Dear Friends of FSI,
I am pleased to share our annual report for academic year 2019-20, highlighting the breadth and depth of scholarly research produced at the Freeman Spogli Institute over the last year. In the midst of a pandemic and during a historic election season, FSI has expanded its research and teaching in new directions and continued engaging with policymakers around the world to offer rigorously researched ideas and solutions. Included below are links to our faculty output as well as our Master’s in International Policy (MIP) website.
I am grateful to you and the community of donors whose gifts have made our work possible, and I hope you will share in my pride in all that we have accomplished. None of this would be achievable without your support.
With the growing challenges that face us today, FSI has reached farther and moved faster to accelerate our purposeful impact in the world. Our new FSI resource pages include analysis and commentary on the recent election as well as the struggle against police brutality and racial injustice in the United States in particular, which we launched this summer. Two additional pages highlight our COVID-19 resources as well as recommendations for the new Biden administration. The urgency of these issues transformed our research agenda this past year and engaged scholars and students across FSI.
This past year, we welcomed many top-notch scholars into our ranks including Kiyoteru Tsutsui, director of the Japan Program; Oriana Skylar Mastro, center fellow with APARC; Arzan Tarapore, research scholar at APARC; Rose Gottemoeller, Payne Distinguished Lecturer at CISAC; Brett Carter, visiting scholar; and Salma Mousa, CDDRL postdoctoral scholar.
In addition to these significant efforts and successful talent recruitments, there are many exciting things happening around the institute:
With sustained attention to systemic racism, FSI convened the Racial Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (REDI) Task Force, chaired by Gabrielle Hecht, to investigate how FSI should address this national conversation.
The Cyber Policy Center (CPC) welcomed the Program on Platform Regulation, led by Daphne Keller, into the center. It offers lawmakers, academics, and civil society groups ground-breaking analysis and research to support wise governance of internet platforms.
Jean Oi is the lead researcher on "The Nature and Impact of the Belt and Road Initiative," which takes an institutional and micro-level approach to identify the different actors and interests that drive China’s BRI in practice and what the implications are for global strategy.
Michael Bennon, along with Francis Fukuyama, is leading the Global Infrastructure Policy Research Initiative, which will conduct research on policies to promote infrastructure development around the world and how they interact with global democracy and politics.
The Program on Turkey, led by Ayça Alemdaroğlu, is a platform for critical analysis and research on politics and society in Turkey. Through research projects, speaker events, and conferences, the program seeks to provide and facilitate an understanding of the changing internal dynamics and external relations of the country.
What Does It Mean to Be an American is a new, timely, and critically relevant free online curriculum resource available to K-12 and community college educators developed by SPICE and the Mineta Legacy Project.
FSI’s two undergraduate honors programs – the Fisher Family Undergraduate Honors Program on Democracy and Development at CDDRL and the Honors Program in International Security Studies at CISAC – continue to attract the best students from a wide variety of majors across Stanford. These programs are a vital training opportunity for future scholars and policymakers. Read more about them here.
Ziyi Wang, MIP class of 2021, was one of three Stanford students who were awarded Rhodes Scholarships. Read about the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy graduating class of 2020 here, and take a deeper dive into the program below.
FSI concluded another strong year providing much-needed research, mentorship, and policy impact advice. We look forward to building on this success to add new areas of inquiry, to expand FSI’s teaching contributions at Stanford and to provide ongoing advice to policymakers on a variety of pressing challenges.
Read on to learn more about the concrete impact we have made with your support.
Thank you for your engagement with FSI.
Michael McFaul
Senior Fellow and Director, FSI
Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies, Department of Political Science
Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
