International Relations

Violence, Drugs and Governance: Mexican Security in Comparative Perspective

On October 3-4, 2011, the Stanford University Program on Poverty and Governance at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law and the Center for International Security and Cooperation, in conjunction with the Center for Latin American Studies, the Stanford Law School, and the Bill Lane Center for the American West, hosted a conference to discuss the problem of violence, organized criminal activity, and governance. In particular, the conference focused on growing concerns about Mexican security. Participants examined the issue from a comparative perspective, drawing lessons from the experience of Afghanistan, Colombia, and other countries that have grappled with similar challenges.

Among other topics, the conference explored the root causes of the dramatic upswing in violence in Mexico in recent years, compared those problems to chronic violence and illicit activity in other countries, and considered potential solutions that could reduce the risk of violence in the future. The conference was held at Stanford University in the Bechtel Conference Center in Encina Hall. Participants included scholars and doctoral candidates from the United States, Mexico, Colombia, and Germany, representatives from the U.S. Departments of Justice and Treasury, and the Mexican Embassy.

Context of the Problem

Crime and violence pose a serious challenge to Mexico. According to one of the participants, between January 2007 and December 2010, official statistics confirm that approximately 40,000 homicides have occurred. The problem appears to be growing worse, with 2011 on pace to become the most violent year on record.

The rising violence in Mexico has resulted in a sharply heightened sense of fear among citizens, who now feel the presence of cartels in their every day lives. The use of extortion and kidnapping by cartels combined with a lack of trust in security forces terrorizes the population and makes them feel like they have no where to turn. Despite this fact, crime rates in Mexico remain lower than in other parts of Latin America. Venezuela, for example, has among the highest homicide rates in the world. Yet the pervasive infiltration of cartels into public life gives Mexicans a heightened sense of the severity of violent crime in their own country.

There are no simple answers explaining these developments. Some participants trace the violence back to the 1980s when the United States began working closely with the Colombian government to stem the flow of cocaine across the Caribbean, and to disrupt powerful Colombian criminal organizations. The scholars suggested that the crackdown on those illegal trafficking routes caused the drug trade to divert through Mexico on the way to markets in the United States. These trade routes strengthened Mexican drug trafficking organizations (DTOs), thereby altering the landscape and scale of illicit activity in the country.

Some participants also noted the importance of attributing other factors to explain the growing violence in Mexico, citing four domestic factors. First, the efforts made by President Felipe Calderón of Mexico to crack down on drug-related violence after his inauguration in 2006; second, the fragmentation of Mexican cartels due to the capture or assassination of "kingpins" in the organizations; third, a diversification in the economic incentives of the DTOs; and fourth, the weak status of rule of law in Mexico.

These four explanations are by no means independent of each other, and the endogenous nature of these factors is exactly why it is so difficult to stop the increasing violence in Mexico. Indeed, examining these four factors a bit further makes it clear that they are closely linked. Following his inauguration, President Calderón made violence and drug trafficking top priorities. His strategy was to target and remove the cartel leadership, assuming that breaking the cartels up would make them easier to subdue. The effort had the opposite effect. Capturing and killing cartel kingpins created a power vacuum and splintered the cartels into many smaller, less organized, and more militant gangs. The smaller and less centralized gangs began fighting each other for control of routes and territory. Without centralized control, the groups also became less efficient as cocaine traffickers - a system that had previously thrived from economies of scale. As a result, they began diversifying their revenue streams. Extortion, human trafficking, money laundering, arms trading, and petty crime all became more economical relative to small-scale drug trafficking and dealing, which led the cartels to diversify further still. Though participants heavily debated the directionality of the link between this diversification and gang fractionalization, consensus emerged that dividing up the cartels led to increased violence in Mexico.

The persistent problems of the Mexican legal system have also exerted a huge impact on the ability of the Mexican government to subdue the violence. High rates of corruption within local police forces, due in part to low compensation, means that the police are unreliable as a means to enforce order in municipalities. This has prompted the government to deploy armed forces to try to restore order in some areas. Furthermore, the judicial system in Mexico is weak, with poor judges, a shortage of lawyers, and a backlog that makes due process nothing more than an idealized notion.

Participants also presented evidence that additional factors could have exacerbated the violence. Among them: the global recession, which has reduced economic opportunities, and democratization in the 1990s. But in general, participants concluded that the evidence that either of these factors affected the overall crime situation in Mexico was weak relative to the other factors discussed.

The overall consensus was that any policy initiative made to control violence in Mexico invariably must address the weak rule of law institutions, the economic incentives of the cartels, and the exploding intra- and inter-cartel violence. Successful strategies, moreover, must approach these topics differently than how they have been addressed thus far.

Lessons and Proposals

What can be done to rein in the rising violence? Participants examined a number of successful anti-gang and anti-drug policies in other countries for potential answers. For instance, the Unidades de Polícia Pacificadora (Pacifying Police Units or UPP) program in Rio de Janeiro, which started in 2008, consists of proximity policing, gaining the trust of and working with favela populations, and directly engaging with and helping favela children and youth. The program's main goal is to keep organized crime out of favelas, which have been their hideout for decades. The program helped restore law and order, participants said, because of the high effectiveness of proximity policing in high-risk communities, which combined policing with social and public services to increase legitimacy of the program. This dual security approach-using specialized forces during conflict and then proximity policing to maintain daily safety and security in the slums-has been highly successful at maintaining order and controlling police corruption in Rio.

In Colombia, because the violence of a few decades ago seemed to be more a result of a weak state than the presence of drugs, the situation improved when the state's capacity increased. Nevertheless, part of the solution found in the city of Medellín, where the local cartel proved too strong to destroy, was to allow one cartel to have a monopoly. Yet while this trade-off worked in the short-term, once the Medellín Cartel kingpin was captured and extradited with the help of U.S. military aid, violence started to increase again.

U.S. military aid to Colombia also had a drawback as some of the funding was leaked to paramilitary activities. Conference participants said one lesson from this experience is that it is important to invest more in drug interdiction than in eradication, because eradication programs increase the price of drugs, thereby improving trafficking incentives. The most important implication of this is that squeezing the traffickers will only cause them to re-route, not stop. When squeezed out of Colombia and the Caribbean, they re-routed through Mexico. If this occurs in Mexico, traffickers will most likely move into Central America. The issue of drug trafficking cannot be resolved if policymakers ignore Central American republics.

Several other proposals received attention during the conference. Among them was the suggestion that Mexican policy emulate aspects of the Colombian model by concentrating all efforts toward destroying the single-most violent cartel until it is entirely eliminated, and then progressing on to the next largest and so forth. Theoretically, doing so would systematically destroy the cartels while minimizing their fragmentation.

Participants also suggested that authorities focus on targeting extortion, kidnapping, and other non-drug related economically incentivized crimes committed by the gangs, which could help limit their ability to fragment and diversify. This approach could benefit from careful analysis of efforts to implement community policing strategies that some participants believe to have yielded results in the United States and Brazil. A third proposal with serious implications is to reform the judicial and penal system in Mexico to ensure that incarcerated "narcos" cannot continue operating from within Mexican prisons.

