Stanford University

International Development

FSI researchers consider international development from a variety of angles. They analyze ideas such as how public action and good governance are cornerstones of economic prosperity in Mexico and how investments in high school education will improve China’s economy.

They are looking at novel technological interventions to improve rural livelihoods, like the development implications of solar power-generated crop growing in Northern Benin.

FSI academics also assess which political processes yield better access to public services, particularly in developing countries. With a focus on health care, researchers have studied the political incentives to embrace UNICEF’s child survival efforts and how a well-run anti-alcohol policy in Russia affected mortality rates.

FSI’s work on international development also includes training the next generation of leaders through pre- and post-doctoral fellowships as well as the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program.

America and the World: Presidential Candidate Advisors Speak on International Security

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The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Dependence on expensive foreign oil. Challenging diplomacy with nuclear-armed countries. America's next president needs a strong vision and stronger will to tackle these formidable tasks and those that lie ahead. Which candidate is best equipped to meet these challenges? Our panel of top advisors to the Republican and Democratic presidential nominees will address each candidate's plan to improve our international security. Join us to listen and ask questions of these experts.

Sponsored by The Commonwealth Club of California.

Mark Hopkins Intercontinental Peacock Court
999 California St.
San Francisco, CA

Hon. James Woolsey Annenberg Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University; Former Director of Central Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency (1993-1995); Advisor to Senator McCain Speaker

Michael A. McFaul

Encina Hall
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies, Department of Political Science
Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
mcfaul_headshot_2025.jpg PhD

Michael McFaul is the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in Political Science, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, all at Stanford University. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1995 and served as FSI Director from 2015 to 2025. He is also an international affairs analyst for MSNOW.

McFaul served for five years in the Obama administration, first as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council at the White House (2009-2012), and then as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation (2012-2014).

McFaul has authored ten books and edited several others, including, most recently, Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder, as well as From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia, (a New York Times bestseller) Advancing Democracy Abroad: Why We Should, How We Can; and Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin.

He is a recipient of numerous awards, including an honorary PhD from Montana State University; the Order for Merits to Lithuania from President Gitanas Nausea of Lithuania; Order of Merit of Third Degree from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, and the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford University. In 2015, he was the Distinguished Mingde Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Center at Peking University.

McFaul was born and raised in Montana. He received his B.A. in International Relations and Slavic Languages and his M.A. in Soviet and East European Studies from Stanford University in 1986. As a Rhodes Scholar, he completed his D. Phil. in International Relations at Oxford University in 1991. 

International Working Group on Russian Sanctions

The International Working Group on Russian Sanctions aims to provide expertise and experience to governments and companies around the world by assisting with the formulation of sanctions proposals that will increase the cost to Russia of invading Ukraine, and support democratic Ukraine in the defense of its territorial integrity and national sovereignty.
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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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Michael A. McFaul Deputy Director, Freeman Spogli Institute For International Studies and Professor of Political Science, Stanford University; Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution; Advisor to Senator Obama Speaker
Dr. Gloria C. Duffy President and CEO, The Commonwealth Club of California; Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Bill Clinton Moderator
Conferences

Indian Democracy and Law from the Bottom Up: the Case of Urban Rickshaw Pullers and Street Vendors

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Madhu Kishwar is Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in Delhi; founder-president of Manushi Sangathan, an organization committed to strengthening democratic rights and women's rights in India; and founder editor of Manushi - A Journal About Women and Society, which has been published continuously since 1978. Her work on issues relating to "Laws, Liberty and Livelihoods" is aimed at evolving a pro-poor agenda of economic reforms in India. Kishwar, the author of numerous books and articles, has lectured extensively in India and abroad, and received many awards for her work. Her two most recent books are Zealous Reformers, Deadly Laws, New Delhi, Sage Publications, 2008; and Deepening Democracy: Challenges of Governance and Globalization in India, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2005.

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Madhu Kishwar Senior Fellow Speaker The Center for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in Delhi, co-sponsored by the Stanford Center for South Asia
Seminars

Divided Memories: History Textbooks and the War in Asia

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The Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, the Center for Pacific and Asian Studies at The University of Tokyo and the Department of Area Studies at The University of Tokyo will present a 3 part discussion comparing the formation of divided memories in Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States.

