On November 16, 2006, FSI convened its annual international conference, A World at Risk, devoted to systemic and human risk confronting the global community. Remarks by Stanford Provost John Etchemendy, FSI Director Coit D. Blacker, former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, and former Secretary of State George Shultz set the stage for stimulating discussions. Interactive panel sessions encouraged in-depth exploration of major issues with Stanford faculty, outside experts, and policymakers.

“When I was a child, the world was a simpler place,” stated Stanford Provost John Etchemendy. “What has changed is not the risk, but the number and complexity of problems that face the world today.” The complex challenges of the 21st century require that universities change, as well. The International Initiative, led by FSI, was launched “to identify key challenges of global importance and to contribute to their solutions by leveraging the university’s academic strength and international reach.”

Invoking Jane and Leland Stanford’s desire to educate students to become useful, contributing citizens, Etchemendy said, “We can best serve that mission today by producing graduates well-versed in the complex problems of a world at risk and willing to make the difficult choices that might lead to their solution.”

“It has been acutely apparent to us at FSI that we must actively engage a world at risk,” stated FSI director Coit D. “Chip” Blacker, “risk posed by the growing number of nuclear issues on the international agenda; the insurgency in Iraq; global poverty, hunger, and environmental degradation; the tensions of nationalism versus regionalism in Asia; infectious diseases; terrorism; and the geopolitical, financial, and ecological risks of the West’s current energy policies, especially its voracious appetite for oil.”

Introducing three Stanford luminaries, Blacker said, “One of the remarkable things about Stanford is the privilege of working with some of the outstanding intellects and statesmen of our time. Warren Christopher, William Perry, and George Shultz tower among them.”

“As Stanford University’s primary forum for the consideration of the major international issues of our time, we at FSI are dedicated to interdisciplinary research and teaching on some of the most pressing and complex problems facing the global community today.” – Coit D. “Chip” Blacker, Director, Freeman Spogli Institute“The Middle East has descended into hate, violence, and chaos,” said Warren Christopher, the nation’s 63rd secretary of state. “It really is a dangerous mess.” Discussing the Israeli incursion into Lebanon, the war in Iraq, and Iran’s regional and nuclear ambitions, he said the U.S. has aggravated these threats by “action and inaction.” Nonetheless, the U.S. remains the most influential foreign power in the region. “We must not give up on the Middle East,” he said. “We have to return to old-fashioned diplomacy with all its frustrations and delays.”

“We live in dangerous times,” stated William J. Perry, the nation’s 19th secretary of defense and an FSI senior fellow. “Last month about 1,000 of our service personnel in Iraq were killed, maimed, or wounded; the Taliban is resurging in Afghanistan; North Korea just tested a nuclear bomb; and Iran is not far behind. China’s power is rising and Russia’s democracy is falling.” As Elie Wiesel wrote, he said, “Peace is not God’s gift to its children. Peace is our gift to each other.” Comparing major security issues of 1994 to today, Perry assessed the nuclear arms race, North Korea, Iran, and Iraq. He noted that the Clinton administration had eliminated more than 10,000 nuclear weapons and urged that the work continue, because “the danger of terrorists getting a nuclear bomb is very real.”

Citing North Korea’s 2006 missile and nuclear tests, Perry said he was concerned that a robust North Korean nuclear program will stimulate a “dangerous arms race in the Pacific” and increase “the danger of a terrorist group getting a nuclear bomb.” “Iran is moving inexorably toward becoming a nuclear power,” Perry said. “We are facing new dangers,” he concluded, “and we must adjust our thinking accordingly.”

“The world has never been at a more promising moment than it is today,” said George Shultz, the nation’s 60th secretary of state. “All across the world, economic expansion is taking place. The U.S. is giving fantastic leadership to the global economy.” For Shultz, the imperative is to prevent the security challenges “from aborting all these fantastic opportunities.”

