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.

Police Body Worn Cameras in Rio’s Favelas: Can Technology Reduce Violence?

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In 2016, a team of three researchers based at Stanford University — Beatriz Magaloni, Vanessa Melo, and Gustavo Robles — conducted a groundbreaking experiment in Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro’s largest favela (informal settlement), to test whether body-worn cameras (BWC) could reduce police violence and improve community relations.

The findings reveal that body cameras hold great promise, but they also come with serious challenges.  Before the experiment started, one police unit commander ominously told the researchers: “If you give body cameras to my officers, this will stop them from doing their job.”

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Research brief on "Warriors and Vigilantes as Police Officers: Evidence from a Field Experiment with Body Cameras in Rio de Janeiro," by Beatriz Magaloni, Vanessa Melo, and Gustavo Robles (Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, Volume 7, article number 2, (2023)).

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Scientia
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Place Attachments: Theory and Measurement for Political Science

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Scholars increasingly ask how place shapes citizens’ attitudes and behavior. Despite growing interest in place-based politics, recent work engages with only a subset of the potential roles for place in politics. In this paper, we take up three questions that are crucial in understanding how a place might affect its residents’ behavior: what does it mean for a person to feel attached to a place, how can such place attachment be measured, and how does it influence political engagement? We develop a concept of place attachments and present a flexible measure that can capture strength of attachment to a variety of places. We present evidence from the United States and Germany that many people feel attached to the place where they live, that this attachment is distinct from an identity formed around the place, and that the strength of this attachment is related to how they engage with politics.

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Political Behavior
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Hans Lueders

Let the Public Govern AI

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Recent reporting on Meta’s internal AI guidelines serves as a stark reminder that the rules governing AI behaviors are frequently decided by a small group of the same people, behind closed doors. The sheer scale of work every AI company grapples with, from determining ethics and mapping acceptable behaviors to enforcing content policies, affects millions of people through processes that the public has no visibility into.

The truth is that these silos are constantly happening across the industry.

Tech policy, particularly AI policy, is often so complex and evolves so rapidly that everyday perspectives are not easily captured. As consumers, we’ve grown accustomed to a system where the most important decisions about technology governance happen in exclusive settings.

But what if we flipped the script? What if users helped create the rules?

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Tech Policy Press
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Alice Siu

Global Challenges & Responses to Democratic Erosion

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DAL Launch Event

Two decades after the close of the Third Wave of democratization, scholars and practitioners alike continue to grapple with the question of why some democracies erode while others endure. To advance this critical inquiry, Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is launching the Democracy Action Lab (DAL), a new initiative devoted to rigorous, comparative, and conceptually grounded research on the conditions of democratic backsliding and resilience. DAL will provide an academic home for refining definitions, testing theories, and generating knowledge that informs both scholarly debates and practical responses to the challenges facing democracy worldwide.

The launch will feature a roundtable, “Global Challenges & Responses to Democratic Erosion” with leading voices in the field — Kathryn Stoner, Beatriz Magaloni, Anna Grzymala-Busse, and Didi Kuo — moderated by María Ignacia Curiel. Panelists will reflect on conceptual clarity and contestation around “backsliding,” its relationship to fragile statehood, populism, and authoritarian resilience, and the mechanisms through which institutions weaken or recover. Drawing on comparative cases across Latin America, Europe, and beyond, the discussion will also chart new directions for research: refining metrics, mapping mechanisms of erosion, and theorizing pathways of democratic renewal. The event marks DAL’s commitment to placing cutting-edge academic work at the center of global conversations about democracy’s future.

Following the panel, attendees are invited to a celebratory reception.

SPEAKERS:

  • Anna Grzymala-Busse
  • Didi Kuo
  • Beatriz Magaloni
  • Kathryn Stoner
     

MODERATOR: María Ignacia Curiel

About the Speakers

Anna Grzymala-Busse

Anna Grzymala-Busse

Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies, Professor of Political Science; Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution; Director of The Europe Center
Link to bio

Anna Grzymała-Busse is a professor in the Department of Political Science, the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the director of The Europe Center. Her research interests include political parties, state development and transformation, informal political institutions, religion and politics, and post-communist politics. Anna's most recent book, Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State argues that the medieval church was a fundamental force in European state formation.