Finally, much discussion was given to the best way to address the demand-side of drug trafficking. While legalizing drugs in the United States was seen as highly unlikely option with very unclear potential results, a participant proposed that policymakers encourage the expansion of rigorous drug treatment programs, such as Hawaii's highly successful Opportunity Probation with Enforcement program. It requires convicted drug offenders on probation to undergo randomized drug tests one to seven times a week, with automatic incarceration for anyone who tests positive or is found to be in violation of their parole.

Conclusion

Daunting problems remain in understanding crime and governance in Latin America. But this conference, among other things, helped highlight areas where further research on drug trafficking, organized crime, violence, and issues of citizen security are still needed. There were also several highly actionable proposals put forth based on programs that have been implemented in other countries in the Western Hemisphere. These initiatives hold promise for helping Mexico deal with its own situation. This conference should serve as a launch pad to encourage and develop research and communication in this area with policy implications for the near future.

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Beatriz Magaloni

Dept. of Political Science
Encina Hall, Room 436
Stanford University,
Stanford, CA

(650) 724-5949

magaloni@stanford.edu

Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies

Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations

Professor of Political Science

beatriz_magaloni_2024.jpg MA, PhD

Beatriz Magaloni Magaloni is the Graham Stuart Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science. Magaloni is also a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, where she holds affiliations with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She is also a Stanford’s King Center for Global Development faculty affiliate. Magaloni has taught at Stanford University for over two decades.

She leads the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (Povgov). Founded by Magaloni in 2010, Povgov is one of Stanford University’s leading impact-driven knowledge production laboratories in the social sciences. Under her leadership, Povgov has innovated and advanced a host of cutting-edge research agendas to reduce violence and poverty and promote peace, security, and human rights.

Magaloni’s work has contributed to the study of authoritarian politics, poverty alleviation, indigenous governance, and, more recently, violence, crime, security institutions, and human rights. Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006) is widely recognized as a seminal study in the field of comparative politics. It received the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations, as well as the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section. Her second book The Politics of Poverty Relief: Strategies of Vote Buying and Social Policies in Mexico (with Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estevez) (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores how politics shapes poverty alleviation.

Magaloni’s work was published in leading journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Criminology & Public Policy, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, Latin American Research Review, and others.

Magaloni received wide international acclaim for identifying innovative solutions for salient societal problems through impact-driven research. In 2023, she was named winner of the world-renowned Stockholm Prize in Criminology, considered an equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of criminology. The award recognized her extensive research on crime, policing, and human rights in Mexico and Brazil. Magaloni’s research production in this area was also recognized by the American Political Science Association, which named her recipient of the 2021 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review, the leading journal in the discipline.

She received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University and holds a law degree from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.

Director, Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab

Co-director, Democracy Action Lab

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Tue, 04/22/2025 - 16:42

Russia’s Public Health Crisis: Examining the Politcal Causes of Dismal Health Outcomes Since the Collapse of Communism

Friday, January 27, 2012 | 12:00 PM -Friday, January 27, 2012 | 1:30 PM

In spite of the economic advances and increases in GDP since the collapse of communism, Russia suffers from a range of dismal public health outcomes reminiscent of a much poorer country. This study seeks to understand what role political factors play in the country's high adult mortality rate and declining life expectancy by mining World Bank and World Health Organization data and examining how Russians access healthcare services and information.

Walter P. Falcon Lounge

Kathryn Stoner

FSI
Stanford University
Encina Hall C140
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 736-1820 (650) 724-2996

kstoner@stanford.edu

Satre Family Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies

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Kathryn Stoner is the Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), and a Senior Fellow at CDDRL and the Center on International Security and Cooperation at FSI. From 2017 to 2021, she served as FSI's Deputy Director. She is Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) at Stanford and she teaches in the Department of Political Science, and in the Program on International Relations, as well as in the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy Program. She is also a Senior Fellow (by courtesy) at the Hoover Institution.

Prior to coming to Stanford in 2004, she was on the faculty at Princeton University for nine years, jointly appointed to the Department of Politics and the Princeton School for International and Public Affairs (formerly the Woodrow Wilson School). At Princeton she received the Ralph O. Glendinning Preceptorship awarded to outstanding junior faculty. She also served as a Visiting Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at McGill University. She has held fellowships at Harvard University as well as the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC.

In addition to many articles and book chapters on contemporary Russia, she is the author or co-editor of six books: "Transitions to Democracy: A Comparative Perspective," written and edited with Michael A. McFaul (Johns Hopkins 2013); "Autocracy and Democracy in the Post-Communist World," co-edited with Valerie Bunce and Michael A. McFaul (Cambridge, 2010); "Resisting the State: Reform and Retrenchment in Post-Soviet Russia" (Cambridge, 2006); "After the Collapse of Communism: Comparative Lessons of Transitions" (Cambridge, 2004), coedited with Michael McFaul; and "Local Heroes: The Political Economy of Russian Regional" Governance (Princeton, 1997); and "Russia Resurrected: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order" (Oxford University Press, 2021).

She received a BA (1988) and MA (1989) in Political Science from the University of Toronto, and a PhD in Government from Harvard University (1995). In 2016 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Iliad State University, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia.

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Mosbacher Director, Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law

Professor of Political Science (by courtesy), Stanford University

Senior Fellow (by courtesy), Hoover Institution

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Kathryn Stoner-Weiss FSI senior fellow Speaker

Rajaie Batniji Postdoctoral fellow, department of medicine, Stanford University Speaker

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Political order in Egypt

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Francis Fukuyama

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Commentary

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Mon, 08/01/2011 - 12:00

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In the May-June edition of The American Interest, Francis Fukuyama traces the contemporary history of U.S. development policy and its failure to incorporate Huntingtonian-style theory, which emphasizes the interconnectedness of economy, politics, and society. Using Egypt as an example, Fukuyama calls for policymakers to break down their silos to more holistically examine and support democratic transitions.

While academic political science has not had much to tell policymakers of late, there is one book that stands out as being singularly relevant to the events currently unfolding in Tunisia, Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries: Samuel Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Societies, first published over forty years ago.¹ Huntington was one of the last social scientists to try to understand the linkages between political, economic and social change in a comprehensive way, and the weakness of subsequent efforts to maintain this kind of large perspective is one reason we have such difficulties, intellectually and in policy terms, in keeping up with our contemporary world.

Huntington, observing the high levels of political instability plaguing countries in the developing world during the 1950s and 1960s, noted that increasing levels of economic and social development often led to coups, revolutions and military takeovers rather than a smooth transition to modern liberal democracy. The reason, he pointed out, was the gap that appeared between the hopes and expectations of newly mobilized, educated and economically empowered people on the one hand, and the existing political system, which did not offer them an institutionalized mechanism for political participation, on the other. He might have added that such poorly institutionalized regimes are also often subject to crony capitalism, which fails to provide jobs and incomes to the newly educated middle class. Attacks against the existing political order, he noted, are seldom driven by the poorest of the poor; they instead tend to be led by rising middle classes who are frustrated by the lack of political and economic opportunity—a phenomenon noted by Alexis de Tocqueville in his masterful analysis of the origins of the French Revolution and raised again in the early 1960s by James Davies’s well known “J-curve” theory of revolution.²

Something like this Huntingtonian process has unfolded in recent months in both Tunisia and Egypt. In both cases, anti-government protests were led not by the urban poor or by an Islamist underground, but by relatively well-educated middle-class young people used to communicating with each other via Facebook and Twitter. It is no accident that Wael Ghonim, Google’s regional head of marketing, emerged as a symbol and leader of the new Egypt. The protesters’ grievances centered around the fact that the authoritarian regimes of Ben Ali and Mubarak offered them no meaningful pathway to political participation, as well as failing to provide jobs befitting their social status. The protests were then joined by other groups in both societies—trade unionists, Islamists, peasants and virtually everyone else unhappy with the old regimes—but the driving force remained the more modern segments of Tunisian and Egyptian society.

