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.

Regional Advantage: The Non-Silicon Valley Way

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This seminar is part 1 of SPRIE's 5-part series on "Greater China: Entrepreneurial Leaders."

For a long time, researchers have asked whether the success of Silicon Valley can be replicated elsewhere. There have been various levels of attempts and various levels of success outside the United States.

Depending on how success is measured, one can draw different conclusions. How do we evaluate Hsinchu Science Park? Have they created innovative products? Have they produced entrepreneurs? How do they stack up to Silicon Valley? What is their competitive edge? As China joins the WTO, what should its strategy be?

On a long-term basis, what are the factors that will drive and deliver sustainable competitive advantages? With changes in global economic conditions, how does one re-evaluate the Silicon Valley model? As China joins the WTO, what should its strategy be? And as China becomes the manufacturer of the world, what is its impact on Taiwan and Silicon Valley?

This talk offers an analysis of experiences in Silicon Valley and Asia in the past twenty years. It also offers some reflections on the model and strategy for Greater China.

Since November 1998, Sha has been a managing partner at Spring Creek Venture, which specializes in early-stage venture investment and business consultation with Internet and infrastructure companies. Sha is currently serving on the board of directors of several start-up companies, including Appstream, Acela, Aduva, E21, LiveABC, Optoplex, Mediostream, and Tom.com.

Sha has extensive experience as a leader of high technology companies. He served as CEO for Sina.com and senior vice president of Commerce Solutions at Netscape Communications. While at Netscape, he served concurrently as president and CEO of Actra Business Systems, a joint venture formed by Netscape and GE Information Services. A company Sha built from scratch, Actra was the first company to focus on business-to-business e-commerce and e-procurement application systems. Prior to Actra, Mr. Sha served as vice president and general manager of business-to-consumer integrated application business at Netscape Communications and vice president of the UNIX Product Division at Oracle Corporation.

In his community service, Sha served as chairman of the Monte Jade West Coast association from 2000-2001. Sha currently is serving as chairman of the Monte Jade Global Association, the premier technology entrepreneur association with twelve chapters in the United States, Canada, Singapore, and Taiwan.

Mr. Sha holds an MS in EECS from the University of California at Berkeley, an MBA from Santa Clara University, and a BS in EE from Taiwan University.

Philippines Conference Room

James C. Sha Managing Partner Spring Creek Venture
Seminars

Program on Sovereignty

Work on the complex and evolving nature of sovereignty has been underway at Stanford IIS since the mid-1990s. The Center will build on this foundation of knowledge by taking up the issues of intervention, or efforts by external actors to alter domestic authority structures in other states. While influencing domestic authority structures of target states has been central to statecraft for centuries, it has been all but ignored by most international relations theorists.

Rule of Law Program

Today, it is widely recognized that the absence of the rule of law constitutes a critical barrier to economic growth and democractic political development. Increasingly, scholars and policy makers alike are turning their attention toward the concept of economic rights - ranging from broad affirmations of the importance of secure property rights to more particular descriptions of modes of corporate governance - to inform their thinking about growth and development.

Program on Democracy - Completed

In the past three decades, the number of democracies in the world has tripled, and democracy has become the only broadly legitimate form of government. But many of the regimes that have replaced dictatorships themselves suffer from many illiberal practices, or hold multiparty elections only as a façade to mask continuing authoritarian domination.

Eva Meyersson Milgrom

CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall, Room C144
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 724-7985 (650) 724-2996
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Visiting Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Business
milogram.jpg PhD

Eva Meyersson Milgrom is a senior research scholar at CDDRL and a visiting associate professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and the Public Policy Program. She is also an associate professor and senior research fellow at the School of Business at Stockholm University in Sweden.

Her current research focuses on the following topics: (1) implications of social behavioral theories on economic growth, in conjunction with Guillermina Jasso of New York University; (2) institutional change and its effects on promotion and demotion in Swedish private companies; inter-firm wage mobility in Sweden from 1979-1990; labor markets segregation (firm and individual characteristics) in collaboration with Illong Kwon of the University of Michigan along with Mike Gibbs and Kathy Lerulli; (3) equity considerations and the trade-offs between complementarities and influence costs within organizations; and (4) the structure of inequality and extremism. At Stanford, she has taught courses on international corporate governance and on managing diversity.

Her previous interdisciplinary work includes the following: In the summer of 2002, she organized a laboratory to provide an institutional analysis of economic growth based on firm-matched data from four Scandinavian countries. In fall 2002, she organized a conference that brought together scholars from diverse fields to analyze the phenomenon of suicide bombing and to discuss how this phenomenon affects current social science thinking and research. A book is in the works on this topic. Meyersson Milgrom also organized sessions on rational choice at the August 2002 meeting of the American Sociological Association.

Meyersson Milgrom previously served as a visiting scholar in the sociology departments at Stanford University (1998-2000) and Harvard University (2000-2001), and also served as a visiting associate professor at the Sloan School of Management, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2001-2002).