Didi Kuo

Didi Kuo

Center Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Link to bio

Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.

Beatriz Magaloni

Beatriz Magaloni

Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations, School of Humanities and Sciences; Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; Director, Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab
Link to bio

Beatriz Magaloni is the Graham Stuart Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science. Magaloni is also a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, where she holds affiliations with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She is also a faculty affiliate at Stanford’s King Center for Global Development. Magaloni has taught at Stanford University for over two decades.

She leads the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (PovGov). Founded by Magaloni in 2010, PovGov is one of Stanford University’s leading impact-driven knowledge production laboratories in the social sciences. Under her leadership, PovGov has innovated and advanced a host of cutting-edge research agendas aimed at reducing violence and poverty and promoting peace, security, and human rights.

Kathryn Stoner

Kathryn Stoner

Mosbacher Director, Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law; Senior Fellow; Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Link to bio

Kathryn Stoner is the Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), and a Senior Fellow at CDDRL and the Center on International Security and Cooperation at FSI. From 2017 to 2021, she served as FSI's Deputy Director. She is Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) at Stanford and she teaches in the Department of Political Science, and in the Program on International Relations, as well as in the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy Program. She is also a Senior Fellow (by courtesy) at the Hoover Institution.

Maria Curiel

Maria Ignacia Curiel

Research Scholar, CDDRL; Research Affiliate, Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab
Link to bio

María Ignacia Curiel is a Research Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and Research Affiliate of the Poverty, Violence and Governance Lab at Stanford University. Curiel is an empirical political scientist using experimental, observational, and qualitative data to study questions of violence and democratic participation, peacebuilding, and representation.

Her research primarily explores political solutions to violent conflict and the electoral participation of parties with violent origins. This work includes an in-depth empirical study of Comunes, the Colombian political party formed by the former FARC guerrilla, as well as a broader analysis of rebel party behaviors across different contexts. More recently, her research has focused on democratic mobilization and the political representation of groups affected by violence in Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela.

María Ignacia Curiel
María Ignacia Curiel

Panel: William J. Perry Conference Room, Encina Hall 2nd Floor 
Reception: Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab, Encina Hall Garden Level S051

Virtual to Public. If prompted for a password, use: 123456
Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to the William J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person. Registration is required.

Anna Grzymała-Busse

Encina Hall
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA  94305

 

(650) 723-4270
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies
Professor of Political Science
Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
anna_gb_4_2022.jpg

Anna Grzymała-Busse is a professor in the Department of Political Science, the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the director of The Europe Center. Her research interests include political parties, state development and transformation, informal political institutions, religion and politics, and post-communist politics.

In her first book, Redeeming the Communist Past, she examined the paradox of the communist successor parties in East Central Europe: incompetent as authoritarian rulers of the communist party-state, several then succeeded as democratic competitors after the collapse of these communist regimes in 1989.

Rebuilding Leviathan, her second book project, investigated the role of political parties and party competition in the reconstruction of the post-communist state. Unless checked by a robust competition, democratic governing parties simultaneously rebuilt the state and ensured their own survival by building in enormous discretion into new state institutions.

Anna's third book, Nations Under God, examines why some churches have been able to wield enormous policy influence. Others have failed to do so, even in very religious countries. Where religious and national identities have historically fused, churches gained great moral authority, and subsequently covert and direct access to state institutions. It was this institutional access, rather than either partisan coalitions or electoral mobilization, that allowed some churches to become so powerful.

Anna's most recent book, Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State argues that the medieval church was a fundamental force in European state formation.

Other areas of interest include informal institutions, the impact of European Union membership on politics in newer member countries, and the role of temporality and causal mechanisms in social science explanations.

Global Populisms

A new project examining the global surge in populist movements and what it means for established democratic rules and institutions.
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Director of The Europe Center
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Anna Grzymala-Busse Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies and Senior Fellow Panelist Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies

Didi Kuo

Encina Hall, C150
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

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Center Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
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Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.