Societies lacking institutions that could accommodate new social actors produced a condition Huntington labeled praetorianism, in which political participation took the form of strikes, demonstrations, protests and violence. The military often seized power in such circumstances because it was the only organized actor in society capable of running a government. The Egyptian Republic’s first autocrat, Gamal Abdel Nasser, came to power in precisely this manner back in July 1952, when his Free Officers movement represented the rising Egyptian middle class. The tragedy of modern Egypt is that there has been scarcely any meaningful political development in the more than half-century since then—meaning, in Huntington’s terms, the rise of modern institutions that could peacefully channel citizen participation.

Socioeconomic development, meanwhile, has proceeded apace: Between 1990–2010 Tunisia’s Human Development Index (a composite measure of health, education and income compiled by the UN) rose 30 percent, while Egypt’s rose 28 percent. Both countries produced tens of thousands of college graduates with no discernable future and a lopsided income distribution in which a disproportionate share of the gains from growth went to a small group of politically connected insiders. Huntington’s analysis of Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s thus remains eerily relevant today.

In Political Order Huntington was also making a broader point about the process of development itself. The significance of his book needs to be seen against the backdrop of post-World War II modernization theory, which in turn drew on classic 19th-century European social theory articulated by academics like Edward Shils, Talcott Parsons and Walt W. Rostow. American modernization theory argued that development was a single, seamless process. Economic development, changing social relationships like the breakdown of extended kinship groups and the growth of individualism, higher and more inclusive levels of education, normative shifts toward values like “achievement” and rationality, secularization and the growth of democratic political institutions, were all seen as an interdependent whole.

By pointing out that the good things of modernity did not necessarily go together, Huntington played a key role in killing off modernization theory. Political development was a separate process from socioeconomic development, he argued, and needed to be understood in its own terms. The conclusion that flowed from this point of view seemed at the time counterintuitive to the point of stunning: Without political development, the other aspects of modernization could lead to bad results—to tyranny, civil war and mass violence.

There were other reasons why Western modernization theory fell into disrepute by the 1970s: It came to be regarded as too Eurocentric—indeed, as too Americentric insofar as it seemed to posit American society as the pinnacle of modernization. It failed to recognize the possibility that countries like Japan and China might take roads to modernity that would look very different from the ones pioneered by Britain and the United States. But even if one agreed that the end point of development should be some form of industrialized liberal democracy, Huntington made it clear that arriving at the desired destination was far more elusive and complicated than modernization theorists believed.

The central piece of policy advice that emerged out of Huntington’s work was the concept of the “authoritarian transition.” If political systems opened up to democratic contestation too early, before the development of political parties, labor unions, professional associations and other organizations that could structure participation, the result could be chaotic. Authoritarian regimes that could maintain order and promote economic growth, Huntington argued, might oversee a more gradual institutionalization of society, and make a transition to democracy only when broad participation could be peacefully accommodated. This form of sequencing, in which economic development was promoted before a democratic opening, was the path followed by Asian countries like South Korea and Taiwan, which made democratic transitions in the late 1980s only after they had succeeded in turning themselves into industrialized powerhouses. It was also the development strategy recommended by Huntington’s former student Fareed Zakaria, as well as by the leaders of many authoritarian governments, who liked the idea of economic growth better than the idea of democratic participation.³ We will return to the question of how well that strategy worked in the Middle East later.

Development in Silos

As interesting and important as Huntington’s work was, it lay outside of mainstream thinking about development, which from the start was a highly Balkanized academic field that was dominated by economists. Few scholars have sought to understand development as an inter-connected process with political, economic and social parts. Few scholars have sought to understand development as an inter-connected process with political, economic and social parts.Development economists looked primarily at economic factors like capital, labor and technology as sources of economic growth, and thought neither about the consequences of growth for politics nor the relationship of political institutions to growth. The Harrod-Domar growth model that was dominant in the 1950s suggested that less-developed countries were poor primarily because they lacked capital, which then led development agencies like the World Bank to try to kick start growth with generous infusions of capital for physical infrastructure. It was only when steel plants and shoe factories in sub-Saharan Africa went idle due to corruption or lack of organizational capacity that they were forced to go back to the drawing board.

The political scientists, for their part, scaled back their ambitions from large Huntingtonian-style theory and focused primarily on political phenomena. Beginning in the 1980s, there was increasing interest in the problem of transitions into and out of democracy; with democratic transitions in Spain, Portugal and nearly all of Latin America, this became a particularly pressing issue. There was some revival of interest in the democracy-development linkage, but it never led to a clear consensus on the causal links connecting the two phenomena.

The academic interest in transitions corresponded to the burgeoning of democracy promotion as a distinct field of international practice, both on the part of the United States and of other democracies around the world. The idea was planted during the 1970s, when the institutes linked with the German political parties played a key role in beating back an attempted Communist takeover in Portugal and facilitating that country’s transition to democracy. The 1980s saw the establishment of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a taxpayer-funded but quasi-independent organization devoted to support of pro-democracy groups around the world. One of the NED’s early successes was its funding of the Solidarity trade union in Poland before the collapse of communism. The 1990s saw the growth of a host of international organizations capable of monitoring elections and the funding of the Democracy and Governance branch of the U.S. Agency for International Development to the tune of almost $1.5 billion annually.

By the late 1990s, there was some degree of convergence in the agendas of economists and political scientists. By that point Douglass North and the school of “New Institutional Economics” he founded made economists aware of the importance of political institutions—particularly property rights—for economic growth. Economists increasingly sought to fold political variables like legal systems and checks on executive power into their models. Political science had itself been colonized at this point by economic methodology, and it was natural for such rational-choice political scientists to start looking at the economic impact of political institutions.

The return to a more interdisciplinary approach to development was marked as well by the tenure of James Wolfenson as President of the World Bank from 1995 to 2005.⁴ Wolfenson early on gave a speech on the “cancer of corruption” and signaled to the institution that, henceforth, political issues like corruption and good governance would be taken seriously. The publication of the 1997 World Development Report, The State in a Changing World, marked an intellectual break with the Washington Consensus focus on economic policy and state downsizing, and the Bank created a new branch devoted to reform of developing country public sectors. These changes constituted an open admission that politics was a critical component of development, and that the state was not simply an obstacle to growth but often a necessary underpinning for it. Increasingly, donor agencies have seen the promotion of democratic accountability as one tool in the fight against corruption.

