Stanford University

Governance

FSI's research on the origins, character and consequences of government institutions spans continents and academic disciplines. The institute’s senior fellows and their colleagues across Stanford examine the principles of public administration and implementation. Their work focuses on how maternal health care is delivered in rural China, how public action can create wealth and eliminate poverty, and why U.S. immigration reform keeps stalling. 

FSI’s work includes comparative studies of how institutions help resolve policy and societal issues. Scholars aim to clearly define and make sense of the rule of law, examining how it is invoked and applied around the world. 

FSI researchers also investigate government services – trying to understand and measure how they work, whom they serve and how good they are. They assess energy services aimed at helping the poorest people around the world and explore public opinion on torture policies. The Children in Crisis project addresses how child health interventions interact with political reform. Specific research on governance, organizations and security capitalizes on FSI's longstanding interests and looks at how governance and organizational issues affect a nation’s ability to address security and international cooperation.

International Relations Theory and Cross-strait Relations

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In this special seminar event, Dr. Szu-yin Ho will examine the current Taiwan-China relations within the framework of international relations theory. He will elaborate how both sides of the Taiwan Strait perceive this relationship, what the implications for the building of new institutions are after President Ma Ying-jeou took office, and what kind of signals these new institutions have delivered. Dr. Ho will also give his concerns and predictions about the future relationship across the Taiwan Strait. In this special seminar, Professor Wei-chin Lee from Wake Forest University will comment on Dr. Ho's speech.

Szu-yin Ho is Professor of Political Science at the National Chengchi University. He received his BA degree (1978) in English Literature from National Taiwan University, MA (1983) and Ph.D. (1986) in Political Science from the University of California at Santa Barbara. After receiving doctoral degree, Professor Ho first joined the Academia Sinica, then moved to the Institute of International Relations, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan. He later served as the Deputy Director of the Institute from 1994 to 1999 and the Director from 1999-2003. From 2003 to 2008 he served as the Director of International Affairs of the KMT, Taiwan's current ruling party. After the presidential election in 2008, he moved to become the Deputy Secretary-General of the National Security Council in the Presidential Office, overseeing the country's foreign affairs. After two years of service in government, Mr. Ho went back to academia. Professor Ho specializes on international relations, comparative political economy, sampling survey, and Chinese politics. He had published books and articles, in both Chinese and English, along these lines of research.

Wei-chin Lee received his Ph.D. in Political Science from University of Oregon. He is Professor of Political Science at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. He has published several books, including the latest edited volume on Taiwan's Politics in the 21th Century (2010). His articles have appeared in various scholarly journals. His teaching and research interests include foreign policy and domestic politics of China and Taiwan, US policy toward East Asia, international security, and international institutions. He is currently serving as an advisor to the Taiwan Benevolent Association of America.

This is a special event cosponsored by CDDRL and Taiwan Benevolent Association of  America.

Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center

Szu-yin Ho Professor Speaker National Chengchi University, Taiwan

Larry Diamond

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Encina Hall, C147
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Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and Sociology
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Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.

Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad.  A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has edited or coedited more than fifty books, including China’s Influence and American Interests (2019, with Orville Schell), Silicon Triangle: The United States, China, Taiwan the Global Semiconductor Security (2023, with James O. Ellis Jr. and Orville Schell), and The Troubling State of India’s Democracy (2024, with Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha Mistree).

During 2002–03, Diamond served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other organizations dealing with governance and development. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq.

Among Diamond’s other edited books are Democracy in Decline?; Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab World; Will China Democratize?; and Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, all edited with Marc F. Plattner; and Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran, with Abbas Milani. With Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, he edited the series, Democracy in Developing Countries, which helped to shape a new generation of comparative study of democratic development.