The aim of this research is that it puts Japanese textbooks in a comparative framework, and changes the nature of the dialogue about these issues as a result. We will NOT focus on Japanese textbooks per se but rather on the comparative analysis.

Part 1. Comparative Analysis of High School History textbooks in China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States

  • Professor Gi-Wook Shin (Director, Shorenstein APARC): an overview of our project
  • Professor Peter Duus (Stanford University): the comparative analysis of historical narratives presented in the textbooks of China, Japan and the U.S.
  • Professor Jae-Jung Chung (The University of Seoul) : the comparative analysis of textbooks in South Korea and Japan
  • Dr. Weike Li (Editor, Peoples Education Press, Beijing): on Chinese textbooks
  • Professor Haruo Tohmatsu (Tamagawa University): the comparative analysis of Japanese textbooks with other textbooks

Part 2. Textbooks as an International Relations issue

  • Dr. Daniel Sneider (Shorenstein APARC): the history of textbooks as an international issue and the different approaches to solving it
  • Professor Hiroshi Mitani (The University of Tokyo): the personal experiences with Sino-Japanese and Korean-Japanese historical Dialogue
  • Professor Shinichi Kitaoka (The University of Tokyo, former ambassador to UN): the experience of official joint committee between Japan and China

Part 3. General Discussions

  • Professor Tatsuhiko Tsukiashi (The University of Tokyo, Korean history)
  • Professor Shin Kawashima (The University of Tokyo, Chinese history)

The University of Tokyo
Komaba Hall 1F, 18th bldg.

Gi-Wook Shin Speaker
Daniel C. Sneider Speaker
Conferences

Legalized Protection Payments, Taxation, and Economic Growth: Evidence from Ottoman Gaza (ca. 1519-1582).

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Haggay is interested in Middle Eastern historical and contemporary economies, as well as in labor and family economics. This year he is a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford's CDDRL, and he also teaches a course on Middle Eastern economic history at the Stanford's economics department.

During this year Haggay will examine the causes and implications of a major socio-economic transformation, which took place in the Gaza Strip during the second half of the twentieth century: The refugees who initially were less educated than the urbanites became by the 1980s better educated. Haggay suggests that the institution of the Palestinian family and ironically the refugees lack of access to credit market played a key role in the rise of the refugees to educational primacy. One plausible result of this transformation is the growth of the Hamas, whose Gazan leadership includes many highly educated men of refugee origin.

Last year, Haggay finished his Ph.D. in the economics department at the Hebrew University. His dissertation used the case of Ottoman Gaza for examining how the proximity of a semi-arid eco-system ­ a common characteriistic of wide regions of the Middle East ­ affected the demographic,, economic, and political development of an early modern Middle Eastern economy. His job market paper, analyzes a unique micro-dataset on protection payments, which villages made to armed nomadic tribes, for evaluating the interaction of this widespread but usually hidden institution with taxation, economic growth, and military technology. It demonstrates that strong predatory state could enhance economic development in an economy with multiple predators.

http://www.stanford.edu/~haggay/

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Haggay Etkes

N/A

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CDDRL Hewlett Fellow 2008-09
Haggay_website_pic.jpg

Haggay is interested in Middle Eastern historical and contemporary economies, as well as in labor and family economics. For 2008-09, he was a post-doctoral fellow at CDDRL and also teaches a course on Middle Eastern economic history at the Stanford's economics department.

During the fellowship year, Haggay examined the causes and implications of a major socio-economic transformation, which took place in the Gaza Strip during the second half of the twentieth century: The refugees who initially were less educated than the urbanites became by the 1980s better educated. Haggay suggested that the institution of the Palestinian family and ironically the refugees lack of access to credit market played a key role in the rise of the refugees to educational primacy. One plausible result of this transformation is the growth of the Hamas, whose Gazan leadership includes many highly educated men of refugee origin.

