Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
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.
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Excerpt from page 4 of John R. Bowen's "If Citizenship is Political Community, then Which Communities Count? Borders and boundaries in France and Indonesia":
But these acts of invoking citizenship as participatory membership in order to support citizenship as the territorial state can open the door to other, alternative claims about political community, claims that challenge the postulates of territorial boundedness and legal uniformity.
It is these challenges to the national model that I wish to address, doing so by looking at some current developments in the two places where I continue to work, France and Indonesia. In France efforts to strengthen territorial control and internal uniformity have the upper hand, but they have encountered claims that cities should run their own affairs and that long-term residents must be fully incorporated into the political community. In Indonesia it is rather arguments based on participatory membership that are on the rise, and they draw on pre-national institutions of local control and Islamic norms; in turn, however, they are challenged by those in the state and the army who privilege a logic of the territorial state. The objects of debate are in some sense, mirror images - in France, external borders; in Indonesia, internal boundaries - but both debates concern the legitimacy of alternative ideas of political community.
About the Author
John R. Bowen is the Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. His research explores broad social transformations now taking place in the worldwide Muslim community, including special emphasis on Muslim life in Indonesia. His research focuses on the role of cultural forms (religious practices, aesthetic genres, legal discourse) in processes of social change. In most of his work he has looked outward from a longterm research site in the Gayo highlands of Sumatra, Indonesia, to the broader transformations taking place in the Indonesian nation and elsewhere around the globe.
Sponsored by the Program on Global Justice and the Stanford Humanities Center
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Abstract of Seema Jayachandran's "Applying the Odious Debts Doctrine while Preserving Legitimate Lending":
Odious debts are debts incurred by the government of a nation without either popular consent or a legitimate public purpose. While there is some debate within academic circles as to whether the successor government to a regime which incurred odious debts has the right to repudiate repayment, in the real world this is currently not an option granted legitimacy either by global capital markets or the legal systems of creditor states. There are compelling reasons to reform the law of odious debts to allow for such a repudiation in citizens of a tyrant to repay their oppressor's personal debts, but the burden of odious-debt servicing can perpetuate the cycle of state failure which has direct national security consequences. In addition, a properly designed odious debt reform could function as an alternative sanctions mechanism to trade sanctions with fewer harmful implications for the general population of the targeted state. Classical proponents of odious debt reform advocate for recognition of a legal rule under which successor governments could challenge the validity of debts incurred by prior regimes against the odious debt legal standard in a judicial-style forum. We make the case for an alternative "Due Diligence" model of reform which provides far greater ex ante certaining for lenders both as to which investments from subsequent invalidation. The Due Diligence Model also solves certain time-consistency problems inherent to the Classical model.
Seema Jayachandran is assistant professor of economics at Stanford University. She received her PhD in economics from Harvard University. She specializes in development economics, labor economics, and political economy.
Sponsored by the Program on Global Justice and the Stanford Humanities Center
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Abstract
This paper presents a matched pair case study of two factories supplying Nike, the world's largest athletic footwear and apparel company. These two factories have many similarities - both are in Mexico, both are in the apparel industry, both produce more or less the same products for Nike (and other brands) and both are subject to the same code of conduct. On the surface, both factories appear to have similar employment (i.e., recruitment, training, remuneration) practices and they receive comparable scores when audited by Nike's compliance staff. However, actual labor conditions exist between these two factories. What drives these differences in working conditions? What does this imply for traditional systems of monitoring and codes of conduct? Field research conducted at these two factories reveals that beyond the code of conduct and various monitoring efforts aimed at enforcing it, workplace conditions and labor standards are shaped by very different patterns of work organization and human resource management policies.
Richard Locke is professor of political science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is also faculty director of the MIT Sloan Fellows program and co-director of the MIT Italy program. His research focuses on economic development, comparative labor relations, and political economy.
Sponsored by the Program on Global Justice and the Stanford Humanities Center
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Workshops examine questions of global justice including: poverty, inequality between nations, oppressive regimes, identity, human rights, and our duties to one another. The workshops bring together faculty and graduate students from across the university to investigate the complexities of these questions and to discuss possible answers.
Thoroughly updated to keep pace with the many new developments in international law, the Fifth Edition of this popular casebook covers the core topics, basic doctrines, and a broad range of foreign policy issues relevant to the contemporary public international law course.
Proven in the classroom, clearly organized, and with a distinctively accessible style, International Law offers
Table of Contents
Somalia is once again on the front page--and the news isn't pretty. Since 2003, the country's seaside capital of Mogadishu has served as an arena for a battle of gladiators, pitting U.S.backed warlords against guntoting Islamic revolutionaries. With no capable or legitimate state to counter it, the Union of Islamic Courts emerged victorious last June, only to be felled in December by an enfeebled transitional government, formed in exile and backed by the Ethiopian military. A recent spate of assassinationstyle killings and suicide bombings herald the arrival of a new resistance movement intent on ejecting these foreign forces and the African Union troops now being dispatched to the country. Caught in the midst of this violent morass is Somalia's longsuffering population of 8.5 million, seeking order from whomever can provide it, simply hoping that the bully who comes out on top will care enough to reverse the country's economic collapse.
Somalia may be garnering headlines today, but the country's strife parallels the bloodshed in far too many of Africa's struggling nations.
While the debate to "surge" or "withdraw" troops continues, Larry Diamond, Coordinator of the Democracy Program at CDDRL, along with Carlos Pascual, writes on the need for a diplomatic strategy to achieve a sustainable peace in Iraq. Diamond asserts that U.S. troops should aim to provide security needed to create an environment to negotiate a peace agreement to end the war and warns that if the parties in Iraq cannot reach a political settlment to reduce the violence and achieve peace, then military force must be redeployed to contain the regional spillover from the conflict.
Just over a year ago, Professor Thomas Heller, Director of CDDRL's Rule of Law Program, had just launched a new project on oil dependent producer states. The project has now become one of the mainstays of the CDDRL law program.
