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.
Taiwan's Democratic Development: Reflections on the Ma Ying-jeou Era
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The eight-year presidency of Ma Ying-jeou (2008-2016) in Taiwan left a complex legacy of political achievements, confrontations, and disappointments that defies easy characterization. It began with President Ma and the Kuomintang’s (KMT) commanding electoral victories in the 2008 elections, and ended with the KMT’s overwhelming loss to the resurgent Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and its leader Tsai Ing-wen in 2016.
It featured rapid conclusions to a broad set of agreements on cross-Strait cooperation with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). But worries about closer ties with the PRC also triggered a popular backlash against growing mainland Chinese influence in Taiwan’s economy and culminated in a student-led occupation of the Legislative Yuan.
It coincided with contradictory trends in public opinion, including both the consolidation of a separate Taiwanese identity and support for the status quo in cross-Strait relations, as well as the increasing salience of divisions over social and environmental issues such as same-sex marriage and green energy at the same time as rising concerns about economic inequality.
It also marked a return to unified government after the acrimonious partisan fights of the Chen Shui-bian years, but long-standing intra-KMT divisions and the decentralized organization of the legislature continued to frustrate the administration, especially in President Ma’s second term.
Finally, the Ma era produced no consensus about how to move beyond Taiwan’s developmental state legacies. Plans for domestic economic liberalization and greater integration into the global economy were only partially carried out, and the Ma administration ignored or struggled to address rising inequality, stagnant wages, increasing economic dependence on the PRC market, and a skewed tax system favoring investors and corporations over salaried workers.
Conference Agenda
The 11th Annual Conference on Taiwan Democracy will bring together scholars from Taiwan, the US, and Europe to consider these political achievements, confrontations, and disappointments in depth, and to assess the strengths and weaknesses of Taiwan’s democracy at the end of the Ma Ying-jeou’s presidency. Conference participants will discuss trends in public opinion, party politics and elections, cross-Strait relations, governance and media, and the performance of political institutions. The conference papers will be revised and included in an edited volume covering democratic practice during the Ma Ying-jeou era in Taiwan.
The conference is free and open to the public. Those interested in attending are requested to RSVP at the link above. This event is organized by the Taiwan Democracy Project in the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.
Thursday, March 9
9:15-10:45. Panel I. Public Opinion and Elections
- Min-hua Huang, "Why Young Voters Abandoned the KMT"
- Ching-hsin Yu, "Trends in National Identity, Partisanship, and Attitudes toward Cross-Strait Relations"
- Yun-han Chu, discussant
11:00-12:45. Panel II. Party Politics
- Austin Wang, "Tsai Ing-wen and the DPP: The Path Out of the Political Wilderness"
- Nathan Batto, "The KMT as a Presidentialized Party: Party Leaders and Shifts in China Discourse"
- Kharis Templeman, "The Disruption that Wasn't: How 2016 Changed the Taiwanese Party System"
- Ching-hsin Yu, discussant
12:45-1:45. Lunch
1:45-3:30. Panel III. Economics, Security, and Cross-Strait Relations
- Szu-yin Ho, "Ma Ying-jeou's Cross-Strait Policy: Ambitions, Constraints, Results"
- Lang Kao, "Cross-Strait Agreements and Taiwan's Executive-Legislative Relationship, 2008-2016"
- Dean Chen, "In the Shadow of Great Power Rivalry: The KMT Administration's Relations with America, China, and Japan, 2008-2016"
- Larry Diamond, discussant
Friday, March 10
9:15-10:45. Panel IV. Governance, Media, and Civil Society
- Eric Yu, "The Changing Media Environment and Public Opinion"
- Yun-han Chu and Yu-tzung Chang, "The Challenge of Governability in Taiwan"
- Kharis Templeman, discussant
11:00-12:30. Panel V. Political Institutions
- Shih-hao Huang, w/ Shing-yuan Sheng, "Decentralized Legislative Organization and Its Consequences for Policy-making in the Ma Ying-jeou Era"
- Christian Goebel, "Special Prosecutors, Courts, and Other Accountability Institutions under Ma YIng-jeou"
- TJ Pempel, discussant
12:30-1:30. Lunch
Oksenberg Room, 3rd Floor, Encina Hall Central
Larry Diamond
CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C147
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
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ldiamond@stanford.edu
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
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 World; Will 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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Conferences
The Future of Globalization
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The populist backlash against globalization is being felt acutely across Europe as well as here in the US. And yet whether you look at it from an economic, political or military perspective, transnational cooperation has become an integral part of our global landscape. Hear CDDRL Mosbacher Director Francis Fukuyama on the future of globalization for World Affairs.
