Marina S. Ottaway specializes in democracy and post-conflict reconstruction issues. She is a Senior Associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the Democracy and Rule of Law Project, a research endeavor that analyzes the state of democracy around the world and the efforts by the United States and other countries to promote democracy. Her new book, Democracy Challenged, a comparative study of semiauthoritarian regimes in Africa, the Caucasus, Latin America, and the Middle East, was published in January 2003. Her current works focus on political transformation in the Middle East and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan.

She is also a lecturer in African Studies at the Nitze School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Ottaway carried out research in Africa and in the Middle East and taught at the University of Addis Ababa, the University of Zambia, the American University in Cairo, and the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.

She received her undergraduate educatin at University of Pavia, Italy and her Ph.D. from Columbia University. Ottaway's selected Publications include, Democracy Challenged: The Rise of Semi-Authoritarianism (Carnegie, 2003); Funding Virtue: Civil Society Aid and Democracy Promotion, edited with Thomas Carothers (Carnegie, 2000); Africa's New Leaders: Democracy or State Reconstruction? (Carnegie, 1999)

Sherri G. Kraham joined the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) in March 2004 as its Director of Development Policy, working on a broad range of policy issues related to MCC's innovative approach to development. Ms. Kraham, a lawyer, transferred from the U.S. Department of State where she worked overseeing and implementing various U.S. Foreign Assistance including development, peacekeeping and security, humanitarian assistance, and human rights programs. She spent several years working on programs related to Iraq and prior to joining MCC, Ms. Kraham deployed to Baghdad working with the Coalition Provisional Authority as part of the first civilian team that worked on reconstruction following the war.

About the Millenium Challenge Corporation: President George W. Bush established the Millenium Challenge Account in order to link greater contributions from developed nations to greater responsibility from developing nations. The Millennium Challenge Account (MCA)is designed to concretely link assitance to performance by providing aid to those countries that rule justly, invest in their people, and encourage economic freedom. With strong bipartisan support, Congress authorized the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) to administer the MCA and provided $1 billion in initial funding for FY04. President Bush's request for the MCA in FY 2005 was $2.5 billion of which Congress appropriated $1.5 billion. The President has pledged to increase funding for the MCA to $5 billion in the future.

Stanford Law School, the Stanford Rule of Law Program, the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, Santa Clara University School of Law, and the Santa Clara Institute of International and Comparative Law will host a Global Jurisprudence Colloquium at Stanford University on March 17-18, 2005, on the theme of Decisions of International Legal Institutions: Compliance and Enforcement. The Colloquium will provide leading judges from a number of key international courts and tribunals with an opportunity to interact and share with the Stanford community and the public their insights into issues presented by the growing use of international courts to promote the rule of law.

Distinguished international jurists scheduled to participate in the Colloquium include Judges Higgins and Owada of the International Court of Justice, Judges Pillay and Song of the International Criminal Court, President Meron and Judge Robinson of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Judge Mumba of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Judge Ameli of the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal, Judge Kokott of the European Court of Justice, Judge Greve of the European Court of Human Rights, and President Robertson of the Special Court for Sierra Leone.

On March 18, the Colloquium participants, joined by distinguished international law and international relations faculty, will hold three panel discussions, each on a particular theme related to the historic challenge to improve enforcement of international law and efforts to enhance the rule of law. These panel discussions will be held at Stanford Law School and are open to the University community and the public.

During the first three months of 2004, Larry Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. He is now lecturing and writing about the challenges of post-conflict state-building in Iraq.

Rajiv Chandrasekran has been one of the Post's main correspondents in Iraq over the last two years. He is currently on leave from the Post and is a Visiting Scholar at the SAIS, Johns Hopkins University.

Diamond and Chandrasekran will speak panel-style and provide their perspectives on the recent elections in Iraq and Iraq's political future. A light lunch will be served on a first come, first serve basis.