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Beatriz Magaloni

Dept. of Political Science
Encina Hall, Room 436
Stanford University,
Stanford, CA

(650) 724-5949
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations
Professor of Political Science
beatriz_magaloni_2024.jpg MA, PhD

Beatriz Magaloni Magaloni is the Graham Stuart Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science. Magaloni is also a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, where she holds affiliations with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She is also a Stanford’s King Center for Global Development faculty affiliate. Magaloni has taught at Stanford University for over two decades.

She leads the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (Povgov). Founded by Magaloni in 2010, Povgov is one of Stanford University’s leading impact-driven knowledge production laboratories in the social sciences. Under her leadership, Povgov has innovated and advanced a host of cutting-edge research agendas to reduce violence and poverty and promote peace, security, and human rights.

Magaloni’s work has contributed to the study of authoritarian politics, poverty alleviation, indigenous governance, and, more recently, violence, crime, security institutions, and human rights. Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006) is widely recognized as a seminal study in the field of comparative politics. It received the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations, as well as the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section. Her second book The Politics of Poverty Relief: Strategies of Vote Buying and Social Policies in Mexico (with Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estevez) (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores how politics shapes poverty alleviation.

Magaloni’s work was published in leading journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Criminology & Public Policy, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, Latin American Research Review, and others.

Magaloni received wide international acclaim for identifying innovative solutions for salient societal problems through impact-driven research. In 2023, she was named winner of the world-renowned Stockholm Prize in Criminology, considered an equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of criminology. The award recognized her extensive research on crime, policing, and human rights in Mexico and Brazil. Magaloni’s research production in this area was also recognized by the American Political Science Association, which named her recipient of the 2021 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review, the leading journal in the discipline.

She received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University and holds a law degree from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.

Director, Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab
Co-director, Democracy Action Lab
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Beatriz Magaloni Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations and Senior Fellow Panelist Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies

Kathryn Stoner

FSI
Stanford University
Encina Hall C140
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 736-1820 (650) 724-2996
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Satre Family Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
kathryn_stoner_1_2022_v2.jpg MA, PhD

Kathryn Stoner is the Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), and a Senior Fellow at CDDRL and the Center on International Security and Cooperation at FSI. From 2017 to 2021, she served as FSI's Deputy Director. She is Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) at Stanford and she teaches in the Department of Political Science, and in the Program on International Relations, as well as in the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy Program. She is also a Senior Fellow (by courtesy) at the Hoover Institution.

Prior to coming to Stanford in 2004, she was on the faculty at Princeton University for nine years, jointly appointed to the Department of Politics and the Princeton School for International and Public Affairs (formerly the Woodrow Wilson School). At Princeton she received the Ralph O. Glendinning Preceptorship awarded to outstanding junior faculty. She also served as a Visiting Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at McGill University. She has held fellowships at Harvard University as well as the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC. 

In addition to many articles and book chapters on contemporary Russia, she is the author or co-editor of six books: "Transitions to Democracy: A Comparative Perspective," written and edited with Michael A. McFaul (Johns Hopkins 2013);  "Autocracy and Democracy in the Post-Communist World," co-edited with Valerie Bunce and Michael A. McFaul (Cambridge, 2010);  "Resisting the State: Reform and Retrenchment in Post-Soviet Russia" (Cambridge, 2006); "After the Collapse of Communism: Comparative Lessons of Transitions" (Cambridge, 2004), coedited with Michael McFaul; and "Local Heroes: The Political Economy of Russian Regional" Governance (Princeton, 1997); and "Russia Resurrected: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order" (Oxford University Press, 2021).

She received a BA (1988) and MA (1989) in Political Science from the University of Toronto, and a PhD in Government from Harvard University (1995). In 2016 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Iliad State University, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia.

Download full-resolution headshot; photo credit: Rod Searcey.

Mosbacher Director, Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Professor of Political Science (by courtesy), Stanford University
Senior Fellow (by courtesy), Hoover Institution
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Does the Bukele Model Have a Future?

