Policy Analysis
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Robin Wright is an American journalist currently covering U.S. foreign policy for The Washington Post. She has reported for The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Sunday Times (of London), CBS News and The Christian Science Monitor, and has served as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Europe, and Africa. She has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The New York Times, and The International Herald Tribune.

Awards and Honors
Wright received the U.N. Correspondents Association Gold Medal for coverage of international affairs, the National Magazine Award for reportage from Iran in The New Yorker, and the Overseas Press Club Award for "best reporting in any medium requiring exceptional courage and initiative" for coverage of African wars. For coverage of U.S. foreign policy, she was named journalist of the year by the American Academy of Diplomacy for “distinguished reporting and analysis of international affairs ” and won the National Press Club Award and the Weintal Prize for diplomatic reporting. Wright has also been the recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation grant.

Wright has been a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Brookings Institution, Yale University, Duke University, Stanford University, the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Southern California. She also lectures extensively around the United States and has been a television commentator on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and MSNBC programs, including "Meet the Press," "Face the Nation," "This Week," “Nightline," the PBS Newshour, "Frontline," and "Larry King Live."

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Robin Wright Diplomatic Correspondent Speaker The Washington Post
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In early 2007, CSIS launched an expert task force to examine the growing involvement of the Department of Defense as a direct provider of “non-traditional” security assistance, concentrated in counterterrorism, capacity building, stabilization and reconstruction, and humanitarian relief. The task force set out to shed light on what drives this trend, including the new global threat environment; assess what was happening at the same time in the diplomatic and developmental realms; evaluate DOD performance in conducting its expanded missions; and consider the impact of the Pentagon’s enlarged role on broader U.S. national security, foreign policy and development interests. From the outset, the task force sought to generate concrete, practical recommendations to Congress and the White House on reforms and legislation that will create a better and more sustainable balance between military and civilian tools.

J. Stephen Morrison joined CSIS in early 2000. He directs the CSIS Africa Program, the CSIS Task Force on HIV/AIDS (begun in 2001) and most recently co-directed a CSIS Task Force on non-traditional U.S. security assistance. In his role as director of the Africa Program, he has conducted studies on the United States’ rising energy stakes in Africa, counter-terrorism, the stand-up of the U.S. Africa Command, and implications for U.S. foreign policy. In 2005–2006, he was co-director of the Council on Foreign Relations Independent Task Force on Africa, ‘Beyond Humanitarianism: A Strategic U.S. Approach Toward Africa.’ Immediately prior to that, he was executive secretary of the Africa Policy Advisory Panel, commissioned by the U.S. Congress and overseen by then–Secretary of State Colin Powell. From 2005 up to the present, he has directed multi-phase work on China’s expansive engagement in Africa. His work on HIV/AIDS and related global health issues has involved multiple missions to China, Russia, India, Vietnam and Africa, and most recently, a series of focused studies on the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. He publishes widely, testifies often before Congress, and is a frequent commentator in major media on U.S. foreign policy, Africa, foreign assistance, and global public health. From 1996 through early 2000, Morrison served on the secretary of state’s policy planning staff, where he was responsible for African affairs and global foreign assistance issues. From 1993 to 1995, he conceptualized and launched USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives, which operates in countries emerging from protracted internal conflict and misrule. From 1992 until mid-1993, he was the U.S. democracy and governance adviser in Ethiopia and Eritrea. In the period 1987 to 1991, he was senior staff member of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa. Morrison holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Wisconsin, has been an adjunct professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies since 1994, and is a graduate magna cum laude of Yale College. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

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J. Stephen Morrison Executive Director Speaker HIV/AIDS Task Force and Director, Africa Program, Center for Strategic & International Studies
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Neta C. Crawford is Professor of Political Science and African American Studies where her teaching focuses on international ethics and normative change. Crawford is currently on the board of the Academic Council of the United Nations System (ACUNS). She has also served as a member of the governing Council of the American Political Science Association; on the editorial board of the American Political Science Review; and on the Slavery and Justice Committee at Brown University, which examined Brown University's relationship to slavery and the slave trade.

Her research interests include international relations theory, normative theory, foreign policy decisionmaking, abolition of slavery, African foreign and military policy, sanctions, peace movements, discourse ethics, post-conflict peacebuilding, research design, utopian science fiction, and emotion. She is the author of Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization, Humanitarian Intervention (Cambridge University Press, 2002) which was a co-winner of the 2003 American Political Science Association Jervis and Schroeder Award for best book in International History and Politics. She is co-editor of How Sanctions Work: Lessons from South Africa (St. Martin's, 1999). Her articles have been published in books and scholarly journals such as the Journal of Political Philosophy; International Organization; Security Studies; Perspectives on Politics; International Security; Ethics & International Affairs; Press/Politics; Africa Today; Naval War College Review; Orbis; and, Qualitative Methods. Crawford has appeared on radio and TV and written op-eds on U.S. foreign policy and international relations for newspapers including the Boston Globe; Newsday (Long Island), The Christian Science Monitor, and the Los Angeles Times. Crawford has a Ph.D. in political science from MIT and a bachelor of arts from Brown.

