Stanford University

Institutions and Organizations

Nick Deychakiwsky and Maurice Middleberg speak on 'fabric of NGOs'

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Nick Deychakiwsky, program officer at the C.S. Mott Foundation, and Maurice Middleberg, executive director of Free the Slaves, engaged in a realistic, yet encouraging conversation on the fabric of NGOs for CDDRL's Program on Human Rights’ Winter Speaker Series “U.S. Human Rights NGOs and International Human Rights” on January 14, 2015.

Deychakiwsky gave the audience the macro perspective to NGOs working in human rights, while Middleberg, working on a specific mission to end modern day slavery, provided the micro perspective. Both Deychakiwsky and Middleberg pronounced the complications and challenges of working for and running an NGO today, narrating a cautionary yet motivating story of NGO management. Deychakiwsky pointed out that all too often, accountability to the society whose projects are designed to help gets lost in the bigger picture of NGO management. He emphasized that to have a positive impact, an NGO must remain mindful of and true to its core values and organizational mission. Middleberg agreed with Deychakiwsky’s view that an organization must always stay true to its mission, while at the same time emphasized that an NGO must nurture its own financial health and organizational culture in order to have the capacity for safekeeping its mission.  

Helen Stacy, director of the Program on Human Rights, was struck by the overlap in Deychakiwsky and Middleberg’s stances on NGO management. Stacy questioned Deychakiwsky about indicators for testing local accountability, and Deychakiwsky pointed out that when a community is willing to offer resources such as time or money, that it is a very strong indication that the project will succeed. Stacy probed Middleberg on his theory of change, asking whether there is an overemphasis of “head” (organizational management) over “heart” (organizational mission). Middleberg asserted that the head and heart of an organization are not in contradiction, but that the head has to be “squared off” in order for the organization to not lose its heart. When asked about NGO competition, both Middleberg and Deychakiwsky believe that there need to be fewer emerging NGOs, and more partnerships and mergers between those that currently exist. Questions from the audience included the resources required for theory of change, the need and ability to stay true to one’s mission, and the systems in place to test and measure change.  

Dana Phelps, Program Associate, Program on Human Rights

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Douglas Rutzen, president and CEO of ICNL, speaks on defending civil society

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Douglas Rutzen, president and CEO of the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL), and adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., gave a talk on defending civil society for the Stanford Program on Human Rights’ Winter Speaker Series, “U.S. Human Rights NGOs and International Human Rights,” on January 7, 2015.

Rutzen sounded the alarm of today’s disturbing trend of governments around the world using the rule of law to restrict civic spaces of congregation and protestation. Highlighting that national governments are constitutionally committed to a rule of law, Rutzen claimed this is not being applied in the interests of the citizen but rather to restrict citizens’ criticism of government. Rutzen emphasized that this misuse of the rule of law to restrict civil society is a tool of manipulation utilized not just by nations with a history of civic control, such as Cuba and Russia, but also by liberal democracies, including the United States.

Rutzen noted that the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) established in 2000 were dramatically altered by the attacks of September 11, 2001. NGOs were targeted as potential terrorist organizations, while at the same time recognized for their potential to fight terrorism. This contradiction shows the tension in the role of NGOs in civil society. The challenge now lies in a long-term transformation of the relationship between NGOs representing civil society and national governments.

The talk continued with a discussion with Helen Stacy, director of the Program on Human Rights, and Rutzen. Stacy posed provocative questions that challenged Rutzen to defend his stance with questions on U.S. cultural imperialism; “good” and “bad” civil society groups; and the need to understand domestic civil society engagement with human rights issues as part of international human rights activism. 

-Dana Phelps, Program Associate, Program on Human Rights

 

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Open Government Partnership - A new platform for reforms in transparent and accountable governments

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Three years ago, world leaders from 8 countries came together to launch the Open Government Partnership (OGP) - a multi-stakeholder initiative that brings together domestic reformers committed to making their governments more open, accountable and responsive to citizens. Since then, the partnership has rapidly grown from 8 to 65 countries. In this talk, Linda Frey speaks about OGP's new approach to multilateralism, and how the uniqueness of its model is helping to spur progress on concrete open government reforms in a diverse group of countries.  Frey will draw on the findings of OGP's Independent Reporting Mechanism to speak to early successes, as well as implementation challenges and areas for further study.  

 

Speaker Bio

Munyema Hasan

Munyema Hasan

Program Officer
Open Government Partnership, Support Unit

Munyema joined the OGP Support Unit in January 2014 as Program Officer. She has spent the past four years working in the field of transparent and accountable governance, with organizations like the World Bank, International Budget Partnership, Stanford University and the Affiliated Network for Social Accountability. Munyema holds a M.Sc. in Development Studies from the London School of Economics and a B.A. in Economics and Political Science from the American University in Cairo, Egypt and the University of California, Berkeley.

