The 12th annual Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program gathered 25 democracy leaders from around the developing world for a three-week training program on democracy, good governance, and the rule of law reform. Selected from a large pool of applicants, the fellows have diverse backgrounds across sectors and geographies, working in civil society, public service, social enterprise, media and technology.

Fellows were instructed by an all-star roster of Stanford scholars and policy experts, including former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; FSI Director and former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul; CDDRL Mosbacher Director Francis Fukuyama and Larry Diamond, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Fellows also met industry leaders such as Eric Schmidt of Google, democracy leaders such as Carl Gershman of the National Endowment for Democracy and others. During the program, they shared their personal stories about the struggle in their home countries, but also stories of their fight for justice, equality, and democracy, stories of optimism and endurance.

You can find some of their talks below and for more videos visit our YouTube channel. 

Kasha Nabagesera (Uganda)

The founding member of Uganda's LGBTI Movement

"I am the only founding member of Uganda's LGBTI movement who is still based in the country"

Kasha Nabagesera is the executive director of Kuchu Times Media Group, the first LGBTI media platform in Africa. She is known as the “founding mother” of the LGBTI movement in Uganda - where homosexuality is illegal - advocating for equal rights and the eradication of all forms of discrimination based on sexual orientation. Listen to her story about big losses and big wins, everyday dangers and hope.

Rafael Marques de Morais (Angola)

Investigative reporter, MakaAngola

"Why the government is after you when you are sleeping so much?"

Rafael Marques de Morais is an award-winning journalist and human rights activist in Angola, working to investigate corruption and abuse of power by the country’s ruling family. He founded Makaangola, a watchdog website dedicated to exposing corruption and human rights abuses in Angola. Find out why his son thinks that his father is harmless for the government.

Belabbes Benkredda (Algeria)

The founder of Munathara Initiative

"Debate is the central part of the democratic equation."

Belabbes Benkredda is an award-winning social innovator and the founder of the Munathara Initiative, the Arab world’s largest online and television debate forum highlighting voices of youth, women, and marginalized communities. Operating in 11 Arab countries, Munathara’s monthly prime-time TV debates are the only civil society-run, independent political talk program on Arabic television. Munathara Initiative organized over 650 workshops with more than 10 thousand participants from 12 countries. They have around 90 thousand of registered users. More importantly, Munathara Initiative provided safe public space for young women to voice their opinions and mark their presence in public, traditionally dominated by the middle-aged men.  

Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is proud to announce our four incoming fellows who will be joining us in the 2016-2017 academic year to develop their research, engage with faculty and tap into our diverse scholarly community. 

The pre- and postdoctoral program will provide fellows the time to focus on research and data analysis as they work to finalize and publish their dissertation research, while connecting with resident faculty and research staff at CDDRL. 

Fellows will present their research during our weekly research seminar series and an array of scholarly events and conferences.

Topics of the incoming cohort include electoral fraud in Russia, how the elite class impacts state power in China, the role of emotions in support for democracy in Zimbabwe, and market institutions in Nigeria. 

Learn more in the Q&A below.

Hometown: Tomsk, Russia

Academic Institution: Northwestern University

Discipline and expected date of graduation: Sociology, April 2017

Research Interests: authoritarianism, state capacity, social policy, civil society, trust, Russia and post-communist countries

Dissertation Title: The State that Betrays the Trust: Infrastructural State Power, Public Sector Organizations, and Authoritarian Resilience in Putin's Russia

What attracted you to the CDDRL Pre/post-doctoral program? I study the connection between state capacity and political regimes - the topic that is at the core of many research initiatives at CDDRL. Learning more about this work and receiving feedback for my dissertation will enrich and sharpen my analysis, while helping me to place it into a comparative context. I am looking forward to discussing my work with the faculty who study the post-Soviet region. I also will explore policy implications of my work with the help of policy experts at CDDRL.

What do you hope to accomplish during your nine-month residency at the CDDRL? Besides finishing writing my dissertation, I will workshop three working papers to prepare them for publication. The first one argues that Putin's regime used the school system to administer a large-scale electoral fraud in 2012 presidential elections; the second one shows how the networks of social organizations were used by subnational autocrats to strengthen the regime; and the third one will look at the factors that make the abuse of such organizations more difficult in some regions. In addition to these papers I will continue developing my post-graduation research project exploring the relationship between social trust and distrust, institutions, political competition, and democratization.

Fun fact: I have spent 25 years of my life in Siberia, and I can tell you: Chicago winters are worse!

