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Human Rights

Global Underdevelopment Action Fund awards six grants to projects addressing global underdevelopment

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The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University has awarded six seed grants in the first round of funding from the Global Underdevelopment Action Fund. The grants are intended to jumpstart early-stage multidisciplinary research projects that tackle persistent problems of global underdevelopment. The Action Fund, which is supported by expendable gifts from FSI donors, matching funds from the Office of the President, and FSI, grew out of the Institute's spring 2010 conference on Technology, Governance, and Global Development, which featured keynote speaker Bill Gates, together with leaders from business, government, and nonprofit organizations, the media, and the academic community, to examine novel integrative approaches to poverty alleviation and human development around the world. The Action Fund projects range across disciplines, focusing primarily on problems in developing and transitioning societies. The majority of the projects have a health dimension, reflecting the degree to which poor health outcomes mirror a country's development status.

"Stanford is uniquely placed among American universities to bring cutting edge research to bear on practical problems of development.  No other institution has lower barriers to multidisciplinary work.  The Action Fund award recipients are drawn from many different parts of the university but united in their concern for promoting development," said Stephen D. Krasner,  the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations, Senior Associate Dean of the Social Sciences at H&S, and deputy director of FSI.

Six multidisciplinary research teams led by Stanford faculty from across the university will receive a total of $236,000 in seed grants. The projects were selected by a faculty committee chaired by Stephen Krasner, with a focus on early-stage, multidisciplinary, policy-relevant research. All, projects are required to have a training component for Stanford undergraduate or graduate students.

The award-winning projects and their principal investigators are:

  • Explaining and Improving U.S. Global Health Financing
    Eran Bendavid, assistant professor of medicine and affiliate in FSI’s Center for Health Policy. Co-investigator: Rajaie Batniji, postdoctoral fellow, Department of Medicine. With a sharp divergence between justifications for global health funding and the countries and diseases to which funding is disbursed, this study will conduct a quantitative analysis of the determinants of U.S. financing for the 171 countries receiving development assistance for health in 2009. The project seeks to identify the key drivers for U.S. global health financing by country and facilitate research on how to make global health financing work better. 
  • Peasants into Democrats: Evaluating the Impact of Information on Local Governance in Mali
    James D. Fearon, professor of political science. Co-investigator and trainee: Jessica Gottlieb, PhD student in political science. Recent research suggests that enhancing voter information holds promise for increasing government accountability in new democracies. This project will undertake a field experiment in Mali, a model of an underperforming new democracy, to test the theory that information that sufficiently raises citizen voter expectations of government performance can have an important effect on governance. It will examine the impact of an intervention that provides citizens with a civics course on voter and government behavior.
  • Effects of “Best Buy Health and Nutrition Toolkit” for Improving Educational Outcomes in Rural China
    Scott Rozelle, FSI Senior Fellow. Co-investigator and trainee: Paul H. Wise, professor of pediatrics, FSI senior fellow, and Patricia Foo, MD/PhD student, economics. Studies show high levels of anemia, nearsightedness, intestinal worms, and poor health and sanitation among children in China’s rural boarding schools. This project will measure initial health and nutrition levels of students in a randomized control setting, and deploy a set of affordable and sustainable interventions in treatment schools that includes multivitamins, eyeglasses, deworming medication, and nutrition and sanitation training. The project will then assess what works and what does not by comparing improvements in academic performance in treatment and control groups. The results of this experiment are intended to inform education and nutrition policy in China at the central and provincial levels.
  • Controlling Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis: A Cooperative Agenda for China and North Korea
     Gary K. Schoolnik, professor of medicine and microbiology and immunology, and FSI senior fellow. Co-investigator: Sharon Perry, senior research scientist, Department of Medicine and FSI/CISAC. Rates of tuberculosis, a disease that thrives on poverty, malnutrition, and interrupted medical care, are now among the highest in the world in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea), elevating the risk of an epidemic of drug-resistant strains and a spread into China. This project represents a unique historical opportunity to examine the relationship between food security, malnutrition, and the epidemiology of tuberculosis in a present-day famine.

