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Security

FSI scholars produce research aimed at creating a safer world and examing the consequences of security policies on institutions and society. They look at longstanding issues including nuclear nonproliferation and the conflicts between countries like North and South Korea. But their research also examines new and emerging areas that transcend traditional borders – the drug war in Mexico and expanding terrorism networks. FSI researchers look at the changing methods of warfare with a focus on biosecurity and nuclear risk. They tackle cybersecurity with an eye toward privacy concerns and explore the implications of new actors like hackers.

Along with the changing face of conflict, terrorism and crime, FSI researchers study food security. They tackle the global problems of hunger, poverty and environmental degradation by generating knowledge and policy-relevant solutions. 

The Middle East’s Next Moment of Reckoning

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 Larry Diamond, FSI Senior Fellow and Hesham Sallam, CDDRL Associate Director and Research Associate Program on Arab Reform and Democracy, predict that state-led reforms will not be enough to alleviate public discontent in the Middle East. Read the whole article here http://bit.ly/2iSNmQU

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America: the failed state

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"The book on Trump is still not written. We must to await the coming months to see which man, the deal-maker or the extremist, comes to the fore. But Trump’s victory also represents the latest stage in a global shift toward populist nationalism, a pattern whose meaning is starting to become frighteningly clear," writes our Mosbacher Director Francis Fukuyama in Prospect Magazine. Read the article here.

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Stanford program to host Ukrainian leaders

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Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is proud to announce the launch of a new practice-based program to train emerging leaders from Ukraine. The Ukrainian Emerging Leaders Program will welcome three mid-career practitioners for a 10-month immersive academic experience at Stanford University this fall. During the duration of their residency, the fellows will bolster their academic knowledge, build connections across campus, receive mentorship from leading faculty members, and work on a dedicated fellowship project.

Fellows will hail from both inside and outside of government working as policymakers, legal professionals, entrepreneurs, and civil society leaders. They will be selected based on their professional track record, contributions to their field, and the scope of their anticipated fellowship project. The hope is that they will emerge with a deeper academic foundation and stronger network to make a greater contribution to democratic, political and social development in Ukraine and the broader region.

 

"As the political and security situation continues to shift in and around Ukraine, it's more important than ever to support sound principles of good governance,” said Michael McFaul, the director of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institue (FSI). “With CDDRL's commitment to civil society, FSI’s deep expertise in the region and Stanford University's unparalleled opportunities for scholarship, we anticipate that this program will nurture a new generation of dedicated and effective leaders."

 

The Ukrainian Emerging Leaders Program joins two other practice-based programs at CDDRL, which include the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program and the Leadership Academy for Development. All of these programs have a similar goal of connecting practitioners to academic knowledge and have built a global network of over 500 professionals committed to democratic development. Collectively these programs highlight CDDRL’s unique commitment to train practitioners from across the developing world, which also helps to deepen the Center’s understanding of democratic conditions around the world.

The Ukrainian Emerging Leaders Program is CDDRL’s first yearlong global fellowship program, and will allow fellows to enroll in Stanford courses and work on a concrete project that will be presented at the end of their fellowship. While they will be based at CDDRL, the fellows will also benefit from connections to other academic units across campus as well as the broader Silicon Valley community.

 

“CDDRL is very happy to initiate the new Ukrainian Emerging Leaders Program,” said Francis Fukuyama the Mosbacher Director at CDDRL and Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at FSI. “Ukraine is a country that has been seeking to establish viable democratic institutions and to fight corruption, and is also at the center of a geopolitical struggle. Stanford can play a very important role in helping to build intellectual capital there.”

 

Interested applicants will have through Feb. 15, 2017 to apply and must meet a firm set of criteria that can be found here. Fellows will receive a $70,000 stipend for the 10-month fellowship program and a supplement for additional costs and relocation.

Stanford’s John S. Knight (JSK) Fellow Oleksandr Akymenko (2015-16) and Kateryna Akymenko, JSK Affiliate (2015-16) conceptualized the program as a way to connect Stanford with practitioners in Ukraine and contribute to the reformation process in the country. The program is funded by generous support from Western NIS Enterprise Fund, Svyatoslav Vakarchuk and Tomas Fiala.