This modest degree of convergence should not, however, obscure the continuing degree of compartmentalization that exists in the field of development. While paying lip service to the importance of institutions, most economists and field practitioners still see politics as at best an obstacle to the real work of development, which is improvement in incomes, health, education and the like, and not as an independent objective of development strategy. (Amartya Sen is an important exception to this generalization.) The democracy promotion agencies, for their part, spend relatively little time worrying about economic growth, social policy or public health, which in their view are goods often used by authoritarian regimes to buy off populations and prevent democratization.

The intellectual confusion surrounding development has led to severely Balkanized policies both in the United States and in the international community that often work at cross purposes from one another.The intellectual confusion surrounding development has led to severely Balkanized policies both in the United States and in the international community that often work at cross purposes from one another. For example, the authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes of Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia, Paul Kagame in Rwanda and Yoweri Museveni in Uganda have been aid darlings over the past decade because of their track records in promoting economic, health and social goals. At the same time, democracy promotion groups have been highly critical of them and have supported opposition groups and civil society organizations seeking accountability and limits on executive power. To be sure, aid agencies don’t object to greater government accountability on the part of these regimes, while the democracy promotion community wouldn’t stand in the way of progress on HIV/AIDS or malaria. Yet no one takes a larger view and asks, for example, whether existing aid programs are helping to keep the regime in power or, conversely, are destabilizing it.

Egypt itself presents a good case of this particular form of policy incoherence. Despite the fact that Egypt ranks as one of the top American aid recipients, it is hard to say that Washington was pursuing development goals of any sort there. The United States was primarily interested in stability. Despite brave speeches on democracy by both Condeleezza Rice and Barack Obama in Cairo, the United States actually pulled its punches in pushing serious democratic reform on Egypt, particularly after the Hamas electoral victory in Gaza in 2006. Nonetheless, U.S. economic aid programs were still pushing education and economic policy reform programs in the country. Had American aid administrators taken the Huntingtonian view that their assistance was covertly designed to promote an expectations gap and delegitimate Hosni Mubarak, this might have been a clever strategy. But no such cleverness existed. Instead, it was simply an example of compartmentalized aid programs doing their thing in ignorance of the interdependent effects of politics and economics.

What Is to Be Done?

Ideas precede action. Before we can hope to generate a coherent set of policies for Egypt, or anywhere else for that matter, we need a better understanding of development—that is, how changes in economy, politics and society over time constitute a set of discrete yet interlinked processes. Whatever the shortcomings of classic modernization theory, it at least began from the insight that the phenomenon under study required development of a master social science that transcended existing disciplinary boundaries. This objective is as far away as ever in academia, where the traditional disciplines keep a chokehold on how younger academics think and do research. Today, the single most popular form of development dissertation in both economics and political science is a randomized micro-experiment in which the graduate student goes out into the field and studies, at a local level, the impact of some intervention like the introduction of co-payments for malaria mosquito netting or changes in electoral rules on ethnic voting. These studies can be technically well designed, and they certainly have their place in evaluating projects at a micro level. But they do not aggregate upwards into anything that can tell us when a regime crosses the line into illegitimacy, or how economic growth is changing the class structure of a society. We are not, in other words, producing new Samuel Huntingtons, with the latter’s simultaneous breadth and depth of knowledge.

On a policy level, we need far more mutual understanding between those who promote socioeconomic development and those who work on democracy promotion and governance.On a policy level, we need far more mutual understanding between those who promote socioeconomic development and those who work on democracy promotion and governance. Traditional development agencies like USAID already think politically to the extent that their aid projects are designed to support U.S. foreign policy. But they, like their counterparts in multilateral organizations like the World Bank, are not trained to do political economy analysis; they do not seek an understanding of the political context within which aid is used and abused, and what is not sought is very rarely found. We call for the liberalization of ports in Haiti, for example, without trying to understand which particular politicians are benefiting from existing arrangements that keep them closed. For their part, democracy promoters focus on democratic transitions, providing help to opposition parties and civil society organizations in authoritarian countries. But once a transition occurs, as it did after the Orange and Rose revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia, they have relatively little to offer new democratic governments in terms of policy agendas, anti-corruption strategies or help in improving the delivery of services that citizens want.

Beyond these relatively minor adjustments, a more robust theory of social change might tell us that, in certain circumstances, the best way to destabilize an authoritarian society would be not the funding of civil society groups seeking short-term regime change, but rather the promotion of rapid economic growth and the expansion of educational access.⁵ Conversely, there are many societies we know will simply waste development assistance dollars because they are ruled by unaccountable authoritarian regimes. In such circumstances, it might be a more efficient use of aid resources to cut development aid entirely and to work only for political change. This is, in effect, what has happened to Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe, but the country had to sink very far before anyone considered pulling the aid plug.

Huntington got a number of things wrong. The authoritarian transition was not a universally applicable formula for development. It worked reasonably well in East Asia, where there were a number of figures like Lee Kwan Yew, Park Chung-hee or the Chinese Communist Party leadership, who used their autocratic powers to promote rapid development and social change. Arab authoritarians were cut from a different cloth, content to preside over economically stagnant societies. The result was not a coherent development strategy but a wasted generation.

The aspiration of social science to replicate the predictability and formality of certain natural sciences is, in the end, a hopeless endeavor. Human societies, as Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper and others understood, are far too complex to model at an aggregate level. Contemporary macroeconomics, despite dealing with social phenomena that are inherently quantified, is today in crisis due to its utter failure to anticipate the recent financial crisis.

The part of social change that is the hardest to understand in a positivistic way is the moral dimension—that is, the ideas that people carry around in their heads regarding legitimacy, justice, dignity and community. The current Arab uprising was triggered by the self-immolation of an overeducated 26-year-old Tunisian vegetable seller whose cart was repeatedly confiscated by the authorities. After Mohamed Bouazizi was slapped by a policewoman when he tried to complain, he reached the end of his tether. Bouazizi’s public suicide turned into a social movement because contemporary communications technologies facilitated the growth of a new social space where middle-class people could recognize and organize around their common interests. We will probably never understand, even in retrospect, why the dry tinder of outraged dignity suddenly ignited in this fashion in December 2010 as opposed to 2009, or ten years before that, and why the conflagration spread to some Arab countries but not to others. But we can certainly do a better job in putting together the few pieces we do understand, in a way that would be useful to policymakers coping with the reality of social change.

¹Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies: With a New Forward by Francis Fukuyama (Yale University Press, 2006).

²Davies, “Towards a Theory of Revolution”, American Sociological Review, Vol. 27 (1962).

³Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (W. W. Norton, 2003); see also Zakaria, “A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew”, Foreign Affairs (March/April 1994).

⁴For a description of the Wolfenson presidency, see Sebastian Mallaby, The World’s Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations (Penguin Press, 2004).

⁵See Harold James’s retroview, entitled “Growing Pains”, of a classic December 1963 essay by Mancur Olson (“Rapid Growth as a Destabilizing Force”) in The American Interest (September/October 2006).

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Rajaie S. Batniji

Read more about Rajaie S. Batniji

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CDDRL Affiliated Scholar 2011-2012

Resident Physician in Internal Medicine, Stanford Medical Center

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Rajaie Batniji is a resident physician in internal medicine at Stanford and a CDDRL affiliate. His research examines the selection of priority diseases and countries in global health, and he is interested in global health financing and the priority-setting process of international institutions. His work has also examined social determinants of health in the Middle East. At FSI, Dr. Batniji is co-investigator on Global Underdevelopment Action Fund projects explaining U.S. global health financing and political causes of public health crisis.