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Shelby Grossman

CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow

Hometown: Reading, MA

Academic Institution: Harvard University

Discipline & Graduation Date:  Government, Summer 2016

Research interests: political economy of development, private governance, market institutions, Sub-Saharan Africa, survey methods

Dissertation Title: The Politics of Order in Informal Markets: Evidence from Lagos

What attracted you to the CDDRL post-doctoral program? I was attracted to CDDRL largely for its community of scholars. Affiliated faculty work on the political economy of development and medieval and modern market institutions, topics that are tied to my own interests.

What do you hope to accomplish during your nine-month residency at the CDDRL? I plan to prepare a book manuscript based on my dissertation, a project that explains variation in the provision of pro-trade institutions in private market organizations through the study of physical marketplaces in Nigeria. In addition, I will continue to remotely manage an on-going project in Nigeria (with Meredith Startz) investigating whether reputation alleviates contracting frictions. I also plan to work on submitting to journals a few working papers, including one on the politics of non-compliance with polio vaccination in Nigeria (with Jonathan Phillips and Leah Rosenzweig). 

Fun fact: Contrary to popular belief, not all cheese is vegetarian. I have a website to help people determine if a cheese is vegetarian or not: IsThisCheeseVegetarian.com. 

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Daniel Mattingly

CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow

Hometown: Oakland, California

Academic Institution: University of California, Berkeley

Discipline & Graduation Date: Political Science, Summer 2016

Research Interests: Governance, rule of law, state building, authoritarian politics, Chinese politics

Dissertation Title: The Social Origins of State Power: Democratic Institutions and Local Elites in China

What attracted you to CDDRL?  The Center has a fantastic community of scholars and practitioners who work on the areas that I'm interested in, including governance and the rule of law. I'm excited to learn from the CDDRL community and participate in the Center's events. The fellowship also provides me with valuable time to finish my book manuscript before I start teaching.

What do you hope to accomplish during your nine-month residency at the CDDRL? While at CDDRL, I plan to prepare my book manuscript and to work on some related projects on local elites and state power in China and elsewhere. 

Fun fact: I grew up on an organic farm in Vermont.

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Lauren E. Young

CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow

Hometown: Saratoga, CA

Academic Institution: Columbia University 

Discipline & Graduation Date: Political Science (Comparative Politics, Methods), May 2016 (defense), Oct 2016 (degree conferral)

Research Interests: political violence, political economy of development, autocratic persistence, democratization, protest, electoral violence

Dissertation Title: The Psychology of Repression and Dissent in Autocracy

What attracted you to the CDDRL post-doctoral program? As a graduate of the CISAC honors program when I was an undergraduate at Stanford, I have seen first-hand how intellectually stimulating, collaborative, and plugged into policy CDDRL is. While at the center I will be revising my dissertation work on the political psychology of participation in pro-democracy movements in Zimbabwe for submission as a book manuscript, and moving forward new projects that similarly seek to understand how different forms of violence by non-state actors affects citizens' preferences and decision-making. Because of its deep bench of experts on autocracy, narco-trafficking, and insurgency, CDDRL will add enormous value to these projects.

What do you hope to accomplish during your nine-month residency at the CDDRL?  During my fellowship year, my primary goal is to revise my research on Zimbabwe into a book manuscript. I defended my dissertation as three stand-alone articles, including two experiments showing that emotions influence whether opposition supporters in Zimbabwe express their pro-democracy preferences and a descriptive paper showing that repression has a larger effect on the behavior of the poor. To prepare the book manuscript during my fellowship, I will bring in additional quantitative and qualitative descriptive evidence and tie the three papers together into a cohesive argument about how opposition supporters make decisions about participation in protest, why emotions have such a large effect on these decisions, and how this affects variation across individuals and the strategic choices of autocrats and activists.

Fun fact: During my fieldwork I took an overnight train from Victoria Falls to a southern city in Zimbabwe and hitch-hiked into a national park. It got a little nerve-wracking when night started to fall, but ended with  an invitation to a barbecue! 

FSI SENIOR FELLOWS FRANCIS FUKUYAMA & LARRY DIAMOND DISCUSS DEMOCRACY IN THE JULY/AUGUST ISSUE OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS

Larry Diamond and Francis Fukuyama, senior fellows at the Freeman Spogli Institute, have both written essays in the July/August 2016 issue of Foreign Affairs. Follow the links below to read the full articles without a subscription block:

Diamond, who is also the former director of the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), takes stock of the global democratic recession and urges the next president to make democracy promotion a pillar of his or her foreign policy agenda in his article "Democracy in Decline."

In "American Political Decay or Renewal?" Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at FSI and the Mosbacher Director of CDDRL, analyzes the rising tide of populism as represented by the current candidates for the US Presidential elections.

Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law congratulates its undergraduate honors class for completing their original research and undergraduate theses. They graduated from Stanford University on June 12 with honors in their respective disciplines.

Graduates include Vehbi “Deger” Turan, who was awarded the Firestone Medal for his thesis entitled “Augmenting Citizen Participation in Governance through Natural Language Processing.” Turan’s project employed existing literature on democratic participation, case studies and an original algorithm in order to devise a means by which government agencies can evaluate public comments received via the Internet on political issues.

The Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research recognizes Stanford's top ten percent of honors theses in social science, science and engineering among the graduating senior class.

Turan decided to explore this topic shortly after joining the Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program.

According to the program’s Director Stephen Stedman, “After listening to a research seminar at our Center, Deger believed that he could develop an aggregation tool to help policy makers understand such immense data.”

Francis Fukuyama, the Mosbacher Director of CDDRL also noted, “Deger is perhaps the best example to date of why interschool honors programs are valuable. He is a computer science major who came to us expressing an interest in using his background in artificial intelligence to help solve critical public policy problems.” Fukuyama together with Associate Professor of Political Science Justin Grimmer advised Turan on his honor’s thesis.

Turan will be starting a new position at Atomic Labs’ Zenreach start-up after graduation.

The CDDRL Award for Outstanding Thesis was given to Rehan Adamjee whose thesis explored the different factors at play in choosing between healthcare providers in a rural area of Pakistan.

Adamjee and Turan are just two members of a the 2016 cohort of 11 honors students, many of whom traveled to foreign countries to collect original data, conduct interviews and research their thesis topics. Their topics range from timely case studies on the use of social media as a tool of empowerment to a glimpse at the effects of regional politics on healthcare reform in Post-Soviet Russia.

The 2016 class joins 76 graduates from CDDRL’s honors program since its launch in 2007.

The Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program trains Stanford students from diverse majors to write theses with global policy implications on a subject related to democracy, development and the rule of law. Students attend a class on research methods the spring quarter of their junior year. During their senior year, in tandem with the CDDRL research community and their faculty advisor, students conduct both local and international research in order to write their theses. Students travel to Washington, DC for the annual honors college to meet policymakers and members of the development community to enrich their thesis topics.

A list of our graduating students along with links to all their theses can be found below.

Meet our Class of 2017 

Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law is proud to announce the 2016 class of Draper Hills Summer Fellows who were selected for their outstanding contributions to advancing democratic development in some of the most challenging regions of the world. 

From Afghanistan to Venezuela, this group of 25 courageous leaders are working to root out corruption, advance freedom of expression, pioneer new technology for social change, and reform government institutions. Many have been imprisoned and victimized for their work, and struggle with great odds to defend democracy and human rights in closed societies. Fellows will arrive at Stanford in July to begin the three-week academic training program taught by Stanford faculty, policymakers, and thought-leaders in the technology sector.

The 2016 class will mark the 12th cohort of the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program and the fellows will join the Omidyar Network Leadership Forum, an alumni community of over 270 alumni in 70 countries worldwide.

Sub-Saharan Africa

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Rafael Marques de Morais is an award-winning journalist and human rights activist in Angola, working to investigate corruption and abuse of power by the country’s ruling family. He founded Makaangola, a watchdog website dedicated to exposing corruption and human rights abuses in Angola. 

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Astère Muyango is a human rights lawyer working to strengthen the rule of law in Burundi, and serves as the country program director of International Bridges to Justice. His organization represents indigents accused of crimes, and has represented many of the young protestors who were arrested during Burundi’s recent political violence. 

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Kasha Nabagesera is the executive director of Kuchu Times Media Group, the first LGBTI media platform in Africa. She is known as the “founding mother” of the LGBTI movement in Uganda - where homosexuality is illegal - advocating for equal rights and the eradication of all forms of discrimination based on sexual orientation. 

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Oluseun Onigbinde is a social entrepreneur in Nigeria and co-founder of BudgIT, which develops civic technology tools to advance greater public sector transparency and accountability. Their technology campaigns have reached over 625,000 Nigerians on issues of public sector accountability.  

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Glowen Wombo Kyei-Mensah is the managing director of Participatory Development Associates, a development consultancy working to support governance and community development in Ghana. She brings over a decade of experience in the development sector, leading nationwide research projects with considerable impact on social and policy reform. 

Asia

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Atishi Marlena is a young Indian politician, who is part of the Aam Aadmi Party, which emerged from a nationwide anti-corruption movement. She serves as the advisor to the Deputy Chief Minister working on educational reform and participatory governance efforts in the National Capital Territory of Delhi, where the political party is in power. 