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Decapitation by Arrest: International Justice and Demobilization in the DRC
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Commentators have vigorously debated whether international criminal justice mechanisms favor conflict or peace. Others have debated whether decapitation (i.e., assassination of leaders) strengthens or weakens militias, insurgencies, and terrorist groups. This study examines how arrests of, and threats to arrest, militia leaders pursuant to international criminal warrants have affected demobilization of Rwandan militias in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.
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Richard Steinberg writes and teaches in the areas of international law and international relations. He currently teaches International Trade Law, International Business Transactions, and Theories of International Law, and directs Law School clinics that work with the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and conduct research in conflict and post-conflict zones. He is also Director of the Sanela Diana Jenkins Human Rights Project, and Editor-in-Chief of the award-winning www.ICCforum.com (link is external). In addition to his UCLA appointment, Professor Steinberg is currently Visiting Professor of Stanford Global Studies at the WSD Handa Center for Human Rights and International Justice, and the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford.
Co-sponsor: HANDA Center for Human Rights & International Justice
Richard Steinberg
Visiting Professor at Stanford Global Studies and on faculty at UCLA School of Law
Seminars
America: the failed state
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"The book on Trump is still not written. We must to await the coming months to see which man, the deal-maker or the extremist, comes to the fore. But Trump’s victory also represents the latest stage in a global shift toward populist nationalism, a pattern whose meaning is starting to become frighteningly clear," writes our Mosbacher Director Francis Fukuyama in Prospect Magazine. Read the article here.
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Stanford program to host Ukrainian leaders
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Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is proud to announce the launch of a new practice-based program to train emerging leaders from Ukraine. The Ukrainian Emerging Leaders Program will welcome three mid-career practitioners for a 10-month immersive academic experience at Stanford University this fall. During the duration of their residency, the fellows will bolster their academic knowledge, build connections across campus, receive mentorship from leading faculty members, and work on a dedicated fellowship project.
Fellows will hail from both inside and outside of government working as policymakers, legal professionals, entrepreneurs, and civil society leaders. They will be selected based on their professional track record, contributions to their field, and the scope of their anticipated fellowship project. The hope is that they will emerge with a deeper academic foundation and stronger network to make a greater contribution to democratic, political and social development in Ukraine and the broader region.
"As the political and security situation continues to shift in and around Ukraine, it's more important than ever to support sound principles of good governance,” said Michael McFaul, the director of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institue (FSI). “With CDDRL's commitment to civil society, FSI’s deep expertise in the region and Stanford University's unparalleled opportunities for scholarship, we anticipate that this program will nurture a new generation of dedicated and effective leaders."
The Ukrainian Emerging Leaders Program joins two other practice-based programs at CDDRL, which include the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program and the Leadership Academy for Development. All of these programs have a similar goal of connecting practitioners to academic knowledge and have built a global network of over 500 professionals committed to democratic development. Collectively these programs highlight CDDRL’s unique commitment to train practitioners from across the developing world, which also helps to deepen the Center’s understanding of democratic conditions around the world.
The Ukrainian Emerging Leaders Program is CDDRL’s first yearlong global fellowship program, and will allow fellows to enroll in Stanford courses and work on a concrete project that will be presented at the end of their fellowship. While they will be based at CDDRL, the fellows will also benefit from connections to other academic units across campus as well as the broader Silicon Valley community.
“CDDRL is very happy to initiate the new Ukrainian Emerging Leaders Program,” said Francis Fukuyama the Mosbacher Director at CDDRL and Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at FSI. “Ukraine is a country that has been seeking to establish viable democratic institutions and to fight corruption, and is also at the center of a geopolitical struggle. Stanford can play a very important role in helping to build intellectual capital there.”
