Did you know MIP has a joint degree program with Stanford Law? Find out why our graduate student, Julia Neusner, decided to add on the MIP program to her studies on our FSI blog. #MIPFeatureFriday
Room 212, Crown Quadrangle
559 Nathan Abbott Way
Stanford, CA 94305-8610
Jamie O’Connell is a Lecturer in Residence at Stanford Law School. He teaches and writes on political and legal development and has particular expertise in law and development, transitional justice, democratization, post-conflict reconstruction, and business and human rights. Until 2018, he was a Senior Fellow of the Honorable G. William and Ariadna Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, as well as a Lecturer in Residence, teaching both law and undergraduate students.
O’Connell has worked on human rights and development in over a dozen countries in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe, under the auspices of the United Nations, local and international non-governmental organizations, and academic institutions. He co-founded International Professional Partnerships for Sierra Leone, a non-governmental organization that worked with the government of Sierra Leone to enhance the performance of its agencies and civil servants. Earlier in his career, O’Connell studied international business as a researcher at Harvard Business School, publishing numerous case studies. He has directed the Human Rights Clinic at the University of Sierra Leone and taught as a visitor at Harvard Law School and Columbia Law School. O’Connell clerked for the Honorable James R. Browning on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and is admitted to practice in California (inactive status) and New York. In 2016-17, he was a visiting professor and Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Valencia (Spain) Faculty of Law.
O’Connell’s scholarship includes “Representation, Paternalism, and Exclusion: The Divergent Impacts of the AKP’s Populism on Human Rights In Turkey” in Human Rights in a Time of Populism: Challenges and Responses (2020); “When Prosecution Is Not Enough: How the International Criminal Court Can Prevent Atrocity and Advance Accountability by Emulating Regional Human Rights Institutions” (with James L. Cavallaro, Yale Journal of International Law, 2020); “Common Interests, Closer Allies: How Democracy in Arab States Can Benefit the West” (Stanford Journal of International Law, 2012); “Empowering the Disadvantaged after Dictatorship and Conflict: Legal Empowerment, Transitions and Transitional Justice,” in Legal Empowerment: Practitioners’ Perspectives (2010); “East Timor 1999,” in The Responsibility to Protect: Moving the Campaign Forward (2007); “Gambling with the Psyche: Does Prosecuting Human Rights Violators Console Their Victims?” (Harvard International Law Journal, 2005); “Here Interest Meets Humanity: How to End the War and Support Reconstruction in Liberia, and the Case for Modest American Leadership” (Harvard Human Rights Journal, 2004); and Sierra Leone’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Special Court: A Citizen’s Handbook (with Paul James-Allen and Sheku B.S. Lahai, 2003).
Marcella Alsan and Marianne Wanamaker are recipients of this year’s prestigious Arrow Award from the International Health Economics Association for research that shows the health of African-American men was adversely impacted by the Tuskegee syphilis study of the early 20th century.
The annual award recognizes excellence in the field of health economics and is named after the late Kenneth J. Arrow, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and mathematician. He was a Stanford Health Policy fellow and senior fellow by courtesy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). He was also a senior fellow, emeritus, at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR).
The IHEA awarded the 27th annual Arrow Award to Alsan, a core faculty member at Stanford Health Policy, a senior fellow at FSI and SIEPR, and co-author Wanamaker of the University of Tennessee for their paper, “Tuskegee and the Health of Black Men” published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
The infamous Tuskegee study began in 1932 when the U.S. Public Health Service began following approximately 600 African-American men, some of whom had syphilis, for the stated purpose of understanding the natural history of the disease. The government willingly withheld treatment even after penicillin became an established magic bullet for treating the illness.
The medical doctors and staff of the CDC followed the men for four decades, until ultimately the study was halted in 1972 when it was brought to the attention of the media by law student Peter Buxtun.
As noted in this story about the research, Alsan and Wanamaker found that the public disclosure of the study in 1972 was associated with an increase in medical mistrust and mortality among African-American men in the immediate aftermath of the revelation.
“The award is an immense honor for both Marianne and me. First, it sheds light on the importance of history for understanding health disparities. Second, it reaffirms the “expected behavior of the physician” that Professor Arrow eloquently described in his seminal 1963 paper on the distinctive features of the market for medical care and the externalities associated with deviating from those expectations.”
