Zachary D. Kaufman is a CDDRL pre-doctoral fellow in the academic year 2005-2006. Mr. Kaufman is completing his DPhil (PhD) in International Relations at the University of Oxford, where he is a Marshall Scholar and he is writing a dissertation on U.S. policy on the establishment of war crimes tribunals. Afterwards, he will attend Yale Law School. Mr. Kaufman is also currently co-editing (with Dr. Phil Clark) a forthcoming book on transitional justice, post-conflict reconstruction, and reconciliation in Rwanda since the 1994 genocide.

Mr. Kaufman's professional experience has focused on the investigation, apprehension, and prosecution of suspected perpetrators of atrocities, including genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and terrorism. He has served at the United States Departments of State and Justice, the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, and the International Criminal Court.

Mr. Kaufman is also the founder, president, and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the American Friends of the Kigali Public Library; co-founder and Executive Director of Marshall Scholars for the Kigali Public Library; and honorary member of the Rotary Club of Kigali-Virunga, Rwanda. Together, these three non-profit organizations are fundraising and collecting books for, raising public awareness about, and building Rwanda's first public library, the Kigali Public Library. Mr. Kaufman is also a Board Member and Senior Fellow of Humanity in Action, which, in order to engage student leaders in the study and work of human rights, sponsors an integrated set of education programs and internships for university students in Europe and the United States.

In 2004, Mr. Kaufman received his M.Phil (Master's) degree in International Relations from the University of Oxford. In 2000, Mr. Kaufman received his B.A. (Bachelor's) degree in Political Science from Yale University.

Mr. Kaufman's talk will discuss U.S. participation in establishing a UN-backed international war crimes tribunal for addressing the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The origin of the ICTR is complicated and controversial because of the number, attractiveness, and precedence of alternative mechanisms, as well as the pitfalls of establishing such a tribunal. Given the extent, recency, and persistence of atrocities, Mr. Kaufman's research is crucially relevant to academic and policy discussions in the post-9/11 world.

On May 20-21, 2006, the Stanford Project on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SPRIE) of Stanford University and the China Institute for Science and Technology Policy (CISTP) of Tsinghua University will co-sponsor a workshop in Beijing, China, with the collaboration of Zhongguancun Science Park and the Industrial Technology Research Institute. The English version of the proceedings will be published by SPRIE.

Theme and Topics

The theme is the progress in and challenges to Greater China's innovative capacities. The workshop will include discussions of key drivers of innovative capacity: the inputs, processes, institutions, management strategies and outputs, including evidence of innovative capacities as demonstrated in new products, processes, services or business models.

The workshop will focus on information technology and telecommunications, focusing on development within and linkages among Mainland China and Taiwan, plus Singapore and Silicon Valley. Workshop sessions will include:

Statistical indicators

Corporate R&D: Multinational and domestic firms

University and research institute R&D

Science and technology human resources

Regional innovation

New technologies and business models

Papers invited include case studies of products and of firms, analysis of trends and cross-industry or cross-regional comparisons.

Workshop Format

Attendance at the two-day workshop will be by invitation only. More than twenty papers will be presented and discussed by a group of international scholars; panel participants will include senior industry leaders and government policy makers. The workshop format will facilitate discussions.

Recently, a Russo-Turkish strategic relationship has emerged. Trade in general and energy (gas) supplies in particular play a key role in shaping ties between the two countries. But Moscow and Ankara seem to be on the same page too with regard to major regional issues as well: the Iraq war, Iran's nuclear program, security in the Black Sea-Caspian area, and "frozen conflicts" in the South Caucasus. Despite being a NATO member and an EU candidate country, Turkey appears to be much closer to Russia than to the West on all these issues.

Moreover, with the Iraq situation becoming ever more volatile in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion, and the anti-Turkish sentiments on the rise in many European countries, Ankara is deeply dissatisfied with the nature of its relations with Western powers and is, therefore, seeking new strategic allies. In this context, Moscow looks like a natural and valuable partner. Russia, for its part, is also going through a rough patch in its relations with the West and is looking for prospective allies.

Interestingly, the Turkish-Russian rapprochement is accompanied by heated internal debates on Russia and Turkey's international identities and the re-emergence in both countries of Eurasianism -- the ideology that, among other things, promotes historical and cultural affinity between Russia and Turkey.

Igor Torbakov is a historian and analyst who specializes in the political affairs of the former Soviet Union. He holds an MA in History from Moscow State University and a PhD from the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. He was a Research Scholar at the Institute of Russian History, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow; a Visiting Scholar at the Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington DC; a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University, New York; and a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University. He is now based in Istanbul, Turkey and writes regularly on these issues for a variety of publications.

Christine Scheiber is the Microsoft Research Scholar on Corruption on the Rule of Law at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). Her current research examines corruption in the extractive industries (in particular hydrocarbons and diamonds) and how international anti-money laundering instruments can help to prevent and combat political corruption and further the restitution of ill-gotten funds. She received her PhD from the London School of Economics. Her dissertation advances a functionalist theory of the design of international institutions with a focus on international institutions that deal with illicit flows of money, small arms, narcotics and conflict diamonds. She pursued her undergraduate studies in Switzerland and at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po), Paris, France.

The working title of his PHD project is Democracy besides Elections: An Exploration into the Development and Causes of Respect for Civil Liberties in Latin American and Post-Communist Countries. The dissertation addresses the extent of civil liberty (freedom of: opinion and expression, assembly and association, religion, movement and residence as well as independent courts) in 20 Latin American and 28 post-communist countries. Apart from tracking the development of respect for civil liberties from the late 1970's till 2003, it also attempts to explain the present level of respect by examining different structural explanations, such as historical experience with liberty, ethno-religious composition, modernization and natural resources (primarily oil).

Skaaning has constructed his own dataset and index on civil liberties based on coding of the State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices from 1977 to 2003, which he uses in his descriptive analysis of the development and as the dependent variable in the subsequent causal assessment. In this stage of the research, he both undertakes intraregional analyses, utilizing the fuzzy-set method and OLS-regression, and interregional comparisons.

Skaaning received his B.A. (2000) and M.A. (2003) in Political Science from the University of Aarhus, Denmark, where he is also a PHD scholar in the final year. Parts of his MA degree were completed at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität (Heidelberg) and Freie Universität (Berlin).