Dr. Batniji received his doctorate in international relations (D.Phil) from Oxford University where he studied as a Marshall Scholar. He also earned a M.D. from the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine and M.A. and B.A. (with distinction) degrees in History from Stanford University. Dr. Batniji was previously based at Oxford's Global Economic Governance Program, and he has worked as a consultant to the World Health Organization.

Publications

Protecting Health: Thinking Small. Sidhartha Sinha and Rajaie Batniji. Bulletin of the World Health Organization 2010; BLT.09.071530 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20865078

Health as human security in the occupied Palestinian territory. Rajaie Batniji, Yoke Rabai’a, Viet Nguyen-Gillham, Rita Giacaman, Eyad Sarraj, Raija Leena Punamaki, Hana Saab, and Will Boyce. Lancet 2009 373:1133-43 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19268352

Misfinancing global health: the case for transparency in disbursements and decision making. Devi Sridhar and Rajaie Batniji. Lancet 2008; 372: 1185-91 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18926279

Coordination and accountability in the World Health Assembly. Rajaie Batniji. Lancet 2008; 372: 805 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18774416

Barriers to improvement of mental health services in low-income and middle-income countries. Benedetto Saraceno, Mark van Ommeren, Rajaie Batniji, Alex Cohen, Oye Gureje, John Mahoney, Devi Sridhar and Chris Underhill. Lancet 2007; 370:1164-74 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17804061

An Evaluation of the International Monetary Fund's Claims about Public Health. David Stuckler, Sanjay Basu, Rajaie Batniji, Anna Gilmore, Gorik Ooms, Akanksha A. Marphatia, Rachel Hammonds, and Martin McKee. International Journal of Health Services 2010; 40:327-32 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20440976

Reviving the International Monetary Fund: concerns for the health of the poor. Rajaie Batniji. International Journal of Health Services 2009; 39: 783-787 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19927415

Mental and social aspects of health in disasters: relating qualitative social science research and the sphere standard. R Batniji, M van Ommeren, B Saraceno. Social Science & Medicine 2006; 62:1853–1864 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16202495

Averting a crisis in global health: 3 actions for the G20. Rajaie Batniji & Ngaire Woods, 2009. Global Economic Governance Programme, http://www.globaleconomicgovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/averting-a-crisis-in-global-health.pdf.

Report of a High-Level Working Group, 11-13 May 2008. Rajaie Batniji, Devi Sridhar and Ngaire Woods, Global Economic Governance Programme, 2008, http://www.globaleconomicgovernance.org/project-health

Morocco's monarchy: Destroying hope for democracy?

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Authors

Ahmed Benchemsi

News Type

Commentary

Date

Thu, 06/30/2011 - 12:00

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"This is my way: I invite unto Allah with sure knowledge, I and whoever follows me."

It was with this these words, quoted from the Qur'an, that King Mohammed VI ended his speech on 17 June, urging Morocco's people to vote for his new constitution project in a referendum to be held on 1 July.

It takes quite a nerve to identify oneself with the prophet Muhammad and compare a political reform to Allah's path. It's also a paradox, coming from a monarch who is supposedly on the point of renouncing his own divine right.

According to Morocco's new draft constitution, the king won't be "sacred" any more. Instead, the people will owe him respect and tawqeer – an Arabic term which means something between reverence and adoration. So how much of a paradigm change is it really?

Although the US says it is "encouraged" by the draft constitution, this is not particularly good news for the monarchy. This mild praise from a rather unknown state department spokesperson during a routine press briefing demonstrates, if anything, the cautious retreat of US diplomacy.

It's a far cry from Hillary Clinton's heartfelt declaration on 30 March, commending Morocco for "achieving democratic change [in a way that is] a model for other countries in the region". At the time it was useful to highlight the difference between a ruthless US-bombed colonel slaughtering his people, and a nice US-backed monarch reacting to street protests by promising "comprehensive constitutional reform". But since then, the situation has changed.

After taking down two dictators, Arab revolutionary fever was tempered by war in Libya and the bloody repression in Syria. Inside Morocco, the 20 February youth-led, pro-democracy movement has petered out. Because it couldn't produce leaders, centralised structures and a focused, unifying claim, it lost momentum and finally proved harmless to the monarchy.

Since the king had already promised a new constitution, he had to deliver it. But with the pressure gone, the final draft is merely a democratic window dressing: each time a clause appears to bring genuine progress, another one seriously tones it down – or revokes it altogether.

To comply with democratic norms, the new constitution was supposed to curtail the king's prerogatives and to empower the elected prime minister, but the only real change is a semantic one. The prime minister will henceforth be called "chief of government" (CoG), though he's still bound hand and foot to the royal palace, not even controlling his own cabinet.

The king will still appoint and dismiss the ministers at will. At best, the CoG can "propose" ministers for nomination or "require" that they be dismissed, but the king is not bound to accept. On the other hand, the king can reshuffle government whenever he wants. He will now have to "consult" the CoG – but again, he's not bound to take his opinion into account.

To cut a long story short, the Moroccan king's absolutism, just like his "sacredness", has not gone. As for separation of powers, the king said it has been "bolstered" – and yet he still presides over the high council of magistrates, thus tightly controlling the courts of justice.

Optimists may see officialisation of the Tamazight (Berber) language as recognition of Morocco's ethnic and cultural diversity, but beyond the statement of intent, legislation is yet to be crafted. Morocco's regime has a history of undelivered promises on that matter. King Mohammed had already committed to implement Tamazight in the schools' curriculum in 2001, though little progress has been made since then.

In Morocco, practice often contradicts theory

In Morocco, practice often contradicts theory. For instance, the palace-promoted new supreme law "forbids" (again, in the absence of specific legislation) conflicts of interest by politicians and the abuse of dominant positions. Yet one can doubt the sincerity of this provision, knowing that the king's private holding company outrageously dominates Morocco's economy, to the extent that its global revenue equals 8% of GDP.

The main reason for viewing this new constitution with suspicion is that it is being validated at a breakneck pace. Political parties were given less than 24 hours to review the draft before the king threw it to referendum.

The 20 February activists immediately organised nationwide protests against what they saw as an "imposed" constitution. Unlike what happened in May, demonstrations were not brutally broken up by police but instead the authorities hired swarms of thugs who thronged the streets, looking for a fight with pro-democracy protesters and bawling that Mohammed VI is their "only king". The mood is turning ugly.

Meanwhile, the referendum campaign is obviously crooked. The state-controlled mosques are mobilised to preach the constitution's virtues – which is evidently unfair. As for public TV, the Election Watch Collective had asked, alongside Mamfakinch website (the online extension of the 20 February movement) for a fair and balanced airtime-sharing between "yes" and "no" arguments. But the government turned a deaf ear. A few days before the king's speech, an administrative decree was issued on the sly, splitting airtime only between officially recognised, mainly palace-subservient political parties and trade unions.

Because of the ongoing mass propaganda, there is no doubt that the outcome of the referendum will be "yes". But the government also needs to persuade large numbers of Moroccans to vote. If the participation rate is below 80%, the monarchy's motto of "unanimous popular support" will become harder to assert.