African-American men today have the worst health outcomes of all major ethnic, racial and demographic groups in the United States. Life expectancy for black men at age 45 is three years less than their white male peers, and five years less than for black women.
When their working paper was first published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, it became part of the national discussion about the lasting impact of the Tuskegee study.
“The story that Alsan and Wanamaker uncovered is even deeper than the direct effects of the Tuskegee Study,” wrote Vann R. Newkirk II in The Atlantic. “Their research helps validate the anecdotal experiences of physicians, historians, and public health workers in black communities and gives new power to them.”
Abstract: Existing international relations scholarship on human rights focuses on international law and transnational advocacy to the exclusion of "human rights diplomacy" (HRD)---efforts by government officials to engage publicly and privately with their foreign counterparts---because diplomacy is often not publicly observable. We exploit an opportunity to assess the effectiveness of HRD: a campaign coordinated by the U.S. government to free twenty female political prisoners called #Freethe20. Our analysis of release outcomes for #Freethe20 women compared to two control groups (a longer list of women considered by the State Department for the campaign and a list of women imprisoned simultaneously in the same target countries) suggests the campaign was highly effective. While #Freethe20 was public-facing, we find little evidence that "naming and shaming" alone drove releases. Drawing on in-depth interviews with U.S. officials, we argue that foreign governments were most responsive when public pressure was matched with private, coercive diplomacy.
Speaker Bio: Jeremy M. Weinstein is a Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is also a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C.
His research focuses on civil wars and political violence; ethnic politics and the political economy of development; and democracy, accountability, and political change. He is the author of Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence (Cambridge University Press), which received the William Riker Prize for the best book on political economy. He is also the co-author of Coethnicity: Diversity and the Dilemmas of Collective Action (Russell Sage Foundation), which received the Gregory Luebbert Award for the best book in comparative politics. He has published articles in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Annual Review of Political Science, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Journal of Democracy, World Policy Journal, and the SAIS Review.
Weinstein received the International Studies Association’s Karl Deutsch Award in 2013. The award is given to a scholar younger than 40 or within 10 years of earning a Ph.D. who has made the most significant contribution to the study of international relations. He also received the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford in 2007.
He has also worked at the highest levels of government on major foreign policy and national security challenges, engaging in both global diplomacy and national policy-making. Between 2013 and 2015, Weinstein served as the Deputy to the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and before that as the Chief of Staff at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. As Deputy, Weinstein was a standing member of the National Security Council Deputies’ Committee – the sub-cabinet policy committee with primary responsibility for advising the National Security Council, the Cabinet, and the President on the full range of foreign policy issues, including global counterterrorism, nonproliferation, U.S. policy in the Middle East, the strategic rebalance to Asia, cyber threats, among a wide variety of other issues.
During President Obama’s first term, he served as Director for Development and Democracy on the National Security Council staff at the White House between 2009 and 2011. In this capacity, he played a key role in the National Security Council’s work on global development, democracy and human rights, and anti-corruption, with a global portfolio. Before joining the White House staff, Weinstein served as an advisor to the Obama campaign and, during the transition, as a member of the National Security Policy Working Group and the Foreign Assistance Agency Review Team.
Weinstein obtained a BA with high honors from Swarthmore College, and an MA and PhD in political economy and government from Harvard University. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on a number of non-profit boards and advisory groups.
Stanford's Poverty, Violence and Governance Lab is hosting a two day conference that seeks to advance understanding of the causes and consequences of human rights violations in both dictatorships and democracies. It brings together researchers studying repression – including illegal detention, police killings, and censorship – to better understand the conditions under which states violate human rights, and how this affects the relationship between the state and its citizens. CLICK HERE FOR THE CONFERENCE PAGE.
Keynote Speaker Bio
THIS EVENT IS CO-SPONSORED BY:
[[{"fid":"236200","view_mode":"crop_870xauto","fields":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_credit[und][0][value]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto"},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"3":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_credit[und][0][value]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto"}},"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-crop-870xauto","data-delta":"3"}}]]
Dept. of Political Science
Encina Hall, Room 436
Stanford University,
Stanford, CA
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.
