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.

Report from Baghdad

Authors
Larry Diamond
News Type
Commentary
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With the transfer of power to a new interim Iraqi government on June 28, the political phase of the U.S. occupation came to an abrupt end. The transfer marked an urgently needed, and in some ways hopeful, new departure for Iraq. But it did not erase, or even much ease at first, the most pressing problems confronting that beleaguered country: endemic violence, a shattered state, a nonfunctioning economy, and a decimated society. Some of these problems may have been inevitable consequences of the war to topple Saddam Hussein. But Iraq today falls far short of what the Bush administration promised. As a result of a long chain of U.S. miscalculations, the coalition occupation has left Iraq in far worse shape than it need have and has diminished the long-term prospects of democracy there. Iraqis, Americans, and other foreigners continue to be killed. What went wrong?

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Between Democracy and Stability: The Middle East

Authors
Larry Diamond
News Type
Commentary
Date
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How do we balance two conflicting imperatives for U.S. foreign policy: preserving the short-term stability of Arab regimes that have been friendly-or at least not explicitly and intractably hostile-to the United States and promoting a deeper, more organic stability in the region through democratic reform?

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It Only Looks Dead: Don't Write the Obituary for Iraq's Constitution Just Yet

Authors
Larry Diamond
News Type
Commentary
Date
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Iraqi's failure to complete a constitution by August 15 is a blow to the country's prospects for political stability and democracy--and to the credibility of the Bush administration, which staked so much on this deadline. But there could have been a worse development: a bad constitution--unworkable, illiberal, or unacceptable to a section of the country. At least that disaster has been averted for now....

Full article available with subscription.

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Consensus and Iraq's Constitution

Authors
Larry Diamond
News Type
Commentary
Date
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For weeks, the constitutional referendum has been shaping up as a polarizing replay of the Jan. 30 parliamentary elections, when almost all Kurds voted for the Kurdish coalition, most Shiites voted for the United Iraqi Alliance (a coalition of Shiite Islamist parties) and most Sunnis boycotted. In this case, the Kurds and Shiites overwhelmingly support a constitution mainly drafted by their parties, while most Sunni political, tribal and religious groups have been campaigning against the document. The constitution's Sunni opponents will likely fail. Until recently, it seemed they could muster the two-thirds "no" vote in three provinces required to defeat it. But just three days ago, last- minute negotiations among Kurdish and Shiite representatives and the most prominent Sunni party (among a badly fragmented array of them) brought what was hailed as a "breakthrough" compromise. The Bush administration, and particularly its skillful ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, deserve credit for bringing the Sunnis into the constitutional deliberations earlier this summer, after their electoral boycott had largely shut them out of parliament. Khalilzad tried to facilitate a broad constitutional bargain, and then, when the constitution was finally adopted by parliament without Sunni support in August, he fought until this final moment for wider constitutional consensus.
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Russia's Foreign Policy: The Substance behind the Tough Talk

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Dmitri Trenin is a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment, the deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center and chair of its Foreign and Security Policy Program. He has been with the Center since its inception in 1993.

From 1993-1997, Trenin held posts as a senior research fellow at the NATO Defense College in Rome, a visiting professor at the Free University of Brussels and a senior research fellow at the Institute of Europe in Moscow. He served in the Soviet and Russian armed forces from 1972 to 1993, including experience working as a liaison officer in the External Relations Branch of the Group of Soviet Forces Germany and as a staff member of the delegation to the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms talks in Geneva from 1985 to 1991. He also taught at the Defense University in Moscow.

Among the books Trenin authored are Getting Russia Right (2007, forthcoming); Russia's Restless Frontier: The Chechnya Factor in Post-Soviet Russia (2004; with Aleksei V. Malashenko) and The End of Eurasia: Russia on the Border Between Geopolitics and Globalization, (2001). He edited, with Steven Miller, The Russian Military: Power and Policy (2006).

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (CREEES).

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Dmitri Trenin Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment and Deputy Director of the Carnegie Endowment Moscow Center Speaker
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Russia: Rebuilding the Iron Curtain

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As an eternal optimist, I have for decades been one of those who believed that Russia could make the transition from communism to democracy, a development which in turn would help to integrate Russia into to the West. In the long run, I am still certain of this eventual outcome. In the short run, however, it is obvious that President Putin is building a more autocratic regime, an internal process that in turn has strained Russia's relations with the West.

The appropriate policy response to these new developments is not a return to containment or isolation of Russia. Rather, a more substantial agenda between the Russian and American governments would create more permissive conditions for democratic renewal inside Russia. A new American policy towards Russia must pursue both a more ambitious bilateral relationship and in parallel a more long-term strategy for strengthening Russian civil, political, and economic societies, which ultimately will be critical forces that push Russia back onto a democratizing path. As the Bush and Putin administrations wind down, grand new initiatives in U.S.-Russia relations are unlikely to unfold in the next two years. New leadership in both countries in 2008 will open a new window of opportunity to reorient the bilateral relationship along a more constructive path, which in turn will provide a more conducive environment for fostering democratic development inside Russia.

