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.
The Program on Global Justice aims to bring normative ideas from moral and political philosophy into discussions about human rights, global governance, and access to basic goods, and at the same time to ensure that normative discussions of these issues are informed by the best current social-scientific and policy thinking.
Andrew Bennett is a professor of government at Georgetown University. He is the co-author, with Alexander George, of Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (MIT, 2005), and the author of Condemned to Repetition? The Rise, Fall, and Reprise of Soviet-Russian Military Interventionism 1973-1996 (MIT Press, 1999). Bennett served as a Council on Foreign Relations fellow at the Department of Defense in 1994-1995, and is a former fellow at the Center for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford University and the Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University.
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This paper was discussed at the Global Justice workshop on January 19, 2007.
Excerpt from pages 2 through 3 of Michael Blake's "Political Liberalism Abroad":
Whereas Rawls himself emphasizes political liberalism's notions of reciprocity and tolerance in his extension to the international realm, we might instead emphasize political liberalism's commitment to the justification of political coercion to all individuals subject to such coercion. The result, I believe, is an attractive vision of how a liberal state might understand the normative constraints on its actions abroad. This vision of political liberalism will not privilege agreement between collective groups such as peoples, but rather demand that political communities seek to justify their domestic actions through appeal to the moral categories implicit in political liberalism itself. The specific package of international rights and duties thereby produced, I believe, will be quite unlike those developed in The Law of Peoples, but might nonetheless stand as a plausible and attractive vision of how liberalism might be applied internationally.
About the Author
Michael Blake is associate professor of philosophy and public affairs at the University of Washington. He received his bachelor's degree in philosophy and economics from the University of Toronto, and his legal training at Yale Law School. He specializes in social and political philosophy, philosophy of law, and international ethics.
The Program on Global Justice in collaboration with the Program in Ethics in Society seeks to appoint a postdoctoral fellow for 2007-2008. Applicants should have a doctoral degree from a philosophy, political science, or law program, and research interests in global ethics and politics. The fellowship will cover a 12-month period with a possibility of renewal for an additional year. Salary is competitive.
Applicants should send a cover letter, curriculum vitae, three letters of recommendation and a short writing sample to
Debra Satz
Department of Philosophy
Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-2155
Applications must be received by February 1, 2007.
The Program on Global Justice is pleased to welcome Professor Laurence Simon to FSI and Stanford University. Simon is professor at Brandeis University's Heller School, director of Heller School's Sustainable Development Programs, and associate dean, Academic Planning. He will be visiting the Global Justice program this winter and spring.
While at Stanford, Professor Simon will be finishing a book on the relevance of the work of Paulo Freire to today's poor (Simon worked with Freire in the early part of his career). Simon will participate in the Global Justice Workshop, present some parts of his work, and provide advice - based on his experience at the Heller School and in international development organizations, and his interest in philosophical issues about development and justice - on how to build the Global Justice program.
Program on Global Justice
Encina Hall West, Room 404
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305
Joshua Cohen is a professor of law, political science, and philosophy at Stanford University, where he also teaches at the d.school and helps to coordinate the Program on Liberation Technology. A political theorist trained in philosophy, Cohen has written extensively on issues of democratic theory—particularly deliberative democracy and the implications for personal liberty, freedom of expression, and campaign finance—and global justice. Cohen is author of On Democracy (1983, with Joel Rogers); Associations and Democracy (1995, with Joel Rogers); Philosophy, Politics, Democracy (2010); The Arc of the Moral Universe and Other Essays (2011); and Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals (2011). Since 1991, he has been editor of Boston Review, a bi-monthly magazine of political, cultural, and literary ideas. Cohen is currently a member of the faculty of Apple University.
Governments devote significant effort and resources to promote democracy outside their borders, but surprisingly little is known about how to bring about a good return on this investment. The program entitled Evaluating International Influences on Democratic Development aims to fill this void by researching why democracy promotion sometimes works, but often does not. The program investigates the effects of international programs and the roles played by specific actors. It also examines how international conditions, such as the Cold War, change the ability of domestic actor
Sameer Dossani is director of "50 Years is Enough: U.S. Network for Global Economic Justice", a coalition of over 200 U.S. grassroots, women's, solidarity, faith-based, policy, social- and economic-justice, youth, labor, and development organizations dedicated to the transformation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Dossani has been campaigning against the World Bank and IMF since the early 1990s, when he was a student activist at McGill University, Canada. Most recently, he was the executive director of the NGO Forum on the Asian Development Bank, based in Manila, Philippines, where he had the opportunity to work closely with Asian NGOs and peoples movements working for economic justice.
Sponsored by the Program on Global Justice and Stanford Humanities Center.
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Uday Mehta is the Clarence Francis Professor in the Social Sciences at Amherst College. A political theorist, he has taught at Amherst since 2000, has a BA from Swarthmore College, and an MA and PhD from Princeton University. He received a fellowship from the Carnegie Corporation of New York in 2002. On this fellowship, he conducted case studies of minorities in India, South Africa, and Israel as they struggle for political and social recognition. His publications include The Anxiety of Freedom: Imagination and Individuality in Locke's Political Thought, published in 1992, and Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought, published in 1999.
Sponsored by the Program on Global Justice, Stanford Humanities Center, Department of Political Science (Stanford Political Theory Workshop), and Center for International Security and Cooperation.
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