Interested applicants will have through Feb. 15, 2017 to apply and must meet a firm set of criteria that can be found here. Fellows will receive a $70,000 stipend for the 10-month fellowship program and a supplement for additional costs and relocation.
Stanford’s John S. Knight (JSK) Fellow Oleksandr Akymenko (2015-16) and Kateryna Akymenko, JSK Affiliate (2015-16) conceptualized the program as a way to connect Stanford with practitioners in Ukraine and contribute to the reformation process in the country. The program is funded by generous support from Western NIS Enterprise Fund, Svyatoslav Vakarchuk and Tomas Fiala.
WNISEF is a regional private equity fund, a pioneer in Ukraine and Moldova with more than two decades of successful experience in investing in small and medium-sized companies. WNISEF is supported by the United States Agency for International Development.
Svyatoslav Vakarchuk is a civic activist, Ukrainian musician, the lead vocalist and founder of the band “Okean Elzy“. Vakarchuk is also the founder of a charity fund called “Lyudi Maybutnyogo” (People of the Future) and co-founder of the Center for Economic Strategy, an independent policy think tank dedicated to supporting reforms and sustainable economic growth in Ukraine. He was a Yale World Fellow in 2015.
Tomas Fiala is the Chief Executive Officer of Dragon Capital, a leading investment bank in Ukraine. Fiala has over twenty years’ experience in Central and Eastern European securities markets. He served as elected President of the European Business Association (2010-’15) where he lead the top association for foreign businesses in Ukraine uniting over 900 companies with more than a million employees. In October 2016, Fiala was elected to the Board of Transparency International Ukraine.
For more information about the program and to apply, please visit the program page.
For the press release in Ukrainian click here.
To download the flyer in Ukrainian click here.
To download the flyer in English click here.
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Taiwan's Foreign Policy in a New Era
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Abstract
Dr. Tien will reflect on security and economic trends in the Asia-Pacific region, and speak about Taiwan's foreign policy strategy in light of these trends.
Bio
Dr. Hung-mao Tien received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Since September 2016, he has been the the chairman of the Straits Exchange Foundation, the semi-official body in Taiwan responsible for direct exchanges and dialogue with the People's Republic of China. He is also the president and board chairman of the Institute for National Policy Research in Taipei, as well as an advisor to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and board member of several foundations and business corporations in Taiwan. He previously served as Minister of Foreign Affairs, ROC (Taiwan), Representative (ambassador) to the United Kingdom, and presidential advisor to former President Lee Teng-hui. He has also served in an advisory capacity to Harvard University’s Asia Center, The Asia Society in New York, and the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. Dr. Tien has taught in universities in both the US and Taiwan as professor of political science. His numerous publications in English (author, editor and co-editor) include: Government and Politics in Kuomintang China 1927-37 (Stanford University Press); The Great Transition: Social and Political Change in the Republic of China (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press); and Democratization in Taiwan, Implications for China (St. Anthony’s Series, Oxford University), Consolidating the Third Wave Democracies, Themes and Perspectives (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press), China Under Jiang Zemin (Rienner), and The Security Environment in the Asia-Pacific (M.E. Sharpe).
Philippines Conference Room
3rd Floor, Encina Hall
Hung-mao Tien
President
Institute for National Policy Research
Lectures
Russia and the Threat to Liberal Democracy
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"Since the end of World War II, the most crucial underpinning of freedom in the world has been the vigor of the advanced liberal democracies and the alliances that bound them together. Through the Cold War, the key multilateral anchors were NATO, the expanding European Union, and the U.S.-Japan security alliance. With the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO and the EU to virtually all of Central and Eastern Europe, liberal democracy seemed ascendant and secure as never before in history. Under the shrewd and relentless assault of a resurgent Russian authoritarian state, all of this has come under strain with a speed and scope that few in the West have fully comprehended, and that puts the future of liberal democracy in the world squarely where Vladimir Putin wants it: in doubt and on the defensive" writes Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, for The Atlantic. Read the whole article here.
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