WNISEF is a regional private equity fund, a pioneer in Ukraine and Moldova with more than two decades of successful experience in investing in small and medium-sized companies. WNISEF is supported by the United States Agency for International Development.

Svyatoslav Vakarchuk is a civic activist, Ukrainian musician, the lead vocalist and founder of the band “Okean Elzy“. Vakarchuk is also the founder of a charity fund called “Lyudi Maybutnyogo” (People of the Future) and co-founder of the Center for Economic Strategy, an independent policy think tank dedicated to supporting reforms and sustainable economic growth in Ukraine. He was a Yale World Fellow in 2015.

Tomas Fiala is the  Chief Executive Officer of Dragon Capital, a leading investment bank in Ukraine. Fiala has over twenty years’ experience in Central and Eastern European securities markets. He served as elected President of the European Business Association (2010-’15) where he lead the top association for foreign businesses in Ukraine uniting over 900 companies with more than a million employees. In October 2016, Fiala was elected to the Board of Transparency International Ukraine.

 

For more information about the program and to apply, please visit the program page. 

For the press release in Ukrainian click here. 

To download the flyer in Ukrainian click here. 

To download the flyer in English click here. 

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Taiwan's Foreign Policy in a New Era

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Abstract

Dr. Tien will reflect on security and economic trends in the Asia-Pacific region, and speak about Taiwan's foreign policy strategy in light of these trends. 

Bio

Dr. Hung-mao Tien received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Since September 2016, he has been the the chairman of the Straits Exchange Foundation, the semi-official body in Taiwan responsible for direct exchanges and dialogue with the People's Republic of China. He is also the president and board chairman of the Institute for National Policy Research in Taipei, as well as an advisor to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and board member of several foundations and business corporations in Taiwan. He previously served as Minister of Foreign Affairs, ROC (Taiwan), Representative (ambassador) to the United Kingdom, and presidential advisor to former President Lee Teng-hui.  He has also served in an advisory capacity to Harvard University’s Asia Center, The Asia Society in New York, and the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.  Dr. Tien has taught in universities in both the US and Taiwan as professor of political science.  His numerous publications in English (author, editor and co-editor) include: Government and Politics in Kuomintang China 1927-37 (Stanford University Press); The Great Transition: Social and Political Change in the Republic of China (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press); and Democratization in Taiwan, Implications for China (St. Anthony’s Series, Oxford University), Consolidating the Third Wave Democracies, Themes and Perspectives (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press), China Under Jiang Zemin (Rienner), and The Security Environment in the Asia-Pacific (M.E. Sharpe).

Philippines Conference Room

3rd Floor, Encina Hall

Hung-mao Tien President Institute for National Policy Research
Lectures

US-PRC-Taiwan Relations under the Trump Administration

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Co-sponsored by the Taiwan Democracy Project at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, and the China Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC)

 

Abstract

As President Trump assumes office, it is timely to consider the state of US-People's Republic of China (PRC)-Taiwan relations and how they might evolve in the coming years. Uncertainty regarding US-PRC-Taiwan relations is running high—it is far greater than eight years ago when Barack Obama assumed office. Trump’s phone call with Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen shortly after winning the election and his subsequent suggestion that Taiwan could be used as a bargaining chip to extract trade concessions from China have alarmed Beijing and created anxiety in Taipei. In Washington, Trump’s actions and statements have fueled policy debates about whether to abandon the “one China” policy which has been a mainstay of US policy for 37 years.  How the Trump administration will adjust relations with Beijing and Taipei is unknown. In the months ahead, a new dynamic may be created in the US-PRC-Taiwan triangular relationship in which the source of instability is neither China nor Taiwan, but rather is the United States. 

 

Biography

Bonnie S. Glaser is a senior adviser for Asia and the director of the China Power Project at CSIS, where she works on issues related to Chinese foreign and security policy. She is concomitantly a non-resident fellow with the Lowy Institute in Sydney, a senior associate with CSIS Pacific Forum and a consultant for the U.S. government on East Asia. From 2008 – mid-2015 Ms. Glaser was a Senior Adviser with the Freeman Chair in China Studies, and from 2003 to 2008, she was a senior associate in the CSIS International Security Program. Prior to joining CSIS, she served as a consultant for various U.S. government offices, including the Departments of Defense and State.