This is why the local authorities are preparing to transport armies of citizens to polling stations, even though it's illegal. For its part, the 20 February movement is calling for a boycott and preparing to video all suspicious "troop movements" during referendum day. A website has been created specially for that purpose with a new battle cry: Mamsawtinch, ou mamfakinch! – "We won't vote, and we won't give up!"

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The IMF: Violating Women Since 1945

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Date

Mon, 06/27/2011 - 12:00

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In reaction to the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Khan for allegations of rape in May, Kavita Ramdas and Christine Ahn argue in a piece for Foreign Policy in Focus that gender bias is embedded in the global policies and practices at the IMF, which unfairly target women. Kavita Ramdas is the former president and CEO of the Global Fund for Women and a visiting scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

In reaction to the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Khan for allegations of rape in May, Kavita Ramdas and Christine Ahn argue in a piece for Foreign Policy in Focus that gender bias is embedded in the global policies and practices at the IMF, which unfairly target women. Kavita Ramdas is the president and CEO of the Global Fund for Women and a visiting scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

As Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the world’s most powerful financial institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), spends a few nights in Rikers Island prison awaiting a hearing, the world is learning a lot about his history of treating women as expendable sex objects. Strauss-Kahn has been charged with rape and forced imprisonment of a 32-year-old Guinean hotel worker at a $3,000-a-night luxury hotel in New York.

While the media dissects the attempted rape of a young African woman and begins to dig out more information about Strauss-Kahn’s past indiscretions, we couldn’t help but see this situation through the feminist lens of the “personal is political.”

For many in the developing world, the IMF and its draconian policies of structural adjustment have systematically “raped” the earth and the poor and violated the human rights of women. It appears that the personal disregard and disrespect for women demonstrated by the man at the highest levels of leadership within the IMF is quite consistent with the gender bias inherent in the IMF’s institutional policies and practice.

Systematic Violation of Women’s Human Rights

The IMF and the World Bank were established in the aftermath of World War II to promote international trade and monetary cooperation by giving governments loans in times of severe budget crises. Although 184 countries make up the IMF’s membership, only five countries—France, Germany, Japan, Britain, and the United States—control 50 percent of the votes, which are allocated according to each country’s contribution.

The IMF has earned its villainous reputation in the Global South because in exchange for loans, governments must accept a range of austerity measures known as structural adjustment programs (SAPs). A typical IMF package encourages export promotion over local production for local consumption. It also pushes for lower tariffs and cuts in government programs such as welfare and education. Instead of reducing poverty, the trillion dollars of loans issued by the IMF have deepened poverty, especially for women who make up 70 percent of the world’s poor.

IMF-mandated government cutbacks in social welfare spending have often been achieved by cutting public sector jobs, which disproportionately impact women. Women hold most of the lower-skilled public sector jobs, and they are often the first to be cut. Also, as social programs like caregiving are slashed, women are expected to take on additional domestic responsibilities that further limit their access to education or other jobs.

In exchange for borrowing $5.8 billion from the IMF and World Bank, Tanzania agreed to impose fees for health services, which led to fewer women seeking hospital deliveries or post-natal care and naturally, higher rates of maternal death. In Zambia, the imposition of SAPs led to a significant drop in girls’ enrollment in schools and a spike in “survival or subsistence sex” as a way for young women to continue their educations.

But IMF’s austerity measures don’t just apply to poor African countries. In 1997, South Korea received $57 billion in loans in exchange for IMF conditionalities that forced the government to introduce “labor market flexibility,” which outlined steps for the government to compress wages, fire “surplus workers,” and cut government spending on programs and infrastructure. When the financial crisis hit, seven Korean women were laid off for every one Korean man. In a sick twist, the Korean government launched a "get your husband energized" campaign encouraging women to support depressed male partners while they cooked, cleaned, and cared for everyone.

Nearly 15 years later, the scenario is grim for South Korean workers, especially women. Of all OECD countries, Koreans work the longest hours: 90% of men and 77% of women work over 40 hours a week. According to economist Martin Hart-Landsberg, in 2000, 40 percent of Korean workers were irregular workers; by 2008, 60 percent worked in the informal economy. The Korean Women Working Academy reports that today 70 percent of Korean women workers are temporary laborers.

Selling Mother Earth

IMF policies have also raped the earth by dictating that governments privatize the natural resources most people depend on for their survival: water, land, forests, and fisheries. SAPs have also forced developing countries to stop growing staple foods for domestic consumption and instead focus on growing cash crops, like cut flowers and coffee for export to volatile global markets. These policies have destroyed the livelihoods of small-scale subsistence farmers, the majority of whom are women.

“IMF adjustment programs forced poor countries to abandon policies that protected their farmers and their agricultural production and markets,” says Henk Hobbelink of GRAIN, an international organization that promotes sustainable agriculture and biodiversity. "As a result, many countries became dependent on food imports, as local farmers could not compete with the subsidized products from the North. This is one of the main factors in the current food crisis, for which the IMF is directly to blame."

In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), IMF loans have paved the way for the privatization of the country’s mines by transnational corporations and local elites, which has forcibly displaced thousands of Congolese people in a context where women and girls experience obscenely high levels of sexual slavery and rape in the eastern provinces. According to Gender Action, the World Bank and IMF have made loans to the DRC to restructure the mining sector, which translates into laying off tens of thousands of workers, including women and girls who depend on the mining operations for their livelihoods. Furthermore, as the land becomes mined and privatized, women and girls responsible for gathering water and firewood must walk even further, making them more susceptible to violent crimes.

We Are Over It

Women’s rights activists around the globe are consistently dumbfounded by how such violations of women’s bodies are routinely dismissed as minor transgressions. Strauss-Kahn, one of the world’s most powerful politicians whose decisions affected millions across the globe, was known for being a “womanizer” who often forced himself on younger, junior women in subordinate positions where they were vulnerable to his far greater power, influence, and clout. Yet none of his colleagues or fellow Socialist Party members took these reports seriously, colluding in a consensus shared even by his wife that the violation of women’s bodily integrity is not in any sense a genuine violation of human rights.

Why else would the world tolerate the unearthly news that 48 Congolese women are raped every hour with deadening inaction? Eve Ensler speaks for us all when she writes, “I am over a world that could allow, has allowed, continues to allow 400,000 women, 2,300 women, or one woman to be raped anywhere, anytime of any day in the Congo. The women of Congo are over it too.”

We live in a world where millions of women don’t speak their truth, don’t tell their dark stories, don’t reveal their horror lived every day just because they were born women. They don’t do it for the same reasons that the women in the Congo articulate – they are tired of not being heard. They are tired of men like Strauss-Kahn, powerful and in suits, believing that they can rape a black woman in a hotel room, just because they feel like it. They are tired of the police not believing them or arresting them for being sex workers. They are tired of hospitals not having rape kits. They are tired of reporting rape and being charged for adultery in Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia.

Fighting Back

For each one of them, and for those of us who have spent many years investing in the tenacity of women’s movements across the globe, the courage and gumption of the young Guinean immigrant shines like the torch held by Lady Liberty herself. This young woman makes you believe we can change this reality. She refused to be intimidated. She stood up for herself. She fought to free herself—twice—from the violent grip of the man attacking her. She didn’t care who he was—she knew she was violated and she reported it straight to the hotel staff, who went straight to the New York police, who went straight to JFK to pluck Strauss-Kahn from his first-class Air France seat.

