The Fisher Family Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development Program at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is now accepting applications for our summer 2027 program, which will run from Sunday, July 18, to Friday, August 6, 2027. The deadline to apply is 11:59 pm PST on Tuesday, January 12, 2027.

The program brings together an annual cohort of approximately 30 mid-career practitioners from countries in political transition who are working to advance democratic practices and enact economic and legal reform to promote human development. Launched by CDDRL in 2005, the program was previously known as the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program. The new name reflects an endowment gift from the Fisher family — Sakurako (Sako), ‘82, and William (Bill), MBA ‘84 — that secures the future of this important and impactful program.

From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, we select our program participants from among hundreds of applicants each year for the significant contributions they have already made to their communities and their potential to make an even greater impact with some help from Stanford. We aim to give them the opportunity to join a global network of over 500 alumni from 96 countries who have all faced similar sets of challenges in bringing change to their countries.

The Fisher Family Summer Fellows Program provides an intensive 3-week on-campus forum for civil society leaders to exchange experiences and receive academic and policy training to enrich their knowledge and advance their work. Delivered by a leading Stanford faculty team composed of Michael McFaul, Kathryn Stoner, Francis Fukuyama, Larry Diamond, Erik Jensen, and more, the program allows emerging and established global leaders to explore new institutional models and frameworks to enhance their ability to promote good governance, accountable politics, and find new ways to achieve economic development in their home countries.

Prospective fellows from Ukraine are also invited to apply for our Strengthening Ukrainian Democracy and Development (SU-DD) Program, which runs concurrently with the Fisher Family Summer Fellows Program. The SU-DD program provides a unique opportunity for mid-career practitioners working on well-defined projects aimed at strengthening Ukrainian democracy, enhancing human development, and promoting good governance. Applicants to the SU-DD program will use the Fisher Family Summer Fellows Program application portal to apply and indicate their interest there. You will then be directed to a series of supplemental questions specific to the SU-DD program, including requiring a detailed description of your proposed project.

At a CDDRL research seminar held on October 1, 2026, Frances Cayton, the Einstein-Moos Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, presented research from her book project on civil society in backsliding democracies.

Her presentation centered on the democratic potential of informal, apolitical civil society groups in resisting democratic erosion. She argued that autocrats devote little attention to these groups, leaving them with greater autonomy and the ability to decide when and whether to engage with the government. At the outset, these groups often have low civic consciousness, meaning they do not recognize the social capital and civic resources they hold. However, as autocratization threatens their independence, they become more aware of those resources and more committed to defending them, which makes them more likely to mobilize democratically and across partisan divides. 

Cayton began by noting that current scholarship often focuses on two ways autocratic regimes interact with civil society. First, they work alongside and reward groups that share their views as a source of support, and second, they crack down on opponents through repression and bureaucratic pressure. What this picture overlooks, Cayton argues, are the apolitical and informal groups that make up much of civic life, such as biking clubs and mushroom hunters, who often do not consider themselves part of civil society at all. 

To account for these groups, Cayton organizes civic life into a two-by-two framework of formal and informal organizations with political and apolitical missions. Formal groups have internal structures such as membership and dues, making them easy for the state to see. Informal groups have looser arrangements, such as friends who help stray dogs in their neighborhood. Political groups have an explicit political mission, such as human rights, labor, religious, or left-and right-wing causes, while apolitical groups focus on areas like sports, education, and the arts. 

Her argument therefore suggests that the less visible nature of these informal, apolitical groups makes them an almost blind spot in the autocrat's agenda, allowing them to maintain their autonomy. Cayton hypothesizes that, relative to formal pro-regime civil society, aspiring autocrats will target formal apolitical and opposition groups more often, but will not treat informal civil society differently. 