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Former Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Faculty Chair, Jan Koum Israel Studies Program
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Francis Fukuyama: US democracy has little to teach China

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Francis Fukuyama
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The first decade of the 21st century has seen a dramatic reversal of fortune in the relative prestige of different political and economic models. Ten years ago, on the eve of the puncturing of the dotcom bubble, the US held the high ground. Its democracy was widely emulated, if not always loved; its technology was sweeping the world; and lightly regulated "Anglo-Saxon" capitalism was seen as the wave of the future. The United States managed to fritter away that moral capital in remarkably short order: the Iraq war and the close association it created between military invasion and democracy promotion tarnished the latter, while the Wall Street financial crisis laid waste to the idea that markets could be trusted to regulate themselves.

China, by contrast, is on a roll. President Hu Jintao's rare state visit to Washington this week comes at a time when many Chinese see their weathering of the financial crisis as a vindication of their own system, and the beginning of an era in which US-style liberal ideas will no longer be dominant. State-owned enterprises are back in vogue, and were the chosen mechanism through which Beijing administered its massive stimulus. The automatic admiration for all things American that many Chinese once felt has given way to a much more nuanced and critical view of US weaknesses - verging, for some, on contempt. It is thus not surprising that polls suggest far more Chinese think their country is going in the right direction than their American counterparts.

But what is the Chinese model? Many observers casually put it in an "authoritarian capitalist" box, along with Russia, Iran and Singapore. But China's model is sui generis; its ­specific mode of governance is difficult to describe, much less emulate, which is why it is not up for export.

The most important strength of the Chinese political system is its ability to make large, complex decisions quickly, and to make them relatively well, at least in economic policy. This is most evident in the area of infrastructure, where China has put into place airports, dams, high-speed rail, water and electricity systems to feed its growing industrial base. Contrast this with India, where every new investment is subject to blockage by trade unions, lobby groups, peasant associations and courts. India is a law-governed democracy, in which ordinary people can object to government plans; China's rulers can move more than a million people out of the Three Gorges Dam flood plain with little recourse on their part.

Nonetheless, the quality of Chinese government is higher than in Russia, Iran, or the other authoritarian regimes with which it is often lumped - precisely because Chinese rulers feel some degree of accountability towards their population. That accountability is not, of course, procedural; the authority of the Chinese Communist party is limited neither by a rule of law nor by democratic elections. But while its leaders limit public criticism, they do try to stay on top of popular discontents, and shift policy in response. They are most attentive to the urban middle class and powerful business interests that generate employment, but they respond to outrage over egregious cases of corruption or incompetence among lower-level party cadres too.

Indeed, the Chinese government often overreacts to what it believes to be public opinion precisely because, as one diplomat resident in Beijing remarked, there are no institutionalised ways of gauging it, such as elections or free media. Instead of calibrating a sensible working relationship with Japan, for example, China escalated a conflict over the detention of a fishing boat captain last year - seemingly in anticipation of popular anti-Japanese sentiment.

Americans have long hoped China might undergo a democratic transition as it got wealthier, and before it became powerful enough to become a strategic and political threat. This seems unlikely, however. The government knows how to cater to the interests of Chinese elites and the emerging middle classes, and builds on their fear of populism. This is why there is little support for genuine multi-party democracy. The elites worry about the example of democracy in Thailand - where the election of a populist premier led to violent conflict between his supporters and the establishment - as a warning of what could happen to them.

Ironically for a country that still claims to be communist, China has grown far more unequal of late. Many peasants and workers share little in the country's growth, while others are ruthlessly exploited. Corruption is pervasive, which exacerbates existing inequalities. At a local level there are countless instances in which government colludes with developers to take land away from hapless peasants. This has contributed to a pent-up anger that explodes in many thousands of acts of social protest, often violent, each year.

The Communist party seems to think it can deal with the problem of inequality through improved responsiveness on the part of its own hier­archy to popular pressures. China's great historical achievement during the past two millennia has been to create high-quality centralised government, which it does much better than most of its authoritarian peers. Today, it is shifting social spending to the neglected interior, to boost consumption and to stave off a social explosion. I doubt whether its approach will work: any top-down system of accountability faces unsolvable problems of monitoring and responding to what is happening on the ground. Effective accountability can only come about through a bottom-up process, or what we know as democracy. This is not, in my view, likely to emerge soon. However, down the road, in the face of a major economic downturn, or leaders who are less competent or more corrupt, the system's fragile legitimacy could be openly challenged. Democracy's strengths are often most evident in times of adversity.

