In addition to the most pressing issues of the day, scholars at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies focus their research on many regions of the world, from Beijing to Brazil.
Research Spotlight
The Ripple Effects of China’s College Expansion on American Universities
Researchers at SCCEI trace how China’s unprecedented expansion of higher education has impacted U.S. graduate education and local economies surrounding college towns.
While Nayib Bukele's style of authoritarianism may have some successes on paper, Beatriz Magaloni and Alberto Diaz-Cayeros argue that the regime is headed for a reckoning.
Time for Iran to Make a No-enrichment Nuclear Deal
The time has come for Iran’s leaders to reconsider their past intransigent, deceptive posture and instead pursue a nuclear power program that will benefit the Iranian people, write Abbas Milani and Siegfried Hecker.
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems now summarize health-related search results, answer medical questions and offer guidance people once sought from clinicians. These systems bring real benefits, including plain-language explanations of medical information, around-the-clock availability and expanded access for people facing language or literacy barriers. They also carry new risks: inaccurate guidance can harm people at scale, and malicious actors can now generate personalized health misinformation at negligible cost. In this Perspective, we argue that these risks are largely invisible to the institutions responsible for protecting public health. When AI guidance causes harm, no record exists outside the platform, no channel allows users to report it and no independent researcher can measure the consequences. We trace these invisible risks across two settings: incidental exposure online and active seeking through search engines and chatbots. Minimizing harm from AI-generated health information requires making it observable. We therefore offer recommendations that aim to improve transparency, mitigate harm at the point of delivery and assign accountability, ranging from voluntary platform measures to regulatory ones.
Maternal mental health issues are pervasive in rural China, yet community-based interventions are scarce. To address this gap, we developed the Thinking Healthy Extended Program, a nonspecialist-led intervention designed to promote mental health among female caregivers of children under the age of three, including mothers and grandmothers, in resource-constrained areas of China. Drawing on an adapted Stages of Implementation Science framework, this study describes the Exploration and Installation phases of a four-phase intervention development process. During the Exploration phase, we assessed caregivers’ mental health needs and preferences for intervention delivery through in-depth interviews. The Installation phase comprised three stages: developing the overall curriculum structure, identifying and validating curriculum topics, and integrating these topics into a comprehensive curriculum based on feedback from interviews, focus group discussions, and cognitive walkthroughs. The development process took place from 2022 to 2024 in a prefecture in southwestern China and involved 73 caregivers of children aged 6-36 months. The resulting 24-session curriculum integrates simplified cognitive reframing techniques, behavioral activation, caregiving skills, and peer support. This study demonstrates the feasibility of a systematic and participatory approach to developing a mental health intervention for low-resource populations.
Chapter in "De Gruyter Handbook of Cities, Infrastructure and International Relations," edited by Michele Acuto, Simon Curtis, Ian Klaus, and Gaea Morales
British Journal of Political Science,
September 22, 2026
Theories of democratic diffusion predict that exposure to liberal democracies fosters support for political liberalism, while recent studies on Chinese overseas students suggest studying abroad generates backlash against liberal values. Using a unique four-year longitudinal dataset of nearly 1,000 Chinese college students in China and the United States, we examine how studying abroad shapes students’ ideology, attitudes, and identity. Our findings challenge both perspectives. Students who study in the United States are already more politically liberal, market-oriented, and cosmopolitan, and less nationalistic than their peers upon departure, underscoring the importance of selection. Ideological preferences remain remarkably stable throughout college, regardless of location. However, support for China’s political system and affective identification with Chinese national identity declines among students in both countries from 2022 to 2023, with a greater decline among students in the United States. These results show that selection, home-country shocks, and host-country context jointly shape overseas students’ political attitudes.
A new report from Stanford's Tech Impact and Policy Center is offering one of the first cross-sector attempts to make sense of a technology moving faster than the research meant to understand it: AI companions.
Proceedings of Machine Learning Research,
September 2, 2026
By proposing a correspondence between prominent algorithmic harm and social drivers of health (SDOH) frameworks, we show that a range of algorithmic harms ultimately impact human health through SDOH factors, especially structural factors.
Could the global transition to renewable energy create a green dilemma that pits carbon reduction against biodiversity conservation? This study examined the effect of policies promoting solar photovoltaics on local avian biodiversity using a panel dataset covering 2344 counties in China from 2014 to 2023. Policies that favored photovoltaic expansion led to reductions in bird diversity, disproportionately affecting wealthier and nondesert regions, as well as widespread species. The mechanism operated primarily through land conversion: Cropland and grassland were transformed into developed areas, reducing the diversity of vegetation. Paradoxically, the leaf area index increased, a pattern we term “inferior greening,” whereby diverse natural landscapes were replaced by dense but ecologically homogeneous vegetation. We argue that future photovoltaic development should be accompanied by strict biodiversity safeguards, especially in economically developed regions with high habitat complexity.
A special report co-edited by Andrew Grotto, Director of the Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance, with chapters contributed by affiliates Elaine Korzak and Jaclyn Kerr.
