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.

Why Rapid Economic Growth in China May Be Bad for Democracy

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Minxin Pei is a senior associate and director of the China Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University in 1991 and taught politics at Princeton University from 1992 to 1998. His main interest is U.S.-China relations, the development of democratic political systems, and Chinese politics. He is the author of From Reform to Revolution: The Demise of Communism in China and the Soviet Union (Harvard University Press, 1994) and China's Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy (Harvard University Press, forthcoming).

His research has been published in Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, Modern China, China Quarterly, Journal of Democracy and many edited books. His op-eds have appeared in the Financial Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, and other major newspapers.

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Minxin Pei Senior Associate and Director, China Program Speaker Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Seminars

To Tame Tehran

Authors
Michael A. McFaul
Abbas Milani
News Type
Commentary
Date
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In an op-ed published January 28 in the Washington Post, the Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law Michael A. McFaul and Abbas Milani, co-directors of the Hoover project on Iran, offer their view on the Iranian nuclear enrichment crisis. A developing split in the Iranian regime, they argue, creates opportunities for Western leaders well beyond a U.N. resolution.
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NGOs and Political Change in China: The Problems of Social Capital and the State

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Based on recent work in Guangzhou, Xiamen, Taipei, and Hong Kong, this talk will address the relationship of NGO's to political transformation. It will focus in particular on three problems: the relation between state and society under various Chinese regimes, the relation between official and unoffical organizations, and problems of scaling up civil society organizations.

Taiwan/China Seminar Series

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Robert Weller Professor of Anthropology Speaker Boston University
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U.S. Policy on Human Rights in Russia

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Now, the Russian government's s retreat from democracy, as well as its actions to undermine human rights protections have become regular topics in Washington, therefore our topic could not be more timely. What we would like to discuss today is how the U.S. government should respond to those challenges in Russia.

As many of you know Russia has been a consistent concern to the commission, not so much because of the severity of its religious freedom violations but also due to its fragile human rights situation, including that of religious freedom. And trends of the past few years raise serious questions about Russia's commitment to democratic reform and the protection of religious freedom.

After a commission visit to Russia in 2003, we expressed strong concern that the Russian government was retreating from democratic reform endangering the significant human rights gains achieved in the dozen years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In addition, Russia serves as a model for other countries of the former Soviet Union and other nations emerging from dictatorship.

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Publication Type
Testimonies
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom
Authors
Michael A. McFaul
External URL

Social Entrepreneurship in Developing and Post-Conflict Countries: The Kigali Public Library as a Case Study

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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 the founder, president, and chairman of the Board of Directors of 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, which are the three non-profit organizations that are fundraising and collecting books for, raising public awareness about, and building the Kigali Public Library (www.kigalilibrary.org), Rwanda's first public library.

Mr. Kaufman's talk will discuss the initiation and management of social entrepreneurship projects in developing and post-conflict states, using the Kigali Public Library as a case study.

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Zachary Kaufman

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Pre-doctoral Fellow 2005 - 2006
Zachary_Kaufman.jpg MA

Zachary Kaufman is currently a Juris Doctorate (JD) candidate at Yale Law School, where he is Managing Editor of the Yale Human Rights & Development Law Journal, Articles Editor of the Yale Journal of International Law, Policy Editor of the Yale Law & Policy Review, and co-founder and co-president of Yale Law Social Entrepreneurs. At the same time, Mr. Kaufman is completing his D.Phil (PhD) degree in International Relations at the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar from 2002-05.He was a CDDRL Pre-Doctoral Fellow (2005-2006).

Kaufman's dissertation is an analysis of the U.S. government policy objectives in supporting the establishment of four war crimes tribunals: the International Military Tribunal (the Nuremberg Tribunal), the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (the Tokyo Tribunal), the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

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 U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Justice, the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Kaufman also was the first American to serve at the International Criminal Court, where he was policy clerk to the first Chief Prosecutor.

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

Zachary Kaufman Speaker
Seminars

Democracy Promotion Under Stress: Causes and Consequences

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Thomas Carothers is a leading authority on democracy promotion and democratization worldwide as well as an expert on U.S. foreign policy generally. He is the founder and director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project which analyzes the state of democracy in the world and the efforts by the United States and other countries to promote democracy. In addition, he has broad experience in matters dealing with human rights, international law, foreign aid, rule of law, and civil society development. He is the author or editor of six critically acclaimed books on democracy promotion as well as many articles in prominent journals and newspapers. He is adjunct professor at the Central European University in Budapest and serves on the board of various organizations devoted to democracy promotion.Prior to joining the Endowment, Carothers practiced international and financial law at Arnold & Porter and served as an attorney-adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State.

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Thomas Carothers Director, Democracy and Rule of Law Project Speaker Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC
Seminars

Svend-Erik Skaaning

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(650) 724-2489
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Pre-doctoral Fellow 2005 - 2006

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).

Iraq and Democracy: The Lessons Learned

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LARRY DIAMOND, a Current History contributing editor, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author of Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq (Times Books, 2005). In 2004 he served as a senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad.

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Publication Type
Journal Articles
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
Current History
Authors
Larry Diamond
External URL

Playing for the Long Haul in Iran: A Dual Track Strategy for Arms Control and Democratization

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Since the fall of the Shah's regime in 1979, the United States has lacked a viable and coherent policy toward the Islamic Republic of Iran. Now more than ever, the United States must develop a new grand strategy that addresses all three principal U.S. national interests in the country. U.S. policy must seek to halt the development of an Iranian nuclear bomb, to end the regime's support of terrorist groups, and to foster democratic change in Tehran.

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Publication Type
Journal Articles
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
Brown Journal of International Affairs
Authors
Michael A. McFaul
External URL

Russian Resilience as a Great Power

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Two political scientists comment on Thomas Ambrosio's The Geopolitics

of Demographic Decay: HIV/AIDS and Russia's Great-Power Status (Post-Soviet

Affairs, 22, 1, January-March 2006).

Ambrosio's three indicators of great-power capacity, Russia's society, military, and economy, are reviewed in terms of his argument about how the projected effects of HIV/AIDS weakens each factor.

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Publication Type
Journal Articles
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
Post-Soviet Affairs
Authors
Michael A. McFaul
External URL
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