She then tests this through the case of Poland, drawing on a panel dataset covering the universe of Polish civil society, a survey of civic organizations, and interviews. Her analysis of public funding shows that after the Law and Justice party (PiS) took power in 2015, formal apolitical and formal opposition groups lost public funding relative to formal pro-regime groups, while informal groups saw no significant change. Informal and apolitical groups also became less likely to file optional financial disclosures, which she reads as a choice to remain less visible to the state. 

In her survey experiment, Cayton reminded civic groups of government threats to civil society. Informal and apolitical groups became more open to meeting groups with different political views and hosting cross-partisan events, while showing no greater willingness to work with PiS. Together, these results suggest that the regime's pressure largely bypassed informal and apolitical groups, and that the threat to civil society strengthened their commitment to independence and pluralism. 

Ultimately, Cayton's research shows that informal, apolitical civil society is a powerful tool for democratic resilience. As one interviewee put it, these groups often "become political in order to maintain apoliticality," which leads them to defend their independence by mobilizing in support of democracy.

During the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law's (CDDRL) first Fall 2026 Research Seminar, Emily Russell, the 2026-27 Gerhard Casper Postdoctoral Fellow in Rule of Law at CDDRL, presented her research on why police selectively target certain minorities within particular regions of India. She began by situating her work within the literature on common explanations of police repression. These explanations often include crime and political dissent that the police seek to curtail, or racial and ethnic biases within policing institutions. Russell, however, argues that police may also target vulnerable groups in order to enforce an economic order and maintain and enable conditions of extraction that sustain production and hierarchy. 

Russell contextualizes this through the broader literature on coercion, taxation, extraction, and labor control. Existing work already shows how coercion can be used to restrict workers’ outside options and prevent laborers from leaving. Acemoglu and Wolitzky’s 2011 paper, for example, models coercion as force or the threat of force that employers use to influence workers’ participation decisions. Russell adds another layer to this literature by focusing on how coercion can be exercised through the state, rather than only directly by employers. 

Russell situates this argument in the context of Assam’s tea plantation economy. Plantation owners have incentives to control labor, prevent dissent, and discourage laborers from leaving. Within the plantation, they can engage in private coercion directly. Beyond the plantation, however, private coercion becomes more difficult. At that point, landowners may rely on the state, particularly the police, to exercise coercion on their behalf. This produces a clear testable implication: where plantation owners retain incentives to control labor but private coercion can no longer easily reach workers, policing should increase, particularly against the relevant labor population. This is where Assam’s plantation geography becomes useful.

Russell distinguishes between plantations themselves, plantation catchments, and more distant rural areas. Catchment areas are the residential zones surrounding plantations where laborers can still live within commuting distance while remaining beyond employers’ direct control. She then uses a spatial regression discontinuity design across plantation boundaries and catchments to estimate whether policing increases in these areas.

To measure policing and police abuse, Russell draws on GDELT-type media data to capture visible policing events, and legal and human-rights records help capture forms of abuse that may be less visible in media reporting. The broader project also incorporates qualitative evidence from more than 60 interviews.

What she finds is that policing increases sharply in plantation catchment areas relative both to plantations themselves and to more remote rural areas. This increase is especially important in areas with larger populations descended from indentured laborers (Adivasis). Measuring this population is difficult using conventional demographic data, so Russell constructs a surname-based measure based on fieldwork with interviews of elders from indentured communities and geocoded voter records. This allows her to estimate where populations historically connected to plantation labor are concentrated.

The heterogeneity result is particularly important. Policing increases with the concentration of Adivasi populations within plantation catchment areas, but not beyond that geographic zone. This matters because it helps distinguish her argument from a purely ethnic-bias explanation. If repression were driven only by generalized discrimination against Adivasis, one might expect policing to increase wherever these populations are concentrated. Instead, the increase appears specifically where these communities remain economically connected to plantation production but are beyond employers’ direct private control.

The broader point is therefore that the state can use coercion to maintain inequalities that sustain production. Police repression may not only reflect attempts to control crime, political dissent, or ethnic minorities. It can also function as a state-supplied mechanism of labor control, particularly where private coercive authority becomes insufficient.