However, if the democratic, market-oriented model is to prevail, Americans need to own up to their own mistakes and misconceptions. Washington's foreign policy during the past decade was too militarised and unilateral, succeeding only in generating a self-defeating anti-Americanism. In economic policy, Reaganism long outlived its initial successes, producing only budget deficits, thoughtless tax-cutting and inadequate financial regulation.

These problems are to some extent being acknowledged and addressed. But there is a deeper problem with the American model that is nowhere close to being solved. China adapts quickly, making difficult decisions and implementing them effectively. Americans pride themselves on constitutional checks and balances, based on a political culture that distrusts centralised government. This system has ensured individual liberty and a vibrant private sector, but it has now become polarised and ideologically rigid. At present it shows little appetite for dealing with the long-term fiscal challenges the US faces. Democracy in America may have an inherent legitimacy that the Chinese system lacks, but it will not be much of a model to anyone if the government is divided against itself and cannot govern. During the 1989 Tiananmen protests, student demonstrators erected a model of the Statue of Liberty to symbolise their aspirations. Whether anyone in China would do the same at some future date will depend on how Americans address their problems in the present.

The writer is a fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. His latest book, The Origins of Political Order, will be published in the spring.

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<i> The Shah </i> book launch with Dr. Abbas Milani

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Dr. Abbas Milani, Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University, co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution, and CDDRL affiliated faculty has just published his latest book, The Shah, released by Palgrave Macmillan this month.

The 496 page memoir details the life and legacy of the last Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, providing an authoritative account of his 37-year rule marked by forced modernization, political consolidation, and personal over-indulgence that drove his country into the throes of Islamic fundamentalism. Milani's biography sheds new light on the mercurial Shah through the examination of recently declassified materials and interviews, which provide intimate details of a monarch and his relationship to the West. To fully grasp Iran's potential for democratic reform today we must first examine its past. The Shah brings us closer to that understanding.

Prior to coming to Stanford, Milani was a professor of history and political science and chair of the department at Notre Dame de Namur University and a research fellow at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Milani was an assistant professor in the faculty of law and political science at Tehran University and a member of the board of directors of Tehran University's Center for International Studies from 1979 to 1987. He was a research fellow at the Iranian Center for Social Research from 1977 to 1978 and an assistant professor at the National University of Iran from 1975 to 1977.

Dr. Milani is the author of Eminent Persians: Men and Women Who Made Modern Iran, 1941-1979, (Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY, 2 volumes, November, 2008); King of Shadows: Essays on Iran's Encounter with Modernity, Persian text published in the U.S. (Ketab Corp., Spring 2005); Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Persian Modernity in Iran, (Mage 2004); The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution (Mage, 2000); Modernity and Its Foes in Iran (Gardon Press, 1998); Tales of Two Cities: A Persian Memoir (Mage 1996); On Democracy and Socialism, a collection of articles coauthored with Faramarz Tabrizi (Pars Press, 1987); and Malraux and the Tragic Vision (Agah Press, 1982). Milani has also translated numerous books and articles into Persian and English.

Milani received his BA in political science and economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970 and his PhD in political science from the University of Hawaii in 1974.

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Abbas Milani

615 Crothers Way,
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Research Fellow, Hoover Institution
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Abbas Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University and a visiting professor in the department of political science. In addition, Dr. Milani is a research fellow and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution.

Prior to coming to Stanford, Milani was a professor of history and political science and chair of the department at Notre Dame de Namur University and a research fellow at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Milani was an assistant professor in the faculty of law and political science at Tehran University and a member of the board of directors of Tehran University's Center for International Studies from 1979 to 1987. He was a research fellow at the Iranian Center for Social Research from 1977 to 1978 and an assistant professor at the National University of Iran from 1975 to 1977.