  • Political Causes of Russia’s Public Health Crisis
    Kathryn Stoner, FSI senior fellow. Co-investigator: Rajaie Batniji, postdoctoral fellow, Department of Medicine. In spite of the economic advances and increases in GDP since the collapse of communism, Russia suffers from a range of dismal public health outcomes reminiscent of a much poorer country. This study seeks to understand what role political factors play in the country’s high adult mortality rate and declining life expectancy by mining World Bank and World Health Organization data and examining how Russians access healthcare services and information

  • Factors Affecting Adoption and Ongoing Use of Improved Biomass Stoves in Karnataka and Maharashtra, India
    Frank Wolak, professor of economics and FSI senior fellow. Co-investigator: Mark C. Thurber, research scholar, FSI/Program on Energy and Sustainable Development. Burning of biomass in traditional stoves is associated with a host of ills among an estimated 2.5 billion people around the world, even though cleaner and more efficient technologies exist that could mitigate the problems. This study will examine what factors affect cooking mode choice and utilization, with the objective of developing an econometric model that is useful for efforts that encourage the adoption of improved biomass stoves. The project also seeks to offer insights on poorly understood processes of technology adoption among poor populations and to understand the magnitude of health, development, and environmental benefits that might be achievable.
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Josh Cohen signs letter on defense spending

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FSI's Joshua Cohen, Co-Editor in Chief of Boston Review and Director of CDDRL's Program on Global Justice, joined 45 other scholars and national-security experts in signing the following letter delivered to the Chairmen of the President’s Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. The letter argues that the commission should reduce the Defense Department’s budget as part of its overall strategy for deficit reduction.

FSI's Joshua Cohen, Co-Editor in Chief of Boston Review and Director of CDDRL's Program on Global Justice,  joined 45 other scholars and national-security experts in signing the following letter delivered to the Chairmen of the President’s Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. The letter argues that the commission should reduce the Defense Department’s budget as part of its overall strategy for deficit reduction.

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Workers, Wages, Womanhood and Violence

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The Pilipino American Student Union (PASU) and Stanford Asian American Activism Committee (SAAAC) are holding an event on January 13th, Thursday, at Okada Lounge from 7-8:30PM to raise awareness about human rights issues affecting migrant workers in Hong Kong. Aurora David, a Program on Human Rights / Center on Ethics in Society 2010 Human Rights Fellow, will report back on research she conducted on the conditions of migrant domestic workers, specifically sexual violence committed against these workers and policies that discourage them from speaking out. The presentation will be followed by a discussion led by SAAAC.  

Donations will be accepted for Bethune House, a shelter in Hong Kong that houses migrant workers who are victims of employer maltreatment, and physical and verbal abuses.

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Aurora David Program on Human Rights / Center on Ethics in Society 2010 Human Rights Fellow Speaker
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Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives

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Join the editors of Hope Deferred and Stanford faculty members as they explore the power of narration to make human rights claims. 

The editors will recount true stories told by Zimbabweans about losing their homes, land, livelihoods, and families as a direct result of political violence.  Panelists will discuss the editors' goals in publishing the book and the role of story-telling in raising awareness and improving human rights.

Hope Deferred is the first public event of Human Well-Being and Human Rights, a 2010/2011 series that will expore humanistic conceptions of human well-being that underlie definitions of, and policy responses to, human rights.

This event is co-sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center.

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Annie Holmes Zimbabwean writer, editor, filmmaker, and trainer Speaker
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John Lewis on keeping 'the genie in the bottle'

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With a Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives and anticipation building in Beijing for a change in leadership in 2012, domestic politics in both countries are playing a major role in the bilateral relationship. On the eve of his own milestone—his 80th birthday—John W. Lewis, one of the world’s foremost China scholars and the director of CISAC's Project on Peace and Cooperation in the Asian-Pacific Region, discussed the direction of the U.S.-China relationship, the importance of dialogue between the two powers, and the potentially rocky road ahead. Excerpts:

CISAC: The conventional wisdom seems to be that relations between the two countries are not very good and getting worse. Can you provide some context?