Ms. Glaser has written extensively on various aspects of Chinese foreign policy, including Sino-U.S. relations, U.S.-China military ties, cross-Strait relations, China’s relations with Japan and Korea, and Chinese perspectives on missile defense and multilateral security in Asia. Her writings have been published in the Washington Quarterly, China Quarterly, Asian Survey, International Security, Problems of Communism, Contemporary Southeast Asia, American Foreign Policy Interests, Far Eastern Economic Review, Korean Journal of Defense Analysis, New York Times, and International Herald Tribune, as well as various edited volumes on Asian security. Ms. Glaser is a regular contributor to the Pacific Forum quarterly Web journal Comparative Connections. She is currently a board member of the U.S. Committee of the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific, and a member of both the Council on Foreign Relations and the Institute of International Strategic Studies. She served as a member of the Defense Department’s Defense Policy Board China Panel in 1997. Ms. Glaser received her B.A. in political science from Boston University and her M.A. with concentrations in international economics and Chinese studies from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

 

Philippines Conference Room

Encina Hall, 3rd Floor

Bonnie Glaser Director of the China Power Project and Senior Advisor for Asia Center for Strategic and International Studies
Lectures

How the Mexican Drug War Affects Kids and Schools? Evidence on Effects and Mechanisms

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In this paper published by the International Journal of Educational Development, we investigate the impact of drug-related violence in Mexico on academic achievement. We use panel of elementary and lower secondary schools and locality-level firearm homicides from 2006 to 2011. We rely on school fixed-effects models to estimate the impact on math test scores of turf war exposure and turf war persistence (e.g. months of exposure) during the academic year. According to the results, both exposure and persistence of criminal violence reduces math test scores. The analysis of heterogeneous effects shows that schools located in poor urban settings experience the largest negative effects. Further, we find stronger negative effects of drug-related violence exposure in lower secondary schools with street gang presence nearby. Finally, we further examine potential mechanisms driving the effects of criminal violence on test scores. Our findings indicate that turf war exposure and persistence are associated with a loss of instructional time due to higher teacher absenteeism and turnover, as well as student absenteeism, tardiness, and propensity to leave school days early.

 

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Brenda Jarillo Rabling
Beatriz Magaloni
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Police Analysts from Mexico's Commission on National Security Participate in Stanford Workshop

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Effective Law Enforcement Institutions and Democratic Accountability: Workshop Focuses on Regional Issues in Law Enforcement

The Stanford Program on Poverty and Governance delivered its five-day training course, “Effective Law Enforcement Institutions and Democratic Accountability,” to law enforcement professionals from the Planning Unit of the Mexican Comision Nacional de Seguridad (CNS). Held in Encina Hall October 11-15, 2016, the workshop was led by Professors Beatriz Magaloni and Alberto Diaz-Cayeros as part of their U.S. State Department-funded research project on police accountability and citizen trust in Mexico. Stanford political scientists and legal scholars participated in the week-long workshop to address a wide range of topics focused on the dynamics between criminal violence, police practices and citizen trust. Highlights of the unique curriculum included:

  • Design of police interventions by Beatriz Magaloni and Alberto Diaz Cayeros, with discussion of drug policy, fighting organized crime, what law enforcement looks like up close, and prevention of violence.
  • How to measure the success of police operations by Edgar Franco, a doctoral student in Political Science.
  • Use of empirical evidence to develop effective public policy by Gustavo Robles, Ph.D candidate in Political Science, with a discussion of methods for gathering and analyzing data and how to develop indicators for performance, results and impact.
  • Regional issues with a focus on Latin America, including anomie and law, by Stanford Law School visiting professor Rogelio Perez-Perdomo.
  • Roundtable moderated by Beatriz Magaloni featuring Francis Fukuyama, Erik Jensen and Stephen Stedman on accountability, anti-corruption practices, trust in public institutions, civil engagement, and the role of international organizations.
  • A lecture by legal scholar Mirte Posterna from the Stanford Law School on human Rights, security and anti-drug policy.