This event is part of the Liberation Technology Seminar Series. 

PLEASE NOTE: NEW ROOM

School of Education 

Room 128

 

Munyema Hasan Open Government Partnership
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Liberation Technology Seminar Series
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Crowdsourcing a Meeting of Minds

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Crowdsourcing is an increasingly powerful method for combining amateurs' efforts to recreate an expert's abilities. However, across domains from design to engineering to art, few goals are truly the effort of just one person — even one expert. If we can now crowdsource simple tasks such as image labeling, how might we coordinate many peoples' abilities toward far more complex and interdependent goals? In this talk, I present computational systems for gathering and guiding crowds of experts --- including professional programmers, designers, singers and artists. The resulting collectives tackle problems modularly and at scale, dynamically grow and shrink depending on task demands, and combine into larger organizations. I'll demonstrate how these expert crowds, which we call Flash Teams, can pursue goals such as designing new user experiences overnight and producing animated shorts in two days.
 
As new forms of online work such as Flash Teams emerge, new forms of digital labor challenges also arise. I will introduce our work creating an online platform to facilitate collective action for workers on the Amazon Mechanical Turk marketplace. Our reflection from this effort: the nature of online communities make it easy to form new forms of publics to form, but equally easy for them to stall, face internal friction, and ultimately disintegrate.

Speaker Bio

msb hoover Michael Bernstein

Michael Bernstein is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he co-directs the Human-Computer Interaction group and is a Robert N. Noyce Family Faculty Scholar. His research in human-computer interaction focuses on the design of crowdsourcing and social computing systems. This work has received Best Paper awards and nominations at premier venues in human-computer interaction and social computing (ACM UIST, ACM CHI, ACM CSCW, AAAI ISWSM). Michael has been recognized with the NSF CAREER award, as well as the George M. Sprowls Award for best doctoral thesis in Computer Science at MIT. He holds Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from MIT, and a B.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University.

This event is part of the Liberation Technology Seminar Series. 

School of Education

Room 206

Michael Bernstein Assistant Professor, Computer Science; Co-Director, Human-Computer Interaction Group, Stanford
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Liberation Technology Seminar Series
Program on Liberation Technology

Program on Human Rights Winter Speaker Series

U.S. Human Rights NGOs and International Human Rights

Many U.S. human rights non-government organizations, including the U.S. philanthropic sector, work on international human rights. The U.S. government now also partners with the private sector on human rights, both in the U.S. and internationally. This weekly series feature speakers to explore the pro’s and con’s of U.S. NGOs working on international human rights.

Foreign and Domestic Investment in Argentina: The Politics of Privatized Infrastructure

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Abstract

Political economy scholarship suggests that private sector investment, and thus economic growth, is more likely to occur when formal institutions allow states to provide investors with credible commitments to protect property rights. This book argues that this maxim does not hold for infrastructure privatization programs. Rather, differences in firm organizational structure better explain in the viability of privatization contracts in weak institutional environments. Domestic investors – or, if contracts are granted subnationally, domestic investors with diverse holdings in their contract jurisdiction – work most effectively in the volatile economic and political environments of the developing world. They are able to negotiate mutually beneficial adaptations to their contracts with host governments because cross-sector diversification provides them with informal contractual supports. The book finds strong empirical support for this argument through an analysis of fourteen water and sanitation privatization contracts in Argentina and a statistical analysis of sector trends in developing countries.

Book published by Cambridge University Press, 2014

 

Speaker Bio

[[{"fid":"216992","view_mode":"crop_870xauto","fields":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"","field_credit[und][0][value]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","field_related_image_aspect[und][0][value]":"","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto","pp_lightbox":false,"pp_description":false},"type":"media","attributes":{"height":233,"width":870,"style":"line-height: 1.538em; width: 150px; height: 199px; margin: 15px; float: left;","class":"media-element file-crop-870xauto"}}]]Alison Post is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Global Metropolitan Studies.  Her research lies at the intersection of comparative urban politics and comparative political economy, with a regional focus on Latin America.  It examines several related themes: the politics of regulating privatized infrastructure, the varying ability of subnational governments to provide infrastructure services effectively following the decentralization wave of the 1990s, and the politics of urban policy more broadly.  She is the author of Foreign and Domestic Investment in Argentina: The Politics of Privatized Infrastructure (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and articles in Politics & Society, Studies in Comparative International Development, World Development, and other outlets.  She has been named a Clarence Stone Scholar (an early career award) by the Urban Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. Her doctoral dissertation, “Liquid Assets and Fluid Contracts: Explaining the Uneven Effects of Water and Sanitation Privatization,” won the 2009 William Anderson award from the American Political Science Association for the best dissertation in the general field of federalism, intergovernmental relations, state or local politics. She has served as a a Marshall Scholar, a postdoctoral research scholar with the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University, a Visiting Researcher at the Centro de Estudios de Estado y Sociedad in Buenos Aires and the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (E.C.L.A.C.) in Santiago, and as a Researcher at L.S.E. Urban Research in London.