This event is co-sponsored with the Program on Global Justice and the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

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» Article: The Real "Surge" of 2007: Non-Combatant Death in Iraq and Afghanistan
Neta C. Crawford, Catherine Lutz, Robert Jay Lifton, Judith L. Herman, Howard Zinn

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Neta Crawford Political Science Speaker Boston University
Workshops
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Kirsten finished her PhD at Stanford’s Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources in 2007. Her dissertation was entitled: Sustainability of Comprehensive Wealth – A practical and normative assessment. In a truely interdisciplinary manner, she combined economics, ethics, and engineering to improve and assess a macroeconomic sustainability indicator. She is currently a Teaching Fellow with Stanford’s Public Policy Program and a Research Associate at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. She teaches classes at the intersection of policy analysis and ethics, leads a seminar on comparative research design, and convenes a weekly environmental ethics working group. Her research interests lie in combining quantitative data with normative argument, to this end, she is co-Investigator on a Woods Institute for Environment grant working with PIs Kenneth Arrow and Debra Satz.

Prior to entering Stanford’s Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources in 2003 Kirsten worked at the World Bank for five years. Her work at the World Bank focused on the environmental impacts of infrastructure projects, remediation of industrial sites, carbon finance, compliance of projects with the World Bank’s environmental and social policies and corporate environmental strategy development. Her projects spanned the globe, including India, Kazakhstan, Dominican Republic, Peru, Colombia and Brazil. She is comfortable holding conversations over a beer or two in French, Spanish and Dutch. For two years, she served as an elected official of the World Bank’s Staff Association board, representing 8,500 staff to management on myriad issues. She won numerous awards at the World Bank and from community groups for her professional achievements and volunteer work.

Kirsten is an environmental engineer trained first at the University of Virginia (BS ‘96) and the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands (MS ’98). More recently, she completed an MS in Applied Environmental Economics from Imperial College of London (’05).

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Kirsten Oleson Public Policy Speaker Stanford University
Workshops

Funded in 2009, the Program on Human Rights (PHR) is a unique intersection of the social sciences and public-policy formation and implementation. It provides a forum for the dozens of Stanford faculty who work in disciplines that engage or border on human rights (including law, philosophy, political science, education, human biology, public health, history and religious studies) and the more than 30 student-initiated human rights groups on campus. It seeks to relate the research and findings of the academic disciplines to domestic and human rights policy today.

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Michael Ross received his Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University in 1996. From 1996 to 2001 he was an Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He spent the 2000 calendar year as a Visiting Scholar at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and Jakarta, Indonesia. He is now an Associate Professor of Political Science at UCLA; and also the Chairman of the International Development Studies program, and Acting Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies.

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Michael Ross Associate Professor of Political Science Speaker University of California, Los Angeles
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Before coming to CDDRL, Miriam Abu Sharkh was employed at the United Nation's specialized agency for work, the International Labour Organization, in Geneva, Switzerland. As the People's Security Coordinator (P4), she analyzed and managed large household surveys from Argentina to Sri Lanka. She also worked on the Report on the World Social Situation for the United Nation's Department of Economic and Social Affairs in New York. Previously, she had also been a consultant for the German national development agency (Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit, GTZ) in Germany where she focused on integrating core labor standards into German technical cooperation.

She has written on the spread and effect of human rights related labour standards as well as on welfare regimes, gender discrimination, child labour, social movements and work satisfaction.

Currently, she holds a grant by the German National Science Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) to study the evolvement of worldwide patterns of gender discrimination in the labor market, specifically the effects of international treaties. These questions are addressed in longitudinal, cross-national studies from the 1950´s to today.

This research builds on her previous work as a Post-doctoral Fellow at CDDRL as well as her dissertation on child labor for which she received a "Summa cum Laude" ( Freie Universität Berlin, Germany-joint dissertation committee with Stanford University). After discussing various labor standard initiatives, the dissertation analyzes when and why countries ratify the International Labour Organization's Minimum Age Convention outlawing child labour via event history models. It then examines the effect of ratification on child labor rates over three decades through a panel analyses. While her dissertation employed quantitative methods, her Diplom thesis (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany) builds on extensive fieldwork in South Africa examining the genesis, strategies, and structures of the South African women's movement.

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John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Building
Stanford, CA 94305

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Visiting Scholar 2007-2010
Miriam_web.jpg PhD

Before coming to CDDRL, Miriam Abu Sharkh was employed at the United Nation's specialized agency for work, the International Labour Organization, in Geneva, Switzerland. As the People's Security Coordinator (P4), she analyzed and managed large household surveys from Argentina to Sri Lanka. She also worked on the Report on the World Social Situation for the United Nation's Department of Economic and Social Affairs in New York. Previously, she had also been a consultant for the German national development agency (Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit, GTZ) in Germany where she focused on integrating core labor standards into German technical cooperation.