The Mexican delegation took afiled trip to the Stockton Police Department to meet with Chief of Police Eric Jones, an innovator in effective community policing and use of body-worn cameras. They also a visited Stanford's new David Rumsey Map Center, where scholars can work with digital mapping software to manipulate, enlarge, quantify, aggregate, and visualize geo-data in unique ways for research.

The final session of the workshop focused on developing collaborative approaches between scholars and law enforcement practitioners in Mexico on a CNS-sponsored "risk terrain" project currently underway in Acapulco, with an analysis of police patrolling data, the role of schools in mitigating risk for youth violence and gang activity, and the design of federal police surveys.

The workshop and site visits were instrumental in advancing key goals of U.S. State Department-funded research project on project police accountability and citizen trust, which include assessing the efficacy of new law enforcement approaches in coordinating policing between federal, states and municipal agencies, mapping criminal activity and drug trafficking routes in Mexico, and correlating socio-economic characteristics with levels of trust among Mexican citizens.

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Former Foreign Minister of Russia, Andrei Kozyrev. “The Future of U.S.-Russian Relations”

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As the Trump administration prepares to take office, it joins with the previous incoming Bush and Obama administrations in promising to improve U.S.-Russian relations. However, both President Bush and Obama left office with relations far worse than when they took office. Andrey Kozyrev, the first Foreign Minister of the newly independent Russian Federation, will discuss his views on the future prospects of the relationship, and examine some of the deep-rooted issues that contribute to current political tensions between our countries.

Andrei Kozyrev is the former Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation. In 1974 he graduated from the Moscow State Institute for International Relations and subsequently earned a degree in Historical Sciences. He joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1974 and served as head of the Department of International Organizations from 1989-1990. He became the Foreign Minister of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in October 1990 and retained his position when the Russian Federation gained independence in 1991.Kozyrev was an early proponent for increased cooperation between the United States and Russia and advocated for the end of the Cold War. He was a participant in the historic decision taken in December 1991 between the leaders of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine to peacefully dissolve the Soviet Union. As Russia’s first Foreign Minister, Kozyrev promoted a policy of equal cooperation with the newly formed independent states of the former Soviet Union, as well as improved relations with Russia’s immediate neighbors and the West.Kozyrev left the post of Foreign Minister in January 1996, but continued in politics by representing the northern city of Murmansk in the Russian Duma for four years. Since 2000, Kozyrev has lectured on international affairs and served on the boards of a number of Russian and international companies. He is also a distinguished fellow with the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute.

This event has reached full capacity, please email Magdalena Fitipaldi at magdafb@stanford.edu to get on the waiting list.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.

Note location change:

Encina Hall, 2nd Floor

616 Serra St
Stanford, CA 94305

 

 

Andrei Kozyrev Former Foreign Minister of Russia
Lectures

Competing Narratives on Syria amid International Escalation

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ABSTRACT

By now, those following the news on Syria have been saturated with analysis, data, information, and misinformation on developments there since 2011. Yet we observe an increasing gravitation to mutually exclusive narratives that adorn websites and publications on the situation in Syria: (a) the narrative of pure and consistent revolution versus that of (b) external conspiracy/designs on Syria. Both narratives carry grains of truth, but are encumbered by maximalist claims and fundamental blindspots that forfeit various potentials for enduring cease-fires and/or transitions, let alone mutual understanding. This talk will address these competing narratives in the context of international escalation marked by increasing US-Russian tension and continued multi-layered conflicts on the battlefield. It closes with addressing a framework for understanding and gauging potential prospects despite conflicting declarations by all parties involved.

 

SPEAKER BIO

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Bassam Haddad is Director of the Middle East Studies Program and Associate Professor at the School of Policy, Government, and International Affairs (SPGIA) at George Mason University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011) and Co-Editor of Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of an Old Order? (Pluto Press, 2012). Bassam serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal a peer-reviewed research publication and is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of a critically acclaimed film series on Arabs and Terrorism, based on extensive field research/interviews. Bassam is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and the Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute, an umbrella for five organizations dealing with knowledge production on the Middle East. He serves on the Board of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences and is Executive Producer of Status Audio Journal.

