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.

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/

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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
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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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Thad Dunning Assistant Professor of Political Science Speaker Yale University
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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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Daniel Ziblatt Assoc. Prof. of Government and Social Studies Speaker Harvard University
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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

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Claire Adida Pre-doctoral Fellow Speaker CDDRL
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Transparent Democracy: increasing communication and trust in democratic systems

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Kim Cranston is C.E.O. and Chair of the Board of TransparentDemocracy, Chair of the Board of the Global Security Institute, a member of the Board of the Los Altos Community Foundation, and a member of the Human Rights Watch California Committee North. Born in San Francisco, Kim graduated from U.C. Santa Cruz with a B.A. in Environmental Studies and from Hastings College of the Law. Kim has worked previously as director of Corporate Social Responsibility and the Transparent Commerce Initiative for One Cosmos Network, a new media company; as President of the Social Venture Network, a network of socially conscious business and social entrepreneurs and investors; as a consultant to the State of the World Forum; as Chief of Staff to California Lieutenant Governor Leo T. McCarthy; as Vice President of Business Affairs for Platypus Productions, Inc., a cable television production company; as a lawyer with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher; as a law clerk to Federal District Court Judge Terry J. Hatter; and in several political campaigns, including as Chair, Cranston for Senate, 1986. Kim has served as a board member and volunteer to organizations addressing issues affecting the environment, civic participation, and the nonprofit sector.

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Kim Cranston CEO and co-founder Speaker TransparentDemocracy.org
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Strategies of vote Buying: Poverty, Democracy and Social Transfers in Mexico

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Alberto Diaz-Cayeros earned his Ph.D at Duke University in 1997. Before joining the faculty at Stanford in 2001, he served as an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Diaz has also served as a researcher at Centro de Investigacion Para el Desarrollo, A.C. from 1997-1999. His work has primarily focused on federalism and economic reform in Latin America, and Mexico in particular. He has published widely in Spanish and English. His forthcoming book is entitled "Overawing the States: Federalism, Fiscal Authority and Centralization in Latin America."

Beatriz Magaloni joined the faculty at Stanford in 2001. She previously served as an Assistant Professor at UCLA where she taught in the Department of Political Science. She graduated with a PhD from Duke University in 1997. She won the American Political Science Association's Gabriel Almond Award for the Best Dissertation in Comparative Politics in 1998. She has been a visiting fellow at Harvard University

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Alberto Díaz-Cayeros

Encina Hall, C149
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 725-0500
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Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
alberto_diaz-cayeros_2024.jpg MA, PhD

Alberto Díaz-Cayeros is a Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and co-director of the Democracy Action Lab (DAL), based at FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law (CDDRL). His research interests include federalism, poverty relief, indigenous governance, political economy of health, violence, and citizen security in Mexico and Latin America.

He is the author of Federalism, Fiscal Authority and Centralization in Latin America (Cambridge, reedited 2016), coauthored with Federico Estévez and Beatriz Magaloni, of The Political Logic of Poverty Relief (Cambridge, 2016), and of numerous journal articles and book chapters.

He is currently working on a project on cartography and the developmental legacies of colonial rule and governance in indigenous communities in Mexico.

From 2016 to 2023, he was the Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford University, and from 2009 to 2013, Director of the Center for US-Mexican Studies at UCSD, the University of California, San Diego.

Affiliated faculty at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Co-director, Democracy Action Lab
Director of the Center for Latin American Studies (2016 - 2023)
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Alberto Diaz-Cayeros Professor Speaker Department of Political Science

Beatriz Magaloni

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

(650) 724-5949
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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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Taiwan's 'Nuclear Option'? Security Imperatives and Normative Transformation

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This is a CDDRL's seminar within our Democracy in Taiwan Program.

Vincent Wei-cheng Wang is Chair and Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Richmond. He was a former Coordinator of the American Political Science Association Conference Group on Taiwan Studies and a board member of the American Association for Chinese Studies. He has published over fifty scholarly articles and book chapters on Asian politics and international relations, Taiwan’s domestic politics and external relations, United States-Asian relations, and comparative political economy of East Asia and Latin America. His most recent publication is “Taiwan: Conventional Deterrence, Soft Power, and the Nuclear Option,” in Muthiah Alagappa, ed., The Long Shadow: Nuclear Weapons and Security in 21st Century Asia (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2008). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

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Vincent Wei-cheng Wang Chair and Associate Professor Speaker Department of Political Science at University of Richmond
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McFaul testifies to Congress on future of US-Russian relations

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Russia's invasion of Georgia last month seriously undermined peace and security in Europe for the first time in years, CDDRL Director Michael McFaul told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on September 9. Russia's military actions and subsequent decision to recognize South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states, McFaul said, represent a fundamental challenge to the norms and rules that help to promote order in the international system.

"Instead of business as usual or isolation, the United States must navigate a third, more nuanced, more complicated, and more comprehensive strategy that seeks to bolster our allies and partners, check Russian aggression, and at the same time deal directly with the Russian government on issues of mutual interest. The long term goal of fostering democratic change and keeping the door of Western integration open for countries in the region, including Russia, must not be abandoned. American foreign policy leaders have to move beyond tough talk and catchy phrases and instead articulate a smart, sustained strategy for dealing with this new Russia, a strategy that advances both our interests and values."

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Azerbaijan's 2005 Parliamentary Elections: A Failed Attempt at Transition

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The 2005 elections in Azerbaijan qualify as a failed transition from authoritarianism to democracy. The ability of the Aliyev regime to maintain its hold on power reflected both internal and external factors.  Although there is no way to judge the level of actual support for the government, Aliyev retained control of the security apparatus. Through its control of oil and gas revenues and the tight links between most business endeavors and politics, and its control of the broadcast media in particular, the regime was also able to prevent the opposition, which was more united than in previous elections, from mounting effective campaigns to mobilize citizens as voters or protestors.  Thus, although the Aliyev regime was vulnerable along certain dimensions (sizable groups living in poverty amidst high economic growth and rampant corruption in particular), in others, it was not. The lack of clear outside interest in seeing regime change in Azerbaijan was another factor that worked in the regime

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