Religious actors and their political concepts are commonly assumed to be conservative, static, and aligned with the private contemplative world. Popes, however, regularly stand out from this narrative. The article contextualizes the papal human rights discourse since the 1940s and contributes a hitherto neglected perspective to the debate on human rights and religion in the international realm, illustrating that religious ideas and configurations change. The research, partially derived using discourse network analysis software, points out three key findings: First, John Paul II dominates the human rights discourse, which has gained traction since the end of the Second World War. Second, although Francis takes an outside role in the papal discourse, he does not differ in principle from the mainstream trajectory of the papal human rights discourse. Finally, third, from the first evocation of human rights by a pope, there has been a persistent trend stressing both individual and collective human rights. Moreover, the article illustrates that political and religious conceptions of human rights are relational, and even contingent on each other. The results offer ample reason to anticipate future papal political conduct based on the trajectory of the papal human rights discourse.
Speaker Bio:
“I learned long ago to never predict anything about North Korea.”
So began the keynote address by Anna Fifield, veteran journalist and winner of the 2018 Shorenstein Journalism Award. Speaking at the Award’s seventeenth annual panel discussion “How North Korea Is, and Isn’t, Changing under Kim Jong Un,” Fifield, the Beijing bureau chief for The Washington Post , shared some of the many observations she has made since she first began covering North Korea in 2004.
Two other North Korea experts joined Fifield at the panel: Barbara Demick, New York correspondent of the Los Angeles Times, formerly head of the bureaus in Beijing and Seoul, and the 2012 Shorenstein award winner; and Andray Abrahamian, the 2018-2019 Koret Fellow, whose previous role as executive director of Choson Exchange and other projects took him to the DPRK nearly 30 times. Yong Suk Lee, deputy director of the Korea Program at Shorenstein APARC, chaired the panel.
The presence of another person—the Dear Respected Comrade himself—was also very much felt in the room, if only in spirit.
Barbara Demick (center) speaks at 2018 Shorenstein Journalism Award.
Survival at any cost
At various points throughout its 70-year history, experts have predicted the demise of the "Hermit Kingdom." Fifield herself admitted to occasionally thinking along such terms.
And yet the country continues to prove them wrong.
“[D]uring my first stint covering North Korea, [I] just couldn’t envisage any way that this regime could survive the death of the second-generation leader and the transition to a third generation,” she said. “Kim Il Sung had created a myth of revolutionary heroism around himself, and a myth of divine selection around his son, Kim Jong Il. How could the North Korean people, who no longer live in a Hermit Kingdom, tolerate a third leader called Kim, let alone one who had no highly exaggerated or plain fictional back story?”
“Yet," Fifield continued, "here we are. Next month, Kim Jong Un will celebrate seven years in charge of North Korea.”
One prominent reason for the nation's recent survival, and an idea put forward by Fifield and supported by her co-panelists, was the development of markets in the communist state.
For decades, North Korea operated under the centrally-planned communist model. Even as China pursued reform and as the Soviet Union collapsed, the North Korean state maintained its central position in the economy.
However, following the famines of the 1990s, the state had no choice but to allow market activity to develop. Under the third Kim markets have continued to grow.
“There are now more than 400 established, state-sanctioned markets in North Korea,” said Fifield. “That’s more than double the number that existed when Kim Jong Un took over at the end of 2011.”
A side effect of this nascent market economy has been the emergence of new elites in the purported “classless” society. Fifield described the development of a capital within the capital—“Pyonghattan”—where newfound elites purchase clothes from western retailers and undergo plastic surgery for their eyelids.
Abrahamian concurred, noting that Kim Jong Un made sure to coddle this upper middle and upper class in Pyongyang. "The old way of doing that under Kim Jong Il and his father, Kim Il Sung, was very much through a loyalty and gift economy," Abrahamian said. "Money was not necessary in the old North Korea. Now it is. You do need it to get your daily necessities, and if you’re lucky enough, the products [from the “outside world”] help you to have a more pleasurable life through the market.”