Her recent books published in Sweden include: The State as a Corporate Owner (1998, with Susannah Lindh) and Compensation Contracts in Swedish Publicly Traded Firms (1994). Her recently published articles include: "An Evaluation of the Swedish Corporate System" in Hans T:son Soderstom (January 2003); "Pay, Risk and Productivity" in Finnish Economic Papers (with Trond Petersen and Rita Asplund); "Equal Pay for Equal Work? Evidence from Sweden, Norway and the United States" in the Scandinavian Journal of Economics (vol. 4, 2001, with Trond Petersen and Vermund Snartland); and "More Glory and Less Injustice: The Glass-Ceiling in Sweden 1970-1990" in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility (Kevin T. Leicht, editor, with Trond Petersen).

Meyersson Milgrom was born in Sweden and received a PhD in sociology from Stockholm University.

CDDRL Senior Research Scholar

Larry Diamond

CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C147
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 724-6448 (650) 723-1928
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Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and Sociology
diamond_encina_hall.png MA, PhD

Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.

Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad.  A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has edited or coedited more than fifty books, including China’s Influence and American Interests (2019, with Orville Schell), Silicon Triangle: The United States, China, Taiwan the Global Semiconductor Security (2023, with James O. Ellis Jr. and Orville Schell), and The Troubling State of India’s Democracy (2024, with Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha Mistree).

During 2002–03, Diamond served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other organizations dealing with governance and development. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq.

Among Diamond’s other edited books are Democracy in Decline?; Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab World; Will China Democratize?; and Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, all edited with Marc F. Plattner; and Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran, with Abbas Milani. With Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, he edited the series, Democracy in Developing Countries, which helped to shape a new generation of comparative study of democratic development.

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

Former Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Faculty Chair, Jan Koum Israel Studies Program
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New Threat of Terror in the Western Hemisphere, A

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In its relations with Peru, the United States has historically placed greatest emphasis on fighting the war on drugs. As Sendero Luminoso, The Shining Path, led an insurgency against the Peruvian government in the 1980s and 1990s, the United States provided ample support against the terrorists located in the jungle, especially those participating in the drug trade. But Peru's victory over terrorism then was due more to improved police intelligence and increased public investment, rather than success in the war on drugs. Now, in the midst of economic troubles and a difficult transition back to democracy in Peru, the Shining Path has made a resurgence. The United States again faces a choice about how to proceed - to continue focusing on the war on drugs or to provide sustained levels of investment in Peru's economy and political institutions, thereby turning this war on terror into a war on poverty.

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SAIS Review
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Pitfalls of International Idealism, The

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Universal jurisdiction, the new International Criminal Court, and demands for humanitarian intervention, are three of the most prominent manifestations of the new international idealism. Those who support these institutions and policies tend to believe that justice is best achieved when it is removed and isolated from politics and power. The new international idealism suffers from four fundamental flaws, however. First, it presupposes the possibility of general consensus not just on normative principles but on how and when they should be applied. Second, it minimizes considerations of power, and assumes that norms of right behavior can substitute for national capabilities and material interests. Third, it neglects political prudence: it offers a deontological rather than a consequentialist ethics. Fourth, it consistently slights the value of, and need for, domestic accountability.

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Daedalus
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Stephen D. Krasner

Generational Change in Russia

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For most of the 1990s, American foreign policymakers, analysts of Russia in the United States, and leaders of American nongovernmental organizations have pointed to generational change as the beacon of hope for Russia. Because it was believed that the transition from communism to capitalism and democracy would require a "short-term" decline in the well-being of Russian society--and that the older generations would suffer the most during the transitional period--all hope was placed on the young people. Unlike their grandparents and parents, the younger generation would enjoy the benefits of reform and therefore embrace the reforms advocated by the American policymakers and analysts.

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Demokratizatsiya
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Michael A. McFaul
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Western Triumphalism: The Crisis of Human Rights in the Global Era

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There is a metaphysical crisis in human rights. And just as this crisis is troubling those who write about legal institutions, it is posing a conundrum for those who write in pure philosophy, in comparative political and international studies, and in all the academic areas that deal with identity, values and human belief. Across these disciplinary fields, scholars are asking the same question: as between radically different forms of human existence, how are 'we' to decide whose values ought to trumps others values? Can human rights only be defended from within a set of foundational beliefs that are particular to Western ideological and cultural commitments? This question about the universality of human rights has given rise to a vigorous debate about cultural relativism. Law, as an institution that enforces core political and social values, cannot sidestep this debate. What are global institutions to do, and how is law to aid those institutions, when there is no global consensus about the values that ought shape political and social relations? Put differently, how can decisions about the content of human rights be made without committing cultural imperialism in the same (though possibly subtler) ways that 19th century colonists committed cultural imperialism?

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