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In the past five years, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has become Latin America’s most celebrated authoritarian. He has won plaudits—including from U.S. President Donald Trump—for reducing gang violence and transforming one of the world’s most dangerous countries into arguably one of its safest. But Bukele has presided over the erosion of El Salvador’s democracy and the creation of a police state. He rules through a relentless and perpetual state of emergency, the régimen de excepción, that has suspended constitutional protections for more than three years. And there is no end in sight. Bukele and his party have monopolized control over the legislative and judicial branches, which, through constitutional reform, have opened the door for him to serve as president in perpetuity.

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El Salvador’s Police State Will Soon Face a Reckoning

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Foreign Affairs
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Beatriz Magaloni
Alberto Díaz-Cayeros

Israel Insights Webinar with Masua Sagiv — Who Stands for Democracy? Understanding Israel's Constitutional Crisis

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Historically, external threats have tended to unite Israelis and impose a measure of national cohesion on its fractured politics. Yet two years after the worst external attack in the country's history, and in the face of multiple external challenges, Israel is internally divided as never before. Indeed, the country can now be said to be in the midst of a constitutional crisis centered on competing interpretations of democracy and Jewish identity. Few scholars are better placed to analyze this crisis than Dr. Masua Sagiv, a leading analyst of Israeli political culture and constitutional order. Join Amichai Magen in conversation with Masua Sagiv.

Dr. Masua Sagiv is Senior Faculty at the Shalom Hartman Institute and Senior Fellow at the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies at UC Berkeley School of Law. Masua’s scholarly work focuses on the development of contemporary Judaism in Israel, as a culture, religion, nationality, and as part of Israel’s identity as a Jewish and democratic state. Her research explores the role of law, state actors, and civil society organizations in promoting social change across diverse issues: shared society, religion and gender, religion and state, and Jewish peoplehood. Her recently published book Radical Conservatism (Carmel, 2024) examines the use of law in the Halachic Feminist struggle in Israel.

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Israel Insights Webinar with Oded Ailam — Hamas, Israel, and the West: Why This Conflict Matters Far Beyond Gaza

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The 2023-25 Hamas-Israel war proved to be not only the longest war in Israel's history but, remarkably, given that Hamas is a non-state terrorist organization, a war with profound regional consequences. As multiple regional and global actors seek to influence the "day after" in Gaza for their own strategic interests, questions about the broader meaning and implications of the Gaza-centered conflict assume greater international importance. The war has catalyzed a series of regional and global shifts, exposing the limits of external actors, testing the resilience of long-standing alliances, and reshaping the strategic landscape of the Middle East. In this timely conversation, moderated by Or Rabinowitz, Oded Ailam, former head of the Mossad’s Counterterrorism Division, will offer an in-depth analysis of how the Hamas-Israel war continues to reverberate across the region and beyond.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Oded Ailam is a seasoned security and intelligence expert with a career spanning over two decades in Israel’s elite intelligence agency the Mossad. Among his many high-ranking roles, he was the director of the Mossad’s Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC). After retiring from the Mossad, Ailam transitioned into the private sector, offering security and strategic consulting services. Ailam is frequently invited to lecture at international conferences. His insights are regularly featured on FOX News, CNN, Newsmax, The Washington Post, Newsweek, as well as most of the major European media. Ailam writes regularly in Israel Hayom newspaper and other international outlets and appears regularly on prime-time television in Israel.  Ailam is a senior researcher in the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA), and an advising analyst to FDD, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington. Ailam is a graduate of Ben-Gurion University, where he earned a degree in Industrial Engineering and Management. He also founded a company specializing in industrial quality control solutions. He published his first short novel, a bestseller in Israel. He is a writer and contributor to scripts in Hollywood, France, and Israel, bringing his expertise in espionage and security to the world of storytelling.

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Wednesday, February 25, 10:00 am PT. Click to register.

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Profitable Misconduct, Corporate Governance, and Law Enforcement

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This paper analyzes interactions  between corporate governance and law enforcement practices, focusing on cases where deterrence is weak and harmful misconduct is profitable. We show how managerial compensation contracts, including stock-based compensation and insurance that shields managers from liability, systematically undermine enforcement efforts aimed both at the corporation and at managers. We also show that common enforcement policies such as discounting penalties when corporations voluntarily self-report or implement compliance programs can actually lead to more social harm by increasing the profitability of misconduct. Our results suggest that to be effective policies designed to deter corporate misconduct must account for interactions between external governance, such as laws and their enforcement, and internal governance mechanisms such as managerial compensation. The analysis offers insights into how to improve the deterrence of corporate misconduct.
 