In a world where it often feels as though wealth and power can buy anything, the courage of a young woman and the people who stood by her took our breath away. These stubborn, ethical acts of working class people in New York City reminded us that women have the right to say “no.” It reminded us that “no” does not mean “yes” as the Yale fraternities would have us believe, and, most importantly that no one, regardless of their position or their gender, should be above the law. A wise woman judge further drove home the point about how critically important it is to value women’s bodies when she denied Strauss-Kahn bail citing his long history of abusing women.

Strauss-Kahn sits in his Rikers Island cell. It would be a great thing if his trial succeeds in ending the world’s tolerance for those who discriminate and abuse women. We cannot tolerate it one second longer. We cannot tolerate it at the personal level, we must refuse to condone it at the professional level, and we must challenge it every time it we see it in the policies of global institutions like the International Monetary Fund.

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CDDRL honors students recognized for outstanding theses

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News

Date

Tue, 06/14/2011 - 12:00

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The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is pleased to announce that undergraduate senior honors student Yihana von Ritter was awarded The Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research for her outstanding thesis examining HIV/AIDS policy in Papua New Guinea. Von Ritter was presented with the award at a ceremony held on June 11 during commencement weekend at Stanford University.

Von Ritter, a political science major, spent the summer of 2010 on the Papua New Guinea island of Karkar, where she performed extensive field research. She interviewed over 40 government officials, medical personnel, religious and civic leaders, youth, and HIV positive individuals. Her thesis entitled "Between Hope and Despair: An Assessment of HIV/AIDS Policy in Papua New Guinea," underscored the fact that while only 1% of Papua New Guinea's adult population is AIDS-infected, a public health crisis is looming if preventative policies are not swiftly adopted.

According to her thesis co-advisor Professor Emeritus David Abernethy, Von Ritter's thesis received the Firestone Medal--awarded to the top ten percent of honors theses in social science, science, and engineering--for its remarkable combination of social science analysis and informed policy advocacy.

"Von Ritter provides policy-relevant recommendations in her thesis to enhance interagency communication and encourage active government leadership (in Papua New Guinea)," said Abernethy. Von Ritter also worked closely with Francis Fukuyama, FSI senior fellow and CDDRL faculty member, who provided guidance and support during the thesis writing process.

Purun Cheong and Kamil Dada were both recipients of the CDDRL Undergraduate Honors Program "Best Thesis Award" for their outstanding research and policy-relevant scholarship. Cheong, an international relations major, critically evaluated the failed United Nations state-building efforts in East Timor in his thesis, "When the Blind lead: The United Nations in East Timor-Lessons in State Building."

After spending a summer conducting research in Pakistan, Dada, a political science major, wrote "Understanding International Democracy Assistance: A Case Study of Pakistan," a sobering account of democracy assistance to Pakistan. Cheong and Dada were both advised by CDDRL director Larry Diamond.

CDDRL congratulates the 2011 graduating class of CDDRL Undergraduate Honors

Students:

Purun Cheong

International Relations

"When the Blind Lead: The United Nations in East Timor- Lessons in State Building"

Kamil Dada

Political Science

"Understanding International Democracy Assistance: A Case study of Pakistan"

Sarah Guerrero

International Relations

"Automation Nation: Electronic Elections, Electoral Governance and Democratic Consolidation in the Philippines"

Ayesha Lalji

International Relations

"Unleashing the Cheetah Generation: How Mobile Banking Enables Access to Capital for the Poor in Developing Countries"

Lauren Swartz

International Relations

"Agribusiness as a Means of Economic Development: Case Studies of Chile and Mexico"

Ann Thompson

History

"The Other Side of the Coin: The US Military and Afghan Women in Contemporary Counterinsurgurgency Operations"

Yihana von Ritter

Political Science

"Between Hope and Despair: An Assessment of HIV/AIDS Policy in Papua New Guinea"

Ari Weiss

International Relations

"Israel: Managing Diversity with Democracy"

Check out more photos of this event on our Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/StanfordCDDRL

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Bridging Silicon Valley and Tahrir Square

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News

Date

Mon, 06/13/2011 - 12:00

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The Program on Liberation Technology at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) hosted two events in May, which brought together the technology and activist communities in support of a common cause-Egypt. The Program benefitted tremendously from the presence of two Egyptian activists, Ahmed Saleh and Sabah Hamamou, who traveled from Cairo to share their experiences and contribute ideas to help build a community between Tahrir Square and Silicon Valley. These events were coordinated by Stanford and Silicon Valley technology firms interested in leveraging their expertise in technology innovation to provide practical benefits for pro-democracy activists in Egypt and beyond.

On May 14, the Program on Liberation Technology in partnership with the Stanford Peace Innovation Lab, Code the Change (a Stanford student group), CloudtoStreet, and Platform d, organized a Hack-a-Thon for Egypt at Stanford's design school. This event attracted more than 80 computer engineers, programmers, technologists, academics, activists, and members of the public. All expressed a firm commitment to volunteer their skills and time towards the development of technology applications to aid activists.

Volunteers connected in real time with Egyptian activists through videoconference and live presentations where they described the type of applications that would be beneficial to their work. Programmers and designers in the room listened intently as ideas for the following technologies were proposed; mobile phone applications for political mobilization, web-based training for election monitors, a crowdsourcing platform for constitutional negotiations, and a tool to monitor the Egyptian parliament.

Ahmed Saleh, a political activist and founder of the Kifaya movement (the Egyptian Movement for Change), provided a personal account of the revolution, captivating the audience's attention with his details of the 18 days leading up to President Mubarak's fall. Sabah Hamamou, a journalist and blogger, emphasized social media's impact on the public's capacity to organize and connect.

Hackers quickly got to work dividing into groups to begin designing the prototypes for some of the suggested applications. Sketching out designs on whiteboards and developing basic code, programmers worked late into the evening on four tangible projects: a web platform to crowdsource constitutional negotiations, a content management system for an Egyptian watchdog group to increase citizens’ ability to hold politicians to account, an election monitoring training and certification interface, and new visualizations of Twitter usage data emerging from the 18 days of protests.

Going forward, the teams will work with their Egyptian counterparts to scale-up their projects into applications with practical and broad application. The CloudtoStreet project led by CDDRL visiting scholar Ben Rowswell will work to incubate several of the projects and maintain connections with their Egyptian partners to aid in the implementation phase on the ground. A follow-on event to the Hack-a-Thon is planned for the summer quarter of 2011 to encourage the teams to continue the development of applications.

The second event hosted by the Program on Liberation Technology on May 20, brought executives from Google and Facebook to Stanford to explore social media's impact on democratic transition. More than 40 gathered to hear from Egyptian activists Saleh and Hamamou who spoke at length about their direct experience using social media and its impact on the uprisings.

According to Saleh, "Facebook had a humble start in 2008 (in Egypt) but quickly became viral when activists coordinated a national strike on April 6. This shocked the security services but they quickly learned from their mistakes.” The We Are All Khaled Said Facebook page communicated the message of the revolution, Saleh explained, but it still took a great deal of social mobilization to convince people to join the protests in Cairo. Once the power was cut, Saleh told the audience, the "keyboard activists" were then inspired to go to the streets.