To make the case for this dual track approach for dealing with Russia, my written testimony proceeds in four parts.

  • Section one describes the erosion of democracy under Putin.
  • Section two explains why this more autocratic regime in Russia has not caused economic growth, produced a more effective state, or made Russian citizens more content.
  • Section three outlines three false assumptions made by the Bush Administration about Russia which have impeded the emergence of a more effective U.S. policy towards Russia.
  • Section four offers several concrete policy recommendations for changing the troubled bilateral relationship.
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Publication Type
Testimonies
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
House Committee on Foreign Relations
Authors
Michael A. McFaul
External URL

New Efforts to Promote Democracy

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The symposium is being organized by the Center's "Taiwan Democracy Project." It will feature participation from the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, the National Endowment for Democracy, and other publicly funded as well as civil society efforts to assist democratic development internationally.

The symposium, which will be limited in size to facilitate extensive dialogue and exchange, has several purposes. One set of purposes is informational and analytical. We want to delineate and assess what new and smaller democracy promotion organizations are doing-and what they can do effectively-to support and advance democratic development around the world. To answer the latter question, we want to distill some of what the more established democracy assistance organizations have learned over the last two decades that can be of value in guiding the strategic thinking and organizational development of these new initiatives. How should such new and emerging foundations define their priorities, and what types of grants and activities are most likely to add value to existing efforts? What countries, sectors, and problems may provide, within each region, opportunities for new democracy assistance initiatives to leverage their limited resources into a higher impact?

Second, we would like to promote, in a modest and limited way, some interaction between academic studies of democratic development and the practical efforts to assist it. The Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law has embarked upon a very ambitious study of how international influences affect democratic transitions and consolidation, and we would hope to inject some of what we are learning into the discussions-and most of all, to benefit from them.

Third, we want the workshop to be practically useful to the participants. We want to explore the possibilities for cooperation and joint effort among democracy promotion efforts, small and large, new and old. How can such newer and smaller initiatives acquire the information necessary to identify and evaluate potential projects and grantees? What opportunities may exist for sharing information about potential recipients of assistance? What other forms of exchange and interaction could help new and small assistance efforts to leverage their limited resources? How can the established democracy promotion organizations benefit from some of the "ground truth" that new initiatives may accumulate and the new methods that they may develop in their work?

DAY I: Thursday May 31

Morning Session (8:30 am - 12:30 am):

Introduction

Panel 1: Established Efforts to Promote Democracy: Evolution of Strategy, Priorities, and Programs

Panel 2: New Efforts to Promote Democracy--Asia

Afternoon Session (1:30 pm - 4:45 pm):

Panel 3: New Efforts to Promote Democracy--Eastern Europe

Panel 4: New Efforts to Promote Democracy--Africa

DAY II: Friday June 1

Morning Session (9:00 am - 12:15 pm):

Panel 5: Starting New Democracy Foundations

Panel 6: What Kind of Assistance Do New and Struggling Democracies Need?

Afternoon Session (1:15 pm - 3:00 pm):

Round Table Discussion: How to Measure Success?

Closing Comments

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Symposiums

Cohen gives Tanner lectures at Berkeley

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Program on Global Justice Director Joshua Cohen delivered the prestigious Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the University of California at Berkeley from April 10 to April 12, 2007. In his lectures on "Power, Reason, and Politics," Cohen discussed the role of public reason in a democratic society and global political society. Commentators included Charles Larmore, Elizabeth S. Anderson, and Avishai Margalit.

The Tanner Lectures are a multi-university scholarly lecture series presented annually at nine universities including Cambridge, Harvard, Michigan, Oxford, Princeton, Stanford, Utah, Yale, and the University of California at Berkeley. Tanner lecturers are recognized for "uncommon achievement and outstanding abilities in the field of human values."

Joshua Cohen is a renowned political theorist trained in philosophy. He specializes in democratic theory and its implications for personal liberty, freedom of expression, electoral finance, and new forms of democratic participation. Cohen is currently working on questions of global justice, including the foundations of human rights, distributive fairness, and supra-national democratic governance. He is the director of the Program on Global Justice and professor of political science, philosophy, and law at Stanford University.

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Taiwan's China Policy and Cross-Strait Relations

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

Dr. Chen-yuan Tung is vice chairman of the Mainland Affairs Council, Republic of China (Taiwan) and associate professor at the Sun Yat-Sen Graduate Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, National Chengchi University (Taiwan). He received his Ph.D. in international affairs from the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University. His expertise focuses on economic relations between Taiwan and China, Chinese economic development, Taiwan-U.S.-China trilateral relations, and international economics.

Dr. Tung published book and book chapters including Challenges in the Era of Hu Jingtao (2002, in Chinese), The Globalization of the Chinese Economy (2002), Cross-Strait Economic Relations in the Era of Globalization (2003, in Chinese), Future China: Degenerative Totalitarianism (2004, in Chinese), Renminbi Exchange Rate: Economic and Strategic Analysis (2004, in Chinese), China Today (2005), and China as the World Factory (2006).

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Chen-yuan Tung Vice Chairman Speaker Mainland Affairs Council, ROC (Taiwan)
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