“The Middle East has descended into hate, violence, and chaos. The U.S. remains the most influential foreign power in the region. We have to return to old-fashioned diplomacy with all its frustrations and delays.” – Former Secretary of State Warren ChristopherU.S. leadership should inspire the world, Shultz said, advocating four initiatives. We should aspire to have a world with no nuclear weapons. We should take a different approach to global warning, based on the Montreal Protocols. “This is a gigantic problem we need to do something about and can do something about,” he said. We should build greater understanding of the world of Islam. We must combat rising protectionism. The postwar system reduced tariffs and quotas, promoting trade and growth. “The best defense is a good offense,” Shultz stated. “We need a lot of leadership in that arena.”

Plenary I, chaired by Chip Blacker, examined systemic risk. Elisabeth Paté-Cornell, Burton and Deedee McMurtry Professor and Chair of Management Science and Engineering, discussed how scientists measure risk, asking what can happen, what are the chances it will, and what are the consequences? “The good news is that the worst is not always the most certain,” she noted. Citing challenges of intelligence analysis, she said, “Certainty is rare; signals are imperfect; there is a tendency to focus on one possibility (groupthink) and underestimate others; and it is difficult to assess and communicate uncertainties.” “Success is not guessing in the face of uncertainties,” she said. “It is describing accurately what is known, what is unknown, and what has changed.”

Scott D. Sagan, professor of political science and director of CISAC, examined “Iran and the Collapse of the Global Non-proliferation Regime?” The crux of the issue, Sagan noted, is the emergence of two dangerous beliefs, “deterrence optimism” and “proliferation fatalism.” In Sagan’s view, too little attention has been given to why Iran seeks a nuclear weapon. Arguing that U.N. sanctions are unlikely to work and military options are problematic, Sagan said a negotiated settlement is still possible if the U.S. offers security guarantees to Iran, contingent on Tehran’s agreement to constraints on future nuclear development. As Sagan concluded, “Instead of accepting what appears inevitable, we should work to prevent the unacceptable.”

Siegfried S. Hecker, CISAC co-director, tackled the challenge of “Keeping Fissile Materials out of Terrorist Hands.” Although nuclear terrorism is an old problem, today there is easier access to nuclear materials, greater technological sophistication, and a greater proclivity toward violence. The greatest risk, he said, “is an improvised nuclear device built from stolen or diverted fissile materials.” “Given a few tens of kilograms of fissile material, essentially a grapefruit-sized chunk of plutonium,” he stated, “terrorists will be able to build and detonate an inefficient, but devastating Hiroshima- or Nagasaki-like bomb.” The most likely threat is a so-called “dirty bomb,” he said, which would be a “weapon of mass disruption, not destruction,” but still able to cause panic, contamination, and economic disruption, making risk analysis imperative to mitigate its consequences.

“We are facing new dangers and we must adjust our thinking accordingly. As President Lincoln said, ‘The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.’” – Former Secretary of Defense William J. PerryTurning to human risk, Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, addressed “Pandemic Influenza: Harbinger of Things to Come?” “The risk is one that a pandemic is going to happen,” he told a riveted audience. Comparing the great influenza of 1918 with the pandemics of 1957 and 1968, he noted that pandemics have differed in season of onset, mortality rates, and number of cases. Avian influenza has a 65 percent mortality rate and could affect 30–60 percent of the world’s 6.5 billion people, producing 1.6 billion deaths worldwide and 1.9 million deaths in the U.S. Inevitably, mutation will reduce its lethality.

“It is not a matter of if, just when and where” the pandemic will strike, said Osterholm. Noting that vaccines will not be available in numbers needed, he argued for measures to safeguard families, communities, and essential infrastructure, such as police, firefighters, and health-care workers. Just-in-time inventory practices, he said, have increased vulnerability to disruptions in food supply, transportation, equipment, and communications, making it vital to plan in earnest, now.