Lewis: There have been many, many times when the relationship has been worse. The fundamentals in U.S.-China relations, in my view, have over time gradually gotten better. Both sides recognize that there is a complementarity in their relations in the Pacific. There is a kind of synergy that is very important, and when things get bad, as they are now certainly—or not good—both sides try to keep the genie in the bottle. Several things are important: even though the Chinese think we made the Taiwan problem worse with the sale of $6.4 billion worth of advanced weapons, the Cross-Strait relationship is actually pretty good. That ingredient in our relationship with China is not a serious problem. The issues that we have are not abnormal in big power relationships.

What is so sad at this point is that the militaries on both sides—the Pentagon and the People's Liberation Army—they both want to have a serious engagement with each other. They want to have a security relationship with us, but we have these constant issues such as the South China Sea and the Yellow Sea. It changes every day, but now they say they want to put the USS George Washington in the Yellow Sea, or what the Koreans call the West Sea. It's stupid militarily and it's provocative from the Chinese point of view, and you can't defend it other than that the South Koreans want it. And from the Chinese point of view, they cannot imagine why during the calm periods with North Korea, for example, we don’t try to take advantage of that, why we don’t try to make progress in the Six-Party talks. So they see this constant set of problems that project into China that do affect U.S.-China relations. Add into that the political rhetoric in this country, the loss of jobs to China, for instance. It's a big political deal in the United States now. With China, there are endless things we could do. But politically Obama will not do it because he’s going to take a hit domestically. The anger against China is so strong in Washington, and perhaps in the rest of the country, whether it’s because of human rights or questions related to their currency exchange rate. But again, the fundamentals are quite different. They are actually pretty sound.

CISAC: China is gearing up for a major transition of power. How will this affect the relationship?

L: Now that Xi Jinping has been made vice chairman of the Central Military Commission it’s pretty clear that the jockeying is already moving in the direction [that he will succeed President Hu Jintao]. Can something happen? The Chinese always worry, as any politician would, about the next round. So they’re not going to make any mistakes, and they’re not going to do anything that gets themselves off track. They cannot back down [on foreign policy]. No one can back down against the United States or anyone else, particularly now with the Japanese. They’re going to come right at the Japanese.

CISAC: So the transition makes things more difficult?

L: Absolutely, and it’s true in the United States. Obama's looking at the election and he's going to do everything he can to move to the right and look like he’s really tough on all the things the Republicans can hammer him on. That’s going to shape how the Chinese pick their leadership in 2012. Their selection will come at about the same time as ours in 2012—the campaigns will be simultaneous—and it’s too bad. If we become very nationalistic, it’s going to look very hostile to them. And we’re going to be wagged by the Japanese and South Korean dog, and this great power, the United States, is going to look helpless to them. China is offering opportunities to solve problems and we are not prepared to take them, and they're saying, ‘are you not willing to talk to us?’?

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David Kinley discusses relationship between global finance and human rights

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On November 1, David Kinley, chair of human rights law at the University of Sydney, addressed economists, financiers, consultants, human rights activists, and students in his talk "Principle, Pragmatism or Prostitution? Speaking Human Rights to Global Finance," hosted by CDDRL and the Program on Human Rights.
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Engagement with North Korea and Opportunities for Progress on Human Rights

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Dr. Robert R. King became the Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights Issues in November 2009 following confirmation by the United States Senate.

Prior to his appointment, Ambassador King worked on Capitol Hill for 25 years – 24 of those years as Chief of Staff to Congressman Tom Lantos (D-California). Ambassador King was heavily involved in the planning and conduct of Lantos’ human rights agenda, including the establishment and supervision of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, (which recently became the Tom Lantos Congressional Human Rights Commission). Dr. King traveled with Congressman Lantos to North Korea and played a key role in the passage of the 2004 North Korean Human Rights Act. He was concurrently Staff Director of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U. S. House of Representatives (2007-2008), Democratic Staff Director of the Committee (2001-2007) and held various professional staff positions on the Committee since 1993.

Prior to his service on Capitol Hill, Ambassador King served on the National Security Council Staff as a White House Fellow during the Carter Administration. He was Assistant Director of Research and Analysis at Radio Free Europe in Munich, Germany. Ambassador King holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and has authored five books and some 40 articles on international relations.

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Ambassador Robert R. King Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights Issues Speaker
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