This event is co-sponsored by the Bill Lane Center for the American West and the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

Y2E2, Room 300 (Engineering Quad)

473 Via Ortega, Stanford

Political Order and Political Decay

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Abstract: 

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Francis Fukuyama will discuss the second volume, Political Order and Political Decay, of the bestselling landmark work on the history of the modern state. Taking up the essential question of how societies develop strong, impersonal, and accountable political institutions, Fukuyama follows the story from the French Revolution to the so-called Arab Spring and the deep dysfunctions of contemporary American politics. He examines the effects of corruption on governance, and why some societies have been successful at rooting it out. He explores the different legacies of colonialism in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and offers a clear-eyed account of why some regions have thrived and developed more quickly than others. And he boldly reckons with the future of democracy in the face of a rising global middle class and entrenched political paralysis in the West.

 

Speaker Bio:

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Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He has previously taught at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and at the George Mason University School of Public Policy. Fukuyama was a researcher at the RAND Corporation and served as the deputy director for the State Department's policy planning staff. He is the author of The Origins of Political Order, The End of History and the Last Man, Trust, and America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy.

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Encina Hall, Bechtel Conference Room

616 Serra St.

Stanford, CA

Francis Fukuyama

Encina Hall, C148
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

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Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy
Research Affiliate at The Europe Center
Professor by Courtesy, Department of Political Science
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Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a faculty member of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also Director of Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy, and a professor (by courtesy) of Political Science.

Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His book In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir will be published in fall 2026.

Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation, and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004. He is editor-in-chief of American Purpose, an online journal.

Dr. Fukuyama holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), Aarhus University (Denmark), the Pardee Rand Graduate School, and Adam Mickiewicz University (Poland). He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Trustees of Freedom House, and the Board of the Volcker Alliance. He is a fellow of the National Academy for Public Administration, a member of the American Political Science Association, and of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.

(October 2025)

Global Populisms

A new project examining the global surge in populist movements and what it means for established democratic rules and institutions.
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What we have Learned about Iraq from the Ba`th Party Archives

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Abstract:

Determining the specificities of everyday political life in one of the 20th century's most notorious dictatorships – Iraq under Saddam Hussein – is possible as a result of the availability of more than ten million internal security force and Ba`th party documents recovered after the overthrow of the Iraqi regime in 2003. The documents associated with this collection, which is currently housed at Stanford's University's Hoover Institution, provide a rich picture of the everyday practices of Iraq's highly repressive autocracy.  Using data from these captured documents, I provide empirical evidence about the political practices of citizens living under highly difficult political circumstances.

 

Speaker Bio:

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Lisa Blaydes is an Associate Professor of Political Science and a faculty affiliate of the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University.  She is the author of Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s Egypt(Cambridge University Press, 2011).  Her articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review,International Studies Quarterly, International Organization, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Middle East Journal, and World Politics. She holds degrees in Political Science (PhD) from the University of California, Los Angeles and International Relations (BA, MA) from Johns Hopkins University.

Encina Hall 

Philippines conference room - 3rd floor Central 

Room C330

616 Serra St.

Stanford, CA

Lisa Blaydes Associate Professor of Political Science and Faculty Affiliate Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University
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Erin Baggott Carter

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Erin Baggott Carter (赵雅芬) is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California and a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. She is also a non-resident scholar at the UCSD 21st Century China Center. She has previously held fellowships at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and the Center for International Security and Cooperation. She received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University.

Dr. Carter's research focuses on Chinese politics and propaganda. Her first book, Propaganda in Autocracies (Cambridge University Press), explores how political institutions determine propaganda strategies with an original dataset of eight million articles in six languages drawn from state-run newspapers in nearly 70 countries. She is currently working on a book on how domestic politics influence US-China relations. Her other work has appeared in the British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Security Studies, and International Interactions. Her work has been featured by a number of media platforms, including the New York Times and the Little Red Podcast.

Her research has been supported by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Center for International Studies at the University of Southern California, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University.

Dr. Carter regularly tweets about Chinese politics and propaganda at @baggottcarter. She can be reached via email at baggott [at] usc.edu or ebaggott [at] stanford.edu.

Hoover Fellow
CDDRL Affiliated Scholar
CDDRL Visiting Scholar, 2020-2021
CISAC Affiliate
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