Plenary II, chaired by FSI deputy director Michael A. McFaul, assessed risks to humans from “Natural, National, and International Disasters.” Stephen E. Flynn, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a trade and transportation security expert, decried the “artificial firewalls between homeland and national security.” The Hart-Rudman Commission of 1998 warned of a catastrophic attack on U.S. soil, yet we did not rethink national security even after 9/11. We must approach security as a transnational issue, with no clear “domestic” and “international” lines, he urged. More than 65 percent of critical infrastructure is privately owned and has been given inadequate attention by federal authorities. Hurricane Katrina exposed the vulnerabilities. “We face more threats from acts of God than acts of man,” Flynn stated. We need to move from a concept of “security” to one of “resiliency,” he said, greatly improving our ability to withstand a man-made or natural disaster.

David G. Victor, FSI senior fellow and professor of law, addressed three faces of energy security: oil, natural gas, and climate change. Oil prices are volatile, future fields are in places difficult to do business, and the global supply infrastructure is vulnerable, posing the risk of a one- to six-month supply disruption. For Victor, who directs FSI’s Program on Energy and Sustainable Development, the big threat is less supply than a potential demand-side shock, driven by the U.S. and China. Europe relies on an unreliable Russia for 25–30 percent of its natural gas needs, making it imperative to switch to cheaper, more reliable LNG from North Africa and the Middle East. Oil and gas price volatility has driven further dependence on coal-fired plants, with dire consequences for carbon emissions. New coal plant lifetime emissions, Victor said, are equal to all historic coal emissions, making it critical to invest in advanced technology to protect the environment.

“The world has never been at a more promising moment than it is today. All across the world economic expansion is taking place. Poverty is being reduced dramatically as China and India expand, along with Brazil.” – Former Secretary of State George ShultzPeter Bergen, CNN terrorism analyst and producer of Osama bin Laden’s first television interview, offered the dinner keynote, “Successes and Failures of the War on Terrorism Since 9/11.” Assessing negatives, Bergen noted that al Qaeda continues to carry on attacks from its base in Pakistan; Afghanistan is beset by instability; more than 20 million Muslims in Europe remain dangerously un-integrated; bin Laden has not been apprehended and continues to inspire followers through terrorist attacks; Iraq is an unstable breeding ground for jihad; and anti-Americanism is on the rise. Enumerating positives, there has been no follow-on attack on the U.S.; the government has made the country safer; many Muslims have rejected jihad; plots have been foiled and suspects apprehended across the globe. Weighing whether fighting the terrorists abroad has made the U.S. safer here, Bergen was equivocal: The U.S. can identify and eliminate only so many people and cannot stay in Bagdad forever. A network of educated, dedicated terrorists remains, he warned, capable of bringing down commercial aircraft or deploying a radiological bomb.

On May 1, 2003, President Bush publicly declared an end to combat in Iraq. Four years later, the conflict had only intensified, fueled by a violent insurgency, sectarian strife, and a resurgent al-Qaeda in Iraq. More than 3,000 American servicemen and servicewomen had been killed and 790,000 Iraqi civilians were dead. What had gone so disastrously wrong? Charles Ferguson, an MIT-trained political scientist, determined to find out.

Drawing on shockingly frank interviews with U.S. government officials, military personnel, diplomats, journalists and Iraqi leaders and citizens, his first film, No End in Sight: The American Occupation of Iraq, examines comprehensively how the Bush administration constructed the Iraq war and subsequent occupation. The film won the Special Jury Prize, documentary competition, at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, as a “timely work that clearly illuminates the misguided policy decisions that have led to the catastrophic quagmire of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.”

“Overnight rendered unemployed and infuriated are 500,000 armed men,” one of many ill-advised moves that ignited resentment, desperation, and a still-raging insurgency.On May 23, the Freeman Spogli Institute hosted a special screening of the film, followed by a distinguished panel of experts. Among the film’s central themes was the failure to commit sufficient troops to maintain order, secure the borders, or protect government ministries, historic sites, or ammunition depots. The destruction of national treasures, depicted vividly, was heartbreaking.

