Discussion with Larry Diamond

Please join Larry Diamond, Senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Affairs and the Hoover Institution for the launch of his latest book, "Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency."

 

Featuring a Panel Conversation with:

 

Zin Mar Aung

Burmese MP and political activist

 

Vladimir Kara-Murza

Russian journalist and anti-corruption crusader

 

Cara McCormick

CEO, Chamberlain Project, Co-founder/Co-leader of The

Committee for Ranked Choice Voting in Maine

 

*Reception to follow

Bechtel Conference Center

Encina Hall

616 Serra Mall

Stanford, CA 94305

Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program 2019-20

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We are proud to announce our next year's cohort of CDDRL Honors Program students! We selected a diverse group of undergraduate majors for the program who will be writing their senior theses on a subject touching upon DDRL with a global impact. Students will work to complete their thesis under the guidance and consultation of CDDRL faculty, but may have a primary thesis advisor from their own department. Upon fulfilling individual department course requirements and completing the honors program, the student will graduate in his/her major with a certificate of honors in Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law. 

Read their bios here.

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PODCAST: China and the Global Challenges to Democracy: A Conversation with Larry Diamond

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In this episode of the Power 3.0 podcast, Larry Diamond discusses the Chinese Communist Party's range of influence and interference in activities that target the public, civic, and social institutions of democracies.

 

Listen here.

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Cosmopolitanism and the Crisis of Social Identity

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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:

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Shahrzad Sabet's research spans politics, economics, psychology, and philosophy. She is a Fellow at the University of Maryland’s Bahá’í Chair for World Peace Program. Previously, she was a Senior Research Fellow at Princeton University’s Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard, where she recently received her PhD in Government. Her work has been featured in outlets such as The Washington Post and The New York Times.

Shahrzad Sabet Fellow at the University of Maryland’s Bahá’í Chair for World Peace Program
Seminars

Venezuela's Crisis: Chávez, Maduro and Beyond?

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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:

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Harold Trinkunas is the Deputy Director of and a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Prior to arriving at Stanford, Dr. Trinkunas served as the Charles W. Robinson Chair and senior fellow and director of the Latin America Initiative in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. His research focuses on issues related to foreign policy, governance, and security, particularly in Latin America. Trinkunas has written on emerging powers and the international order, ungoverned spaces, terrorism financing, borders, democratic civil-military relations, drug policy and Internet governance. He received his doctorate in political science from Stanford University in 1999. He was born in Maracaibo, Venezuela.

Harold Trinkunas Deputy Director of and a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University
Seminars

Getting China Right: Reassessing Chinese Power and U.S. Policy in Asia

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EMERGING ISSUES IN CONTEMPORARY ASIA

A Special Seminar Series

RSVP required by February 22, 2019 at: https://goo.gl/forms/ZCwcHC0qTec2rzj63

VALID STANFORD ID CARD MUST BE PRESENTED UPON ARRIVAL

 

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.   

Michael Beckley
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.”

Michael Beckley Assistant Professor of Political Science Tufts University
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