She has written on the spread and effect of human rights related labour standards as well as on welfare regimes, gender discrimination, child labour, social movements and work satisfaction.

Currently, she holds a grant by the German National Science Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) to study the evolvement of worldwide patterns of gender discrimination in the labor market, specifically the effects of international treaties. These questions are addressed in longitudinal, cross-national studies from the 1950´s to today.

This research builds on her previous work as a Post-doctoral Fellow at CDDRL as well as her dissertation on child labor for which she received a "Summa cum Laude" ( Freie Universität Berlin, Germany-joint dissertation committee with Stanford University). After discussing various labor standard initiatives, the dissertation analyzes when and why countries ratify the International Labour Organization's Minimum Age Convention outlawing child labour via event history models. It then examines the effect of ratification on child labor rates over three decades through a panel analyses. While her dissertation employed quantitative methods, her Diplom thesis (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany) builds on extensive fieldwork in South Africa examining the genesis, strategies, and structures of the South African women's movement.

She has traveled extensity, both professionally and privately, loves to dive and sail and speaks German, Spanish and French as well as rudimentary Arabic.

Her current research interests include labor related international human rights, especially child labour and (non-)discrimination, social movements and work satisfaction.

Miriam Abu Sharkh Visiting Scholar Speaker CDDRL
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This is a CDDRL's Special Research Seminar within our Democracy in Taiwan Program. In this seminar, Dr. Szu-chien Hsu will explore whether "democracy" is really perceived differently in today's China in comparison with in the West. And if there is different perception, what are the implications for China's prospect of democratic reform?

 

Dr. Szu-chien Hsu is an Assistant Research Fellow of the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica. Dr. Hsu's research interests include China's political reform, China's "developmental state" in high-tech economic sectors, and cross-strait relations. On China's political reform, Dr. Hsu is analyzing how the Hu-Wen administration conducts reforms on political institutions as an adaptation of the authoritarian regime. The analysis focuses on how the intrinsic institutional principles of the party-state condition and the path and scope of Hu's political reform. Szu-chien Hsu earned his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University in the City of New York in 1997.

**Paper is available upon request.**

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Szu-chien Hsu Assistant Research Fellow, Institute of Political Science Speaker Academia Sinica
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(202) 421-5184
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Visiting Scholar
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Ray Salvatore Jennings is a practitioner scholar with extensive experience within war to peace transitions in over 20 countries including Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Indonesia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Macedonia, Peru, and Sierra Leone. Over the last twenty years, he has served as country director and senior consultant with the United States Institute of Peace, the United Nations, the United States Agency for International Development, the World Bank, and many non-governmental organizations. He has served as a Senior Fellow with the United States Institute of Peace, and as a Public Policy Scholar and an Eastern European Research Scholar with the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. He is currently conducting research with the Stanford University Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law on comparative cases of democratic breakthrough, teaching post-conflict reconstruction and transitional development at Georgetown and Syracuse Universities and is a social development consultant to the World Bank on Middle East and North African affairs. He is the author of numerous articles and is co-authoring a book on democratic breakthrough with Michael McFaul. His media appearances include CNN, CSPAN, NPR and the BBC.

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Dr. Alejandro Toledo was democratically elected President of Peru from July 2001-July 2006.

He was born in a small and remote village in the Peruvian Andes, 12,000 feet above sea level. He is one of sixteen brothers and sisters from a family of extreme poverty. At the age of six, he worked as a street shoe shiner and simultaneously sold newspapers and lotteries to supplement the family income.

Thanks to an accidental access to education, Dr. Toledo was able to go from extreme poverty to the most prestigious academic centers of the world, later becoming one of the most prominent democratic leaders of Latin America. He is the first Peruvian president of indigenous descent to be democratically elected in five hundred years.

He received a BA from San Francisco University in Economics and Business Administration. From Stanford University, he received a MA in Economics of Human Resources, a MA in Economics, and a PhD in Economics of Human Resources.

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution; a Stanford professor of political science, and sociology by courtesy; and coordinator of the Democracy Program at the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). A specialist on democratic development and regime change and U.S. foreign policy affecting democracy abroad, he is the founding co-editor of the Journal on Democracy.

He has written extensively on the factors that facilitate and obstruct democracy in developing countries and on problems of democracy, development, and corruption, particularly in Africa. He is the author of Squandered Victory:The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq; Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation; and Promoting Democracy in the 1990s.

He received a BA, MA, and PhD from Stanford University, all in Sociology.

For more information about this event, please refer to the article in The Stanford Report.

Cubberley Auditorium (School of Education)
485 Lausen Mall
Stanford, CA 94305

Alejandro Toledo Speaker

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 WorldWill 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
Date Label
Larry Diamond Speaker
Lectures
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