Dr. Milani is the author of Eminent Persians: Men and Women Who Made Modern Iran, 1941-1979, (Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY, 2 volumes, November, 2008); King of Shadows: Essays on Iran's Encounter with Modernity, Persian text published in the U.S. (Ketab Corp., Spring 2005); Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Persian Modernity in Iran, (Mage 2004); The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution (Mage, 2000); Modernity and Its Foes in Iran (Gardon Press, 1998); Tales of Two Cities: A Persian Memoir (Mage 1996); On Democracy and Socialism, a collection of articles coauthored with Faramarz Tabrizi (Pars Press, 1987); and Malraux and the Tragic Vision (Agah Press, 1982). Milani has also translated numerous books and articles into Persian and English.

Milani received his BA in political science and economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970 and his PhD in political science from the University of Hawaii in 1974.

Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies
Co-director of the Iran Democracy Project
CDDRL Affiliated Scholar
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Jonathan Zittrain on minds for sale

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The first Liberation Technology seminar of the winter quarter on January 6, featured Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Zittrain focused his talk entitled, Minds for Sale, on the variety of online platforms that harness the wisdom of crowds today, and closed with a discussion of the implications of these platforms. Categorizing these new tools by the breadth of their user base, Zittrain began by describing the platforms that pay the most money per task, require the most skill, and subsequently have the least participation. Key examples of these platforms are listed below, and organized by their decreasing level on skill.

  •  Xprize Foundation attempts to prompt radical breakthroughs through competitions for large quantities of prize money.
  • InnoCentive creates a marketplace between engineers and scientists to encourage innovation.
  • LiveOps, which bills itself as a contact center cloud, has developed a large set of independent contractors who are designated specific tasks when they sign in to the site. They may be assigned to answer calls placed to a restaurant or emergency hotline or to make political calls on behalf of Liveops clients.
  • Samasource offers "dignified digital work for women, children and refugees" located in developing countries.
  • Amazon Mechanical Turk (also known as Artificial Artificial Intelligence) allows users to participate in anonymous, minimally paid tasks. These tasks can be submitted by any party and are highly disaggregated among hundreds or thousands of users, each of whom receives a payout of between approximately one to fifteen cents for completing the task.
  • Soylent, which calls itself "a word processor with a crowd inside" embeds workers from Mechanical Turk into Microsoft Word. When users install the site's Shortn add-in into Microsoft Word, they can use the tool to have written samples shortened in two minutes. In order to achieve this, the written sample is disaggregated by paragraphs, and each paragraph is shortened within two minutes by a "Turker"-a user who accepts the task on Mechanical Turk.
  • Microtask enables disaggregating previously sensitive data to be work processed from a scanned image. The ultimate goal of this group is to put distributed work into video and computer games. For now, they disaggregate larger tasks into two-second tasks that can be distributed across a crowd.
  • Games With A Purpose (GWAP) has a game-like platform designed to get users to complete disaggregated tasks for virtual points, rather than for actual remuneration. One of its more popular activities quickly attracted 23,000 players who contributed 4.1 million labels to images they were presented with in The ESP Game. Many players routinely play more than 20 hours a week.

Next, Zittrain moved on to offer some additional examples, hypothetical scenarios and questions that highlight some of his own concerns about the potential of these technologies. One key question is whether this market may be too efficient at linking up solvers and payers, if certain tasks are not in fact beneficial for society. After all, it was highly contentious when Texas governor Rick Perry set up video cameras on Texas' border with Mexico and invited people to watch the video feeds and report if they saw anything suspicious. Similarly, a site called InternetEyes allows users to watch video feed from CCTV cameras in the UK for free, offering the chance to "earn reward money, have a chance at reducing crime, and potentially become a hero and save lives," instead of actual compensation.

In another example, the University of Colorado Police Department recently offered a $50 reward for identification of students shown to be smoking marijuana in photos from a large April 20 gathering. Hypothetically, the Iranian government could use Turkers to identify Iranian protestors through national ID photographs in the very same way; by Zittrain's calculations, this task could be disaggregated and carried out quickly at a cost of only $17,000 per protester identified.