Soon after one watershed—the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the defeat of the military—there was another watershed, characterized by widespread looting, lawlessness, and a growing feeling among Iraqis that Americans could not protect them. The film chronicles three especially fateful decisions: to halt the formation of an Iraqi interim government (as Iraqi opposition leaders felt they had been promised) and impose an American occupation instead; a wide-ranging campaign of de-Baathification—the purging of higher-level Baath Party officials who ran the civil service and even staffed many schools and hospitals; and the hasty decision to disband the Iraqi military and intelligence services.

Said Col. Paul Hughes (Ret.), “We could have used Iraqi units to clean up, build roads, and rebuild their country.” Instead, the military were told they were going to be out of work, leaving millions of Iraqis suddenly without support. The film recounts, “Overnight rendered unemployed and infuriated are 500,000 armed men,” one of many ill-advised moves that ignited resentment, desperation, and a still-raging insurgency. Ambassador Barbara Bodine recalled, “When we were first starting the reconstruction, we used to joke that there were 500 ways to do it wrong and two to three ways to do it right. What we didn’t understand is that we were going to go through all 500.”

The riveting documentary was followed by a lively panel discussion among Stanford political scientists, historians, and experts on the war in Iraq. Moderating the panel was Larry Diamond, Hoover Institution senior fellow and coordinator of the Democracy Program at FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, who called the war “one of the greatest policy tragedies in American history.” Diamond served as an advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority and wrote a book about the experience, titled %publication1%.

Writer and director Charles Ferguson noted that the shooting to inclusion ratio was 100:1 and said he will release more than 100 hours of film and 3,000 pages of transcripts as a public archive for the historical record. Col. Christopher Gibson, a 2006–07 National Security Affairs fellow at the Hoover Institution, who served in both the Gulf and Iraq wars, observed in his opening remarks, “For this to work in a republic, soldiers have to be there to take the tough questions.” Drawing on his experience during two tours of duty supervising national elections, he underscored the Iraqi people’s desire for freedom and “their deep and sincere desire for democracy.”

David Kennedy, Stanford’s Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and a 2000 Pulitzer-Prize winner, commended the film for making an important contribution to the historical record. Future historians will have to consider a number of major questions, Kennedy said, including these two: “What was the deep strategic rationale for this war and how was that rationale related to the declared reasons for going to war,” namely the now discredited claims that the regime possessed weapons of mass destruction and had verifiable links to al-Qaeda.

In a lively discussion among panelists, it was agreed that the calculus was complex and many factors converged—an Iraq believed both to be a menace and weakened by many years of sanctions under a brutal leader; a son wishing to redress the policy of the father and avenge a near assassination attempt. But the ideological factor was significant—the belief that we had the ability to effect political change in a country that would transform the character of an entire region.

The debate addressed other critical issues—could the outcome have been better had policy been better informed and more skillfully implemented? Could anything change the outcome now? Said Diamond, the only thing that could materially change the outcome now “would be to combine a military surge with a diplomatic surge,” involving the United Nations, the European Union, the United States, and a cooperative Iraqi leadership. The United States should let Iraq know we’ll leave, he stated, if Iraqi leaders fail to undertake the requisite political reconciliation and compromise. As the lively debate and discussion with more than 300 audience members ended, there was little doubt that all these questions would be debated for some time to come.

“Preparing the next generation of leaders and creating more informed elementary and secondary students means changing and improving curricula, setting higher standards, and ensuring that content is based on current research relevant to the world’s critical problems and urgent issues.” Coit “Chip” Blacker, FSI Director and Co-Chair, International Initiative

SPICE was established more than 30 years ago and serves as a bridge between FSI and elementary and secondary schools in the United States and independent schools abroad. SPICE’s original mission in 1976 was to help students understand that we live in an increasingly interdependent world that faces problems on a global scale. For 30 years, SPICE has continued to address this original mission and currently focuses its efforts primarily in three areas:

1. curriculum development for elementary and secondary schools;
2. teacher professional development; and
3. distance-learning education.