If it wasn't for the world watching (the revolution) I am not sure we could have done it.
-Sabah Hamamou

Hamamou showed a variety of YouTube videos featuring cartoons poking fun at the deposed regime, which were produced by small Egyptian media companies. In doing so, she highlighted the fact that social media is becoming increasingly more popular in Egypt as politicians and civil society groups use this tool for civic education and outreach. Sabah explained this by noting that "people want alternative ways of being entertained outside of traditional media." She continued by pointing out that, "if it wasn't for the world watching (the revolution) I am not sure we could have done it."

Both activists outlined practical steps that the technologists in the room could take to help aid their efforts. Saleh underscored the importance of secure communication, which is an enormous challenge for activists who are confronted with sophisticated technologies used by regimes to survey their communication. With limited funds, activists are unable to afford expensive circumvention systems and require software and secure tools that provide user-friendly and cheap solutions. Saleh ended by emphasizing that these secure communication technologies can save lives and are urgently needed.

Hamamou suggested that Silicon Valley-based technology companies should expand their grant-making and philanthropic programs to include Egypt where they can engage directly with NGOs on the ground. She specifically highlighted YouTube's Partnership program and Google's digital journalism grant, which currently have no formal presence in Egypt. A representative from Google explained that engagement in Egypt requires them to comply with local laws to use the Egypt domain, requiring them to censor materials that are not permitted by the authorities. These laws and limitations make it challenging to maximize freedom of expression in this kind of environment.

Both events allowed the Program on Liberation Technology and its partners to match the technological ingenuity of Silicon Valley with the needs of activists in Egypt. Looking forward, the Program will be building on the applications created and the community established around this cause to make a more profound impact on the efforts of pro-democracy activists in Egypt and beyond.

Note: News of the Hack-a-Thon spread quickly through both the traditional and social media sectors, eliciting a great deal of interest and coverage of this event. The initiative was featured on the We Are All Khaled Said Facebook page, home to over 100,000 international members generating an upwards of 350 "likes" and 80 comments. In addition, Fast Company.com published an article on the event and the Financial Post of Canada mentioned the CloudtoStreet project in their business section. See the links below to read more:

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Teaching Human Rights in a Global Context

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Mon, 06/13/2011 - 12:00

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On June 4, 2011, SPICE co-sponsored a conference, “Teaching Human Rights in a Global Context,” with the Program on Human Rights (Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, FSI), the Division of International Comparative and Area Studies (ICA), and the Stanford Humanities Center. Fifty community college and high school faculty attended a full day of lectures, panel discussions, and small-group work. Dr. Helen Stacy, Director of the Program on Human Rights, set the context for the conference, and her remarks were followed by a lecture on “The Globalization of Human Rights Education” by Professor Francisco Ramirez, Stanford School of Education.

Educators discussed, shared, and learned about each other’s experiences of teaching human rights in a wide range of world areas, academic disciplines, and classroom settings. The rudiments of syllabus construction, methods of incorporating a human rights component into traditional courses, sample lesson plans, best ways to make use of interdisciplinary pedagogic resources and materials, and strategies for reaching diverse student populations were topics of discussion. One panel, “Incorporating Human Rights into Your Syllabus,” was facilitated by SPICE’s Jonas Edman. Jonas, Michael Lopez of the Program on Human Rights, and Dr. Robert Wessling, Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies, ICA, served as the primary organizers of the conference, and Dr. Laura Hubbard, Center for African Studies, ICA, served as the emcee. Megan Gorman, Center for Latin American Studies, ICA, and John Groschwitz, Center for East Asian Studies, ICA, also contributed to the organization and promotion of the conference.

As a follow-up to the conference, ICA and the Program on Human Rights will sponsor a limited number of year-long Human Rights Curricular Fellows in the coming 2011–12 academic year. Fellows must teach at an accredited California community college. Also, Jonas will be developing curricular lessons in consultation with some of the educators who attended the conference.

The conference was funded primarily by the Department of Education (Title VI) and ICA.

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Dr. Helen Stacy, Director, Program on Human Rights, setting the context for the conference.

Jonas Edman

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IPS Students: Tackling Real-World Policy Problems

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Wed, 06/01/2011 - 12:00

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The Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies (IPS), a joint undertaking of the Freeman Spogli Institute and the School of Humanities & Sciences, is training the next generation of policy experts and leaders. In their second year of the two–year master’s program, students take a two-quarter practicum course, working in teams to conduct policy analyses for real-world client organizations. Read about their demanding projects and findings. 

Judicial Performance (California Commission on Judicial Performance)
This report analyzed judicial discipline cases in California between 1990 and 2009 using data collected by the California Commission on Judicial Performance. The purpose of the report was to inform the public about the incidence of misconduct and help the public understand the disciplinary process. The report concluded that the number of disciplinary actions per judge has fallen in the last decade, as compared with the previous ten years.

Policies to Improve Industrial Competitiveness (World Bank)
This report researched how countries can select Policies to Increase Industrial Competitiveness (PIIC) using case studies and the development of an analytic process for government use in selecting specific industries to support. The analytic process showed that cooperation between the public and private sectors is crucial in policymakers’ ability to select the most beneficial competitiveness policy measures.

Sunni Militancy In India (U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency)
This report analyzed Sunni militancy in India by identifying major Sunni groups, their ideologies, root causes and recent trends. Utilizing a quantitative overview of Sunni terrorism incidents and deaths, profiles of militant groups, and social network analysis of connections between groups, the report found that the most active and violent Sunni militant groups are related to Pakistan or to the long-running conflict between Pakistan and India in Kashmir.

“The chance to tackle complex, real world policy problems and propose solutions to clients is invaluable for our students as they prepare for their careers” says Kathryn Stoner, Director of IPS and FSI senior fellow. “It’s one more way that our program bridges theory and practice.”
Rare Earth (Breakthrough Institute and Bay Area Council)
This report examined concerns about domestic shortages of rare earth elements, critical in the production of many clean-tech products. The report confirmed that China controls a large share of rare earth deposits and production, but found that market forces should increase U.S. production levels in the long run. The report recommends that the United States accelerate permitting for domestic production and pursue agreements with other rare earth suppliers to mitigate the impact of China's current dominance.

Going Forward: Gas Tax and VMTs (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace)
This report considered the under-funding of the U.S. transportation system, focusing on two ways to generate revenue—the federal gas tax and a prospective vehicle-miles-traveled (VMT) fee. In the long term, introducing fees-per-mile would generate more revenue than increasing fees-per-gallon. Under both proposals, lower income consumers would pay proportionately more, although the difference in distributional impact is minimal for most policy options under consideration.

Fiscal Responsibility Index (Comeback America Initiative/Peterson Foundation)
This project developed a simple, comprehensive analytic tool and framework, called the Fiscal Responsibility Index, to assess sovereign fiscal responsibility and sustainability. The index was designed to illustrate where the United States is, where it is headed, and how it compares with other nations in the area of fiscal responsibility and sustainability. The U.S. ranks near the bottom when compared with 33 OECD and BRIC nations.

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