Another cluster of issues relates to the use of anonymous users to carry out disaggregated tasks that may have the effect of exerting influence on others. For example, Turkers were recently offered the opportunity to write a positive 5 out of 5 review for a product on a website, which hundreds accepted and completed for a few cents at a time. Users on SubvertandProfit.com are paid to "Like" something on Facebook, "Digg" something, or show their approval of a site or product via some other social network. The users are remunerated for their effort, and the site also profits. Taking this a step further, these platforms also enable users to pay people to evince opinions on legislative issues they do not actually care about. For example, health insurers were recently caught paying Facebook gamers virtual currency to oppose the health reform bill. By enabling any task to be disaggregated and monetized, these new platforms can have highly controversial and unethical implications.

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CDDRL accepting applications to Senior Honors Program

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CDDRL is now accepting applications to our interschool Senior Honors program from eligible juniors focusing on democracy, economic development, and rule of law subjects in any university department. Qualified applicants will demonstrate sufficient depth and breadth of democracy, economic and social development, rule of law, and human rights or justice course work. They should hold a grade point average (GPA) of at least 3.5 at the time they apply and must maintain this GPA throughout the program. Admitted students must be able to attend the CDDRL Honors College in Washington, DC tentatively scheduled for September 11-17. Applications are due in the CDDRL office by February 25 at 5:00 pm and students will be notified of admission to the program by March 11. For additional eligibility and program requirements, please reference the link below.
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The Crisis in Cote d'Ivoire

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The catastrophe unfolding in the Ivory Coast is due to the fact that the committed backers of both candidates are unwilling to accept anything other than complete vindication and victory by their man.  A substantial portion of the ordinary population would just like a resolution of the issue and peace, but because this is all tied to questions of land ownership, government support to different regions, and competing elite claims tied into increasingly strong ethnic and regional identities, a substantial portion also feel that it would be a disaster if their man were not president.  It is pretty obvious that Mr. Ouattara won, and that Mr. Gbagbo has been devious, even dishonest, for a long time. But simply giving the presidency to Mr. Ouattara would hardly solve the country's problem.  There has to be power sharing with various regions getting a cut of government programs, and a good bit of local autonomy if any kind of peace is to be achieved. 

Even if Gbagbo goes, some of those around him have to have a share of power.  The same is true for those who back Ouattara.  I think that personally Ouattara is a better man, but many of those around him are no better than those around Gbagbo.  There are local warlords in various parts of the north, for example, who are just as frightening as the "young patriots" who do the killing for Gbagbo in Abidjan.  To understand the difficulties facing this country requires some background to explain what happened when civil war broke out in 2002, and a discussion of why just making either Mr. Gbagbo or Mr. Ouattara president is not an ideal solution. 

An electoral victory by Mr. Ouattara was bound to produce a backlash by those who will not accept a northern Muslim president and who are afraid to lose everything if Mr.  Gbagbo goes.  Standing on legalisms and claiming that either side is cl!  early right gets us nowhere.  None of the contending political forces in this country have clean hands, including Mr. Bedie, the former president who threw his support to Mr. Ouattara in the second round of the election after coming in third in the first round. 

In some ways, even though it takes very specific local knowledge to understand what is happening, the tragedy in this country resembles the situation in quite a few other African cases as well.  Decades of poor governance and corruption have exacerbated ethnic and religious tensions, and too few of the leading politicians are willing to act for the greater good rather than for their own and their supporters' narrow interests.