At the other end of the spectrum, North Koreans turn to the markets not out of entrepreneurial zeal, but out of a need to survive. As an example, Fifield described meeting a mother and daughter living near the border with China. The mother took her daughter out of school in order to raise pigs and make tofu. Before dawn, they trekked into the mountains to tend crops of corn. It was a back-breaking existence. "If they were lucky, they made enough money each day to buy food for themselves," Fifield said. "Many days, they did all this to break even."
Andray Abrahamian responds to a question from the audience.
A smart tyrant not to be underestimated
The panel continued to focus on the man currently at the helm in North Korea.
“When I returned for my second go at covering the Koreas, I wanted to figure out how he’d done it," said Fifield. "How had this podgy young upstart with no qualifications other than being born into this family managed to take control of this regime…? How had he managed to keep intact this anachronistic system that should have died years, even decades, before?”
Fifield emphasized that her comments did not equate to admiration for Kim Jong Un. “He’s a tyrant,” she reminded the room. “But he’s a smart tyrant who’s been operating in a calculating way. To treat him as a joke or a madman is to underestimate the threat of him.”
“Kim Jong Un has not allowed these markets to flourish because he cares about the people and their wellbeing,” Fifield continued. “He has demonstrated time and time again that he doesn’t care at all about the people.”
“There’s only one thing he cares about and that is staying in power.”
Demick cautioned further against over-estimating the positive impact of market development on life in North Korea. “The people Anna interviewed for her groundbreaking series in 2017 in The Washington Post were disgusted with the system,” said Demick. “With the income inequality, with the corruption, with the controls.”
“For them, what’s the worst thing about North Korea? Simply being born there.”
The panelists participated in a lively audience Q & A.
A celebration of journalism
The Shorenstein Journalism Award, which carries a cash prize of $10,000, recognizes accomplished journalists committed to critical reporting on and exploring the complexities of Asia through their writing. It alternates between honoring recipients from the West, who mainly address American audiences, and recipients from Asia, who pave the way for freedom of the press in their countries. Established in 2002, the award honors the legacy of APARC benefactor Mr. Walter H. Shorenstein. A visionary businessman, philanthropist, and champion of Asian-American relations, Shorenstein was dedicated to promoting excellence in journalism and a deeper understanding of Asia.
While the reporting of each year's recipient focuses on different regions and areas of interest, the award consistently recognizes quality journalism. In his welcome remarks, panel chair Yong Suk Lee stated, “In the face of current attacks on journalists and on the truth in the United States and the world, [Shorenstein APARC is] even more committed to excellence in journalism, and to defending independent and free media."
Fifield’s co-panelists spoke at length about how deserving she was of the award. Before their first meeting in Seoul, Abrahamian confessed to harboring skepticism about Fifield. “I had read some of her work before and knew she had analytical chops, but thought to myself that journalists are always fighting for the next scoop.” However, after talking to Fifield for only a few minutes, Abrahamian readily dropped his guard. “I told myself, 'This is a special journalist; she's got something.’"
A previous recipient of the Shorenstein Journalism Award herself, Demick was equally enthusiastic in her praise of Fifield. “For the last four years, [Anna] had owned the North Korea story like no other journalist I’ve met, including myself.”
Fifield was presented with the Shorenstein award and prize at a private evening ceremony.
Watch Fifield’s keynote speech below. An audio version is availalbe on our SoundCloud channel.
The evidentiary weight of North Korean defectors’ testimony depicting crimes against humanity has drawn considerable attention from the international community in recent years. Despite the ramped-up attention to North Korean human rights, what remains unexamined is the rise of the transnational advocacy network which drew attention to the issue in the first place. In their new book, North Korean Human Rights: Activists and Networks, Andrew Yeo and Danielle Chubb lead a team of scholars in tracing the emergence and evolution of North Korean human rights activism. Together they challenge existing conceptions of transnational advocacy, how they operate, and why they provoke a response from even the most recalcitrant regimes. In this event, Professor Yeo draws particular attention to the politics of North Korean human rights in both domestic and international contexts. He explains the relevance and importance of human rights even as the diplomatic environment on the Korean Peninsula shifts from pressure towards engagement.
Philippines Conference Room
Encina Hall, 3rd Floor
616 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305