SPICE hopes to continue to educate new generations of leaders by addressing five key initiatives of The Stanford Challenge, announced by President Hennessy last fall.

Initiative on Human Health / 1

SPICE is working with the School of Medicine and the Center for Health Policy on a high school curriculum unit that focuses on HIV/AIDS. SPICE is collaborating with Drs. Seble Kassaye, David Katzenstein, and Lucy Thairu of the School of Medicine’s Division of Infectious Diseases & Geographic Medicine. Using an epidemiological framework, students will be encouraged to consider the many issues involved in the pandemic, including but not limited to poverty, gender inequality, and biomedical research and development. Two Stanford undergraduates, Jessica Zhang and Chenxing Han, are working with the physicians on this unit.

Initiative on the Environment and Sustainability / 2

SPICE recently completed a curriculum unit called 10,000 Shovels: China's Urbanization and Economic Development. 10,000 Shovels examines China’s breakneck growth through a short documentary that integrates statistics, video footage, and satellite images. The documentary, developed by Professor Karen Seto of the Center for Environmental Science and Policy, focuses on China’s Pearl River Delta region while the accompanying teacher’s guide takes a broader perspective, exploring many current environmental issues facing China. Stanford’s School of Earth Sciences is helping to promote this unit and documentary.

The International Initiative / 3

All of SPICE’s curriculum units focus on international topics. Two of SPICE’s most popular units are Inside the Kremlin: Soviet and Russian Leaders from Lenin to Putin and Democracy-Building in Afghanistan. Inside the Kremlin introduces students to key elements of Soviet and Russian history through the philosophies and legacies of six of its leaders—Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin. The unit includes (on DVD) six lectures by six FSI faculty members, including FSI director Coit D. Blacker; professors David Holloway and Gail W. Lapidus, CISAC; professor and deputy FSI director Michael A. McFaul; history professor Norman M. Naimark; and history professor Amir Eshel, Forum on Contemporary Europe.

Democracy-Building in Afghanistan is a teacher’s guide for a film called Hell of a Nation. The film’s lead advisor and SPICE’s key advisor was former CDDRL fellow J. Alexander Thier. Hell of a Nation documents the lives of two Afghans participating in the political process to develop a new constitution for Afghanistan—illustrating the “human face” of democracy-building and elucidating the complexities and difficulties of democratic construction in a divided and historically conflict-ridden nation.

Arts and Creativity Initiative / 4

Following 9/11, SPICE decided to develop a unit called Islamic Civilization and the Arts, which introduces students to various elements of Islamic civilization through a humanities approach. Lessons on art, the mosque, Arabic language and calligraphy, poetry, and music provide students with experience analyzing myriad primary source materials, such as images, audio clips, sayings of Muhammad, and excerpts from the Quran. In each lesson, students learn about the history, principles, and culture of Islam as they pertain to particular forms of art.

SPICE recently completed a new unit called Along the Silk Road, which explores the vast ancient network of cultural, economic, and technological exchange that connected East Asia to the Mediterranean. Students learn how goods, belief systems, art, music, and people traveled across such vast distances to create interdependence among disparate cultures. This was a collaboration with the Silk Road Project, the Art Institute of Chicago, Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center and Center for East Asian Studies, and the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.

The K-12 Initiative / 5

SPICE develops curriculum based on FSI scholarship, conducts teacher professional development seminars locally, nationally, and internationally, and also offers a distance-learning course called the Reischauer Scholars Program to U.S. high school students. At seminars at Stanford, FSI faculty members offer lectures to the teachers and SPICE curriculum writers give curriculum demonstrations that draw upon the content presented in the lectures. Last summer, Stanford professor Al Dien (Asian Languages) and the SPICE staff gave a workshop for 80 teachers in the Chicago Public Schools. World-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma performed at the workshop.