Daniel Chirot, Job and Gertrud Tamaki Professor of International Studies at the University of Washington, has authored books about social change, ethnic conflict, Eastern Europe, and tyranny.  His most recent works are the co-authored Why Not Kill Them All?  about political mass murder (Princeton University Press, 2nd edition, 2010), and a short text on ethnic conflicts, Contentious Identities (Routledge, 2011).   He has edited or co-edited books on Leninism's decline, on entrepreneurial ethnic minorities, on ethnopolitical warfare, and on the economic history of Eastern Europe.  He founded the journal East European Politics and Societies and has received help in his research and writing from the US State Department, the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations.  He has done some work for, among others, the US Government, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the Ford Foundation.  In 2003, 2004, and 2006 he did some consulting for CARE in Cote d'Ivoire.  He has also worked in Niger and elsewhere in West Africa.  In 2004/05 he was a Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace working on the study of African conflicts.  He has a BA from Harvard and a PhD in Sociology from Columbia.

Co-sponsored by The Center on African Studies

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Daniel Chirot Job and Gertrud Tamaki Professor of International Studies Speaker The University of Washington
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Bob Rae speaks to CDDRL on Exporting Democracy

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On January 18, the Honorable Bob Rae, Liberal Member of Parliament for Toronto Centre and the foreign affairs critic for the Liberal Party of Canada was the featured speaker at a special CDDRL seminar. Rae addressed the Stanford community on the topic of his latest book Exporting Democracy, published in November 2010 by McClelland & Stewart. CDDRL Deputy Director, Kathryn Stoner, welcomed Rae to Stanford and Ben Rowswell, Visiting Scholar and Canadian "diplomat in residence," introduced the distinguished Rae stressing the timeliness of this topic.

This occasion marked the debut of Rae's book to a US audience and drew a sizable crowd interested in learning more about the MP's views on the role of Western powers in statebuilding and democracy promotion efforts abroad. Based on his personal experience engaging in diplomatic missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, and across the Middle East, Rae was confronted with the limits of power and democratic ideals in foreign lands.

 His discussion focused on the theoretical and practical analysis of the role of democracy in statebuilding that is the foundation of his argument in Exporting Democracy. Drawing  on the writing of 18th century philosophers, Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke, Rae examined the tensions between natural law and justice versus customs and tradition that continue to dominate the debate in modern day statecraft.

 Rae's experience observing democracy promotion abroad allowed him to recognize the importance of upholding democratic values, while also respecting the idea that democracy cannot be viewed as the "gold standard" for all. "From a Western perspective the debate suffers from the notion that the idea of democracy has emerged as perfectly natural and an automatic assumption of our daily lives. In reality it has generally been accompanied by periods of great conflict and can take hundreds of years to bear fruit as evidenced by the American and Canadian experience."

Rae emphasized that the best way Western countries can promote democracy is by helping other countries develop their own solutions to their own problems. 

Rae's sensitivity to the consequences of Western interventions, his belief in the principles of human rights, and his testimony to the importance of humility and pragmatism in our efforts of statebuilding abroad, offered the Stanford community a new perspective on the effectiveness of the global democracy movement. 

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Karen Alter speaks on the evolution of transnational law and international courts

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On January 18, Professor Karen Alter of Northwestern University presented her research on international legal institutions and their role in the global struggle for human rights at the third installment of the Sanela Diana Jenkins Speaker Series. Alter, a professor of Political Science and Law, focused her lecture on the evolution of the transnational and human rights judicial orders.

To address the first subject, Alter offered a historical analysis of international courts since the establishment of the paradigmatic European Court of Justice in 1952. Alter argued that progressive lawyers and judges in Western Europe created a European legal revolution that then spread internationally and spurred the proliferation of international legal courts. She also suggested that contemporary international courts have benefitted from the "roadmap" provided by both the ECJ and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) while adjusting this European model to develop their own, more locally nuanced jurisprudence.

Alter also highlighted the importance of international courts focused on human rights issues. While she admitted that certain courts, like the African Court of Human and Peoples Rights (ACHPR), have failed to satisfactorily address issues of human rights in their jurisdictions, she maintained that these courts can still serve as a powerful check for governments that violate the human rights of their people and the domestic judicial systems that legitimize these abuses. She argued that these courts can act as "tipping point political actors" who give hope to human rights activists and legal scholars. She concluded on an optimistic note, saying "[These] activists can change the world.

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