 

 

*This event is supported by the Stanford Initiative for Religious and Ethnic Understanding and Coexistence

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Reuben Hills Conference Room
2nd Floor East Wing E207
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, California 94305

Bassam Haddad Associate Professor George Mason University
Seminars
Arab Reform and Democracy Speaker Series

Accidental State: Chiang Kai-shek, the United States, and the Making of Taiwan

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Accidental State

Abstract

The existence of two Chinese states—one controlling mainland China, the other controlling the island of Taiwan—is often understood as a seemingly inevitable outcome of the Chinese civil war. Defeated by Mao Zedong, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists fled to Taiwan to establish a rival state, thereby creating the “Two Chinas” dilemma that vexes international diplomacy to this day. Accidental State challenges this conventional narrative to offer a new perspective on the founding of modern Taiwan.

Hsiao-ting Lin marshals extensive research in recently declassified archives to show that the creation of a Taiwanese state in the early 1950s owed more to serendipity than careful geostrategic planning. It was the cumulative outcome of ad hoc half-measures and imperfect compromises, particularly when it came to the Nationalists’ often contentious relationship with the United States.

Taiwan’s political status was fraught from the start. The island had been formally ceded to Japan after the First Sino–Japanese War, and during World War II the Allies promised Chiang that Taiwan would revert to Chinese rule after Japan’s defeat. But as the Chinese civil war turned against the Nationalists, U.S. policymakers reassessed the wisdom of backing Chiang. The idea of placing Taiwan under United Nations trusteeship gained traction. Cold War realities, and the fear of Taiwan falling into Communist hands, led Washington to recalibrate U.S. policy. Yet American support of a Taiwan-based Republic of China remained ambivalent, and Taiwan had to eke out a place for itself in international affairs as a de facto, if not fully sovereign, state.

 

Biography

Hsiao-ting Lin is a research fellow and curator of the East Asia Collection at the Hoover Institution. He holds a BA in political science from National Taiwan University (1994) and an MA in international law and diplomacy from National Chengchi University in Taiwan (1997). He received his DPhil in oriental studies in 2003 from the University of Oxford, where he also held an appointment as tutorial fellow in modern Chinese history. In 2003–4, Lin was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California at Berkeley. In 2004, he was awarded the Kiriyama Distinguished Fellowship by the Center for the Pacific Rim, University of San Francisco. In 2005–7, he was a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he participated in Hoover’s Modern China Archives and Special Collections project. In April 2008, Lin was elected a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland for his contributions to the studies of modern China’s history.

Lin’s academic interests include ethnopolitics and minority issues in greater China, border strategies and defenses in modern China, political institutions and the bureaucratic system of the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang), and US-Taiwan military and political relations during the Cold War. He has published extensively on modern Chinese and Taiwanese politics, history, and ethnic minorities, including Accidental State: Chiang Kai-shek, the United States, and the Making of Taiwan (Harvard University Press, 2016); Modern China’s Ethnic Frontiers: A Journey to the West (Routledge, 2011); Breaking with the Past: The Kuomintang Central Reform Committee on Taiwan, 1950–52 (Hoover Press, 2007); Tibet and Nationalist China’s Frontier: Intrigues and Ethnopolitics, 1928–49 (UBC Press, 2006), nominated as the best study in the humanities at the 2007 International Convention of Asia Scholars; and over a hundred journal articles, book chapters, edited volumes, reviews, opinion pieces, and translations. He is currently at work on a manuscript that reevaluates Taiwan’s relations with China and the United States during the presidency of Harry Truman to that of Jimmy Carter.

 

This event is sponsored by the Taiwan Democracy Project in the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. It is free and open to the public, and lunch will be served. Please RSVP by November 28.

Reuben Hills Conference Room

2nd Floor, Encina Hall East

Hsiao-ting Lin Librarian, East Asian Archives, Hoover Institution
Lectures
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