In the previous year, Haggay finished his Ph.D. in the economics department at the Hebrew University. His dissertation used the case of Ottoman Gaza for examining how the proximity of a semi-arid eco-system ­ a common characteriistic of wide regions of the Middle East ­ affected the demographic,, economic, and political development of an early modern Middle Eastern economy. His job market paper, analyzes a unique micro-dataset on protection payments, which villages made to armed nomadic tribes, for evaluating the interaction of this widespread but usually hidden institution with taxation, economic growth, and military technology. It demonstrates that strong predatory state could enhance economic development in an economy with multiple predators.

Haggay Etkes CDDRL Hewlett Fellow 2008-09 Speaker
Seminars

Haggay Etkes

N/A

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CDDRL Hewlett Fellow 2008-09
Haggay_website_pic.jpg

Haggay is interested in Middle Eastern historical and contemporary economies, as well as in labor and family economics. For 2008-09, he was a post-doctoral fellow at CDDRL and also teaches a course on Middle Eastern economic history at the Stanford's economics department.

During the fellowship year, Haggay examined the causes and implications of a major socio-economic transformation, which took place in the Gaza Strip during the second half of the twentieth century: The refugees who initially were less educated than the urbanites became by the 1980s better educated. Haggay suggested that the institution of the Palestinian family and ironically the refugees lack of access to credit market played a key role in the rise of the refugees to educational primacy. One plausible result of this transformation is the growth of the Hamas, whose Gazan leadership includes many highly educated men of refugee origin.

In the previous year, Haggay finished his Ph.D. in the economics department at the Hebrew University. His dissertation used the case of Ottoman Gaza for examining how the proximity of a semi-arid eco-system ­ a common characteriistic of wide regions of the Middle East ­ affected the demographic,, economic, and political development of an early modern Middle Eastern economy. His job market paper, analyzes a unique micro-dataset on protection payments, which villages made to armed nomadic tribes, for evaluating the interaction of this widespread but usually hidden institution with taxation, economic growth, and military technology. It demonstrates that strong predatory state could enhance economic development in an economy with multiple predators.

Expert Information, Public Deliberation and Electoral Support for Good Governance; Experimental Evidence from Benin

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Leonard Wantchekon, PhD is a Professor of Politics and Economics at the New York University. Wantchekon's areas of interest include political economy, development, applied game theory, and comparative politics.

He is the author of several articles on post-civil war democratization, resource curse, electoral clientelism and experimental methods in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Political Science Review, World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Constitutional Political Economy, Political Africaine and Afrique Contemporaine.

Some of his recent publications include "The Paradox of 'Warlord' Democracy: A Theoretical Investigation", American Political Science Review, (Vol. 98, No1, 2004); and "Resource Wealth and Political Regimes in Africa" (with Nathan Jensen), Comparative Political Studies, (Vol. 37, No. 7, 816-841, 2004).

Wantchekon is the editor of the Journal of African Development (JAD), formally known as Journal of African Finance and Economic Development (JAFED). He is the founding director of the Institute for Empirical Research in Political Economy, which is based in Benin (West Africa) and at New York University. He is currently serving on the APSA international committee as well as the APSA Africa initiative committee. He was also a division chair at the 2005 APSA Annual meetings in Washington DC.

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Richard and Rhoda Goldman Conference Room

Leonard Wantchekon Professor of Politics and Economics Speaker New York University
Seminars

Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of oil in the Niger Delta

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Michael Watts, PhD, is a Professor of Geography at the University of California at Berkeley. His interests include the political economy and ecology in Africa and South Asia, US agriculture, and Islamic social movements. Less specifically, Watts is also interested in development, peasant societies, and social and cultural theory.

His recent publications include Afflicted Powers, 2005 and Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements, 2004, as well as many journal articles and invited papers.

Ed Kashi, is a photojournalist, filmmaker and educator dedicated to documenting the social and political issues that define our times. A sensitive eye and an intimate relationship to his subjects are the signatures of his work.