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Wai Wai Nu is the director and founder of Women Peace Network-Arakan, an organization building a platform for peace and understanding among Burma’s diverse ethnic groups. Nu was a political prisoner for seven years under the Burmese military government, and emerged to serve as a national – and international – voice for Burma’s human rights and democracy movement.

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Rajamanohar Somasundaram is a technology entrepreneur from India who co-founded Hexolabs, a company building technology solutions for basic mobile handset users in emerging markets. Somasundaram pioneers the use of mobile technology for the development of healthcare, education, and governance services to support inclusive development at the base of the pyramid.

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Nguyen Duc Thanh is a Vietnamese economist, and president of the Vietnam Institute for Economic and Policy Research, a think tank that advocates for market economy reform, civil society empowerment, and the implementation of the rule of law. Thanh was a member of the Economic Advisory Group to the Vietnamese Prime Minister from 2011-2016. 

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Chandralal Majuwana is a human rights lawyer in Sri Lanka. He serves as the head of the Human Rights Program for the Forum for Human Dignity, a Colombo-based NGO. The program provides legal assistance to victims of human rights abuses and focuses on education and advocacy.

Eastern Europe and Eurasia

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Olga Aivazovska is head of the Board of the Civil Network OPORA, a civil-society organization catalyzing change in Ukraine by engaging citizens in decision-making, and fighting for the protection of voting rights and transparent electoral processes. An active participant in Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity, Aivazovska has been working to transform Ukraine into a democratic and prosperous country. 

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Giorgi Kadagidze is a professor at Ilia State University, one of the leading research and educational institutions in Georgia. From 2009-2016, Kadagidze served as Chairman of the Board and Governor of the Central Bank of Georgia, leading the country’s economic transition from a planned to a market-based economy. 

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Edmon Marukyan is a member of the National Assembly of the Republic of Armenia and serves as the chairman of the Council of Bright Armenia, an opposition party. Before assuming public office, he worked as a human rights lawyer helping to strengthen democracy and civil society in Armenia. 

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Elizaveta Osetinskaya is a media manager, editor and business journalist. She was responsible for the editorial operations at RBC Media Holding until May 2016. RBC Media Holding is the leading independent Russian media outlet, which includes a TV channel, the largest news portal in the country, a newspaper and magazine. 

Arab World

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Houssem Aoudi is a Tunisian entrepreneur with over a decade of experience in media, civic engagement, and social innovation. He is the founder of Wasabi, a company that builds platforms to promote open expression. Aoudi served as the director of the Media Center for the 2014 Tunisian parliamentary and presidential elections, and is the co-founder of a hub and community space for entrepreneurs. 

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Asos Askari is a lawyer who serves as a legal advisor to the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq, drafting new laws and regulations to govern natural resource, human rights, and public sector reform. He also co-founded the Iraq Legal Education Initiative, a partnership between the American University of Iraq Sulaimani and Stanford Law School, which seeks to advance legal education in the Kurdistan region.

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Belabbes Benkredda is an award-winning social innovator and the founder of the Munathara Initiative, the Arab world’s largest online and television debate forum highlighting voices of youth, women, and marginalized communities. Operating in 11 Arab countries, Munathara’s monthly prime- time TV debates are the only civil society-run, independent political talk program on Arabic television. 

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Abdelrahman Mansour is an Egyptian political activist and entrepreneur in the field of media and journalism. He has played a key role in several Egyptian and Arab initiatives committed to advancing citizen’s rights to knowledge and access to information. 

Latin America

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Mauricio Alarcón Salvador is an Ecuadorian lawyer, and human rights and transparency activist. He is currently the executive director of Fundación Ciudadanía y Desarrollo, a non-profit organization that works on citizen participation and transparency, and serves as the program director of Fundamedios, Ecuador’s leading organization in the promotion and defense of freedom of expression. 

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Lisseth Boon is a Venezuelan investigative journalist with over 20 years of experience in print, broadcast, and digital media. She is currently an investigative reporter at RunRun.es, an independent news website.

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Lucila Crexell is a national senator of Argentina and represents the province of Neuquén, located in the Patagonia region. She has two decades of experience working in different areas of the public administration - both at the national and local level. As a senator, she defends the decentralization of power and the protection of provincial autonomy.

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Maria Llorente is the executive director of the Fundacion Ideas para la Paz, an independent think tank working on peace and security issues, and actively involved in the peace process in Colombia. Her work has contributed to evidence-based policy recommendations to increase citizen security and the reform of the Colombian police.  

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Jana Macedo is a public policy manager at the Brazilian Federal Government where she works at the Ministry of Planning coordinating initiatives on participatory planning and civic engagement. Previously, Macedo worked on human rights issues, which gave her a multidisciplinary perspective to develop public policy serving vulnerable populations.