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Stanford University Graduate School of Business Research Paper Forthcoming
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Anat R. Admati

Israel Insights Webinar with Karnit Flug — The Israeli Economy: Quo Vadis?

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Professor Karnit Flug served the the Governor of the Bank of Israel from 2013 to 2018, overseeing the stability of the country's financial system and advising the Israeli government on economic policy, taxation, and growth strategies. In a career spanning four decades, Professor Flug has gained an unparalled insider's view into the stucture, strengths, vulnerabilities, and possible trajectories of the Israeli economy. After two years of war and growing international challenges, where is the Israeli economy now and where might it be going? Join Amichai Magen in conversation with Karnit Flug. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Karnit Flug is the William Davidson Senior Fellow for Economic Policy at the Center for Governance and the Economy at the Israel Democracy Institute. After she completed her five-year term as Governor of the Bank of Israel in 2018, she joined the Department of Economics at Hebrew University. Prior to her appointment as Governor, Flug was the Bank of Israel’s Deputy Governor. Previously, Flug was Director of the Research Department and Chief Economist of the Bank of Israel. She published numerous papers on macroeconomic policies, the labor market, balance of payments and social policies. She was an economist at the International Monetary Fund, before returning to Israel to join the Research Department of the Bank of Israel. She also worked at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington D.C. as a Senior Research Economist. She served on a number of public and government committees, including the Committee on Increasing Competitiveness in the Economy, the Committee for Social and Economic Change ("the Trajtenberg Committee"), the Defense Budget. Flug received her M.A. (cum laude) in Economics from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and her Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University.

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Join us for our next webinar with Karnit Flug, the William Davidson Senior Fellow for Economic Policy at the Center for Governance and the Economy at the Israel Democracy Institute, on Wednesday, February 11, at 10:00 am PT.

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Israel Insights Webinar with Sima Shine & Raz Zimmt — The Israel-Iran Conflict: What's Next?

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The 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran turned what were formerly close allies into mortal enemies. For decades after the revolution, Iran and Israel fought each other in the shadows - through clandestine operations and proxies - but avoided direct military confrontation. This changed dramatically over the past two years. With Iran on the verge of nuclear breakout, the Islamic Republic launched hundreds of ballistic missiles against Israel in April and October of 2024. Having coordinated its response closely with the United States, Israel struck back in June 2025, aiming to destroy Iran’s ballistic missile stockpiles and set back its nuclear program. What were the actual outcomes of the 12-day Iran-Israel war? Is Iran more motivated than ever to acquire nuclear weapons? And what comes next in the Iran-Israel conflict? Join Or Rabinowitz in conversation with Sima Shine and Raz Zimmt. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Sima Shine is a Senior Researcher and former Director of the research program "Iran and the Shiite Axis" at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS). For most of her career, Ms. Shine served in the Israeli Intelligence Community. Her last position was Head of the Research & Evaluation Division of the Mossad (2003-2007).  After her retirement from the Mossad, Shine served as Deputy Head of Strategic Affairs in Israel's National Security Council (2008-2009) and then (2009 -2016) served in the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, where she was responsible, inter alia, for the Iranian file and was deputy Director General.

Dr. Raz Zimmt is the Director of the Iran and the Shiite Axis research program at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS). He is also the co-editor of the institute’s journal, Strategic Assessment. He holds a master's degree and a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern history from Tel Aviv University. His Ph.D. dissertation focused on Iranian policy towards Nasserism and Arab radicalism between 1954 and 1967. Additionally, he is a research fellow at the Alliance Center for Iranian Studies at Tel-Aviv University. He is the author of the book “Iran From Within: State and Society in the Islamic Republic," published (in Hebrew) in 2022, and has published extensively on Iranian politics, society, and foreign policy. He has also regularly provided expert commentary to Israeli and international media. Dr. Zimmt is a veteran Iran watcher in the Israeli Defense Forces, where he served for more than two decades.

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