The Reischauer Scholars Program is a distance-learning course sponsored by SPICE. Named in honor of former ambassador to Japan Edwin O. Reischauer, a leading educator and noted scholar on Japanese history and culture, the RSP annually selects 25 exceptional high school juniors and seniors from throughout the United States to engage in an intensive study of Japan. This course provides students with a broad overview of Japanese history, literature, religion, art, politics, and economics, with a special focus on the U.S.-Japan relationship. Top scholars affiliated with the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (including Ambassador Michael H. Armacost, Professor Daniel I. Okimoto, and Professor Gi-Wook Shin), leading diplomats, and young professionals provide web-based lectures as well as engage students in online dialogue. These lectures and discussions are woven into an overall curriculum that provides students with reading materials and assignments.

SPICE has for many years focused on the initiatives that have been identified by President Hennessy to be at the core of The Stanford Challenge. By continuing to focus on these initiatives, the SPICE staff hopes to continue to make FSI scholarship accessible to a national and international audience of educators and students, with the ultimate goal of empowering a new generation of leaders with the tools needed to deal with complex problems on a global scale.

FSI’s program on global justice (PGJ), now finishing its first year, explores issues at the intersection between political values and the realities of global politics. The aim is to build conversations and research programs that integrate normative ideas—toleration, fairness, accountability, obligations, rights, representation, and the common good—into discussions about fundamental issues of global politics, including human rights, global governance, and access to such basic goods as food, shelter, clean water, education, and health care. PGJ begins from the premise that addressing these morally consequential issues will require a mix of normative reflection and attention to the best current thinking in the social sciences.

In PGJ’s first year of operation, we had several visiting fellows. Adam Hosein and Helena de Bres, both dissertation fellows from MIT, spent the year researching and writing dissertations in political philosophy on issues about global distributive justice. Larry Simon, a professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School, director of Heller School’s Sustainable International Development Programs, and associate dean of academic planning, spent the winter and spring quarters working on a book on the relevance of the work of Paulo Freire to today’s poor.

Next year we will scale up the fellowship program. Helena DeBres will stay on as a postdoctoral fellow, continuing her research on utilitarian approaches to global poverty and fair distribution. She will be joined by Avia Pasternak, an Oxford PhD writing on issues about citizens’ responsibility in wealthy democracies to address issues of injustice elsewhere. Brad McHose, a UCLA PhD, and Kirsten Oleson, a recent PhD from Stanford’s IPER program, will also be affiliated with PGJ. Thorsten Theil will be a predoctoral fellow in the fall, writing on deliberative democracy and postnational politics. And Charles Beitz, a distinguished political theorist from Princeton whose Political Theory and International Relations (1979) remains the basis for much contemporary discussion of global justice, will be visiting in the winter and spring, working on a project on human rights.

Our principal activity for this past year was a regular workshop (coordinated with Stanford’s Humanities Center) covering a wide range of themes, from corporate social responsibility to the philosophical foundations of global justice, with participation from graduate students, research fellows, and faculty from political science, philosophy, economics, education, law, literature, and anthropology. In one of the liveliest sessions, Abhijit Banerjee, MIT economist and director of MIT’s Poverty Action Lab, presented his research and reflections on the strategy of using randomized field experiments to assess aid projects in developing countries. In a seminar jointly sponsored with CDDRL, Banerjee, a self-described aid optimist, expressed doubts about contemporary understanding of the determinants of economic growth and emphasized the importance of project-specific assistance and evaluation.

Richard Locke, a political scientist from MIT’s Sloan School, presented a paper based on his research at Nike and other lead firms in global supply chains that use corporate codes of conduct in their relations with suppliers. The principal finding of Locke’s research is that such codes have not been very successful in improving compensation, working conditions, or freedom of association for workers in firms that supply products to lead firms.

Amherst political theorist Uday Mehta presented a paper contrasting ideas about peace and non-violence to a seminar jointly sponsored with CISAC. Tracing the idea of a principled commitment to non-violence to Gandhi, Mehta suggested there are important costs to that principle (perhaps it requires devaluing justice), but that there are also costs to emphasizing peace as an alternative to principled non-violence: in particular, that the more conditional commitment to non-violence may end up being very permissive about the use of force.