Kashi’s images have been published and exhibited worldwide. His innovative approach to photography and filmmaking produced the Iraqi Kurdistan Flipbook. Using stills in a moving image format, this creative and thoughtprovoking form of visual storytelling has been shown in many film festivals and as part of a series of exhibitions on the Iraq War at The George Eastman House. Also, an eight-year personal project completed in 2003, Aging in America: The Years Ahead, created a traveling exhibition, an award-winning documentary film, a website and a book which was named one of the best photo books of 2003 by American Photo. Along with numerous awards, including honors from Pictures of the Year International, World Press Foundation, Communication Arts and American Photography, Kashi’s editorial assignments and personal projects have generated four books. In 2008, his latest books will be published; Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta and Three.

CO-SPONSORED BY CENTER FOR AFRICAN STUDIES

» http://www.powerhousebooks.com/blackgold.pdf
» http://www.curseoftheblackgoldbook.com/
» http://curseoftheblackgold.blogspot.com/

Oksenberg Conference Room

Michael J. Watts Professor of Geography Speaker University of California at Berkeley, co-sponsored by Center for African Studies
Ed Kashi Photo journalist, filmaker Speaker
Seminars

Why is there no ethnic voting in Mali? Results from an Experiment in the Field

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Thad Dunning is Assistant Professor of Political Science and a research fellow at Yale's Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies as well as the Institution for Social and Policy Studies.

Dunning studies comparative politics, political economy, international relations, and methodology. His book, Crude Democracy: Natural Resource Wealth and Political Regimes (2008, Cambridge University Press), studies the democratic and authoritarian effects of natural resource wealth.

Dunning conducts field research in Latin America and Africa and has written on a range of methodological topics, including econometric corrections for selection effects and the use of natural experiments in the social sciences. Previous work has appeared in International Organization, The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Political Analysis, Studies in Comparative International Development, Geopolitics and in a Handbook of Methodology (2007, Sage Publications).

He received a Ph.D. degree in political science and an M.A. degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley (2006).

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Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Thad Dunning Assistant Professor of Political Science Speaker Yale University
Seminars

Shaping Democratic Practice and the Causes of Electoral Fraud

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Why is there so much alleged electoral fraud in new democracies? Most scholarship focuses on the proximate cause of electoral competition. This article proposes a different answer by constructing and analyzing an original dataset drawn from the German parliament’s own voluminous record of election disputes for every parliamentary election in the life of Imperial Germany (1871-1912) after its adoption of universal male suffrage in 1871. The article analyzes the election of over 5,000 parliamentary seats to identify where and why elections were disputed as a result of “election misconduct.” The empirical analysis demonstrates that electoral fraud’s incidence is significantly related to a society’s level of inequality in landholding, a major source of wealth, power, and prestige in this period. After weighing the importance of two different causal mechanisms, the article concludes that socio-economic inequality, by making new democratic institutions endogenous to preexisting social power, can be a major and underappreciated barrier to democratization even after the adoption of formally democratic rules.

Daniel Ziblatt, PhD is an Associate Professor of Government and Social Studies at Harvard University, focusing his research and teaching on comparative politics, state-building, democratization, and federalism. His main intrests lie in contemporary Europe and the political development of the area, as well as electoral reform, voting rights, and the politics of public goods.

Ziblatt writes copious articles, but is also the author of the book Structuring the State: The Formation of Italy, Germany and the Puzzle of Federalism (Princeton University Press, 2006), awarded in 2007 the American Political Science Association's prize for the best book in European Politics. The book is based on a dissertation that received two additional awards from the APSA (the Gabriel Almond award in comparative politics and the European Politics Division award).

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CISAC Conference Room

Daniel Ziblatt Assoc. Prof. of Government and Social Studies Speaker Harvard University
Seminars

Immigration in Africa

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Claire Adida is a Ph.D. candidate in political science and a pre-doctoral fellow at CDDRL at Stanford. Her dissertation, “Immigrant Exclusion and Insecurity in Africa” explains why some immigrant communities integrate into their host societies while others face exclusion and hostility.

Her research interests include: ethnic identity and ethnic politics; African politics and development; field methods; comparative political behavior; the political economy of development; migration and development; public goods provision; trust and informal institutions

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Claire Adida Pre-doctoral Fellow Speaker CDDRL
Seminars
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