Stanford economist Seema Jayachandran presented research on strategies for dealing with problems of odious debt. And we had workshops on the foundations of global justice with political theorists Michael Blake, Adam Hosein, Jennifer Rubenstein, and Sebastiano Maffetone; on citizenship and immigration with legal theorist Ayelet Schachar and anthropologist John Bowen; on human rights with Chip Pitts, a human rights lawyer; and on the World Bank with Sameer Dossani, a Washington political activist.

Next year, PGJ will initiate—in conjunction with Locke and his colleagues at MIT—a project called Just Supply Chains. The premise of the project is that the globalization of production is redefining employment relations and generating the need for fundamental changes in the basic institutions governing the economy. Corporations, unions, NGOs, national governments, and even international labor, trade, and financial organizations are all searching for new ways to adjust to the new international order and ensure that workers in global supply chains have decent levels of compensation, healthy and safe workplaces, and rights of association.

The project will explore three broad strategies for achieving these goals. First, it will address corporate codes of conduct and monitoring mechanisms to enforce these codes. Today, monitoring for compliance with “private voluntary codes of conduct” is one of the principal ways both global corporations and labor rights NGOs seek to promote “fair” labor standards in global supply chains. Likewise, a number of multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) have banded together to promote a more collaborative/coordinated approach to improved labor standards. (The Joint Initiative for Workers Rights and Corporate Accountability in Turkey and the MFA Forum Project in Bangladesh are two of the best known examples.) But these initiatives, like the corporate codes, have produced very mixed results.

Second, much has been written about pro-labor administrative reforms by national governments (e.g., Dominican Republic, Argentina, Cambodia, and Brazil). But very little is known about whether these efforts are successful and, if they are, how to diffuse their success to other countries struggling with many of the same issues.

Third, there is speculation about how efforts at the ILO and WTO, joining labor standards to trade rules, might produce global improvements in compensation, work, and rights of association.

To explore these issues, the Just Supply Chains project will start next year with a series of workshops, bringing together “practitioners” engaged in these institutional experiments and scholars studying global supply chains, corporate responsibility, regulatory strategies, and normative ideas about global justice. We will examine what is already known about the conditions under which new arrangements and strategies can succeed in promoting fair wages and work hours, decent working conditions, and basic rights, including the right to organize collectively. The larger aim will be to define a research agenda animated by ideals of global justice, informed by understanding of current circumstances and social possibilities, and aimed at improving both our understanding and global well-being.

The Forum on Contemporary Europe (FCE) achieved two major goals in 2006–2007, by developing FCE into a trans-Atlantic hub for policy and academic leaders and guiding research affiliates to answer pressing questions about European Union membership. To do so the forum launched and greatly expanded research and public programs on Europe’s Eastern, Scandinavian, and Iberian regions and addressed dramatic change and instability in the west in governing coalitions and the social fabric of Europe’s traditional powers.

Forum projects addressed several important, interrelated questions. Can the EU integrate its members into a unified polity and civic society, or should it retreat to a sole project of a common market? Should and can the EU Commission form a European foreign policy? How far should Europe’s union extend—to Turkey, to the former Soviet republics, to the North African Maghreb? Answers to these questions have implications for trans-Atlantic and EU-NATO-UN relations and for postindustrial labor, immigration, and welfare policy, democratization and human rights initiatives, and regional crisis intervention. An engaging and productive year of analyzing Europe’s policy dilemmas has clarified the benefits and burdens of the emerging European model of political, social, and economic membership.

Western Europe: Elections and Uncertain Promise

On Jan. 1, 2007, Europe enlarged its union to 27 nations. As Europe extended its borders from Portugal to Bulgaria, and from Sweden to Greece, the EU Council of Ministers reiterated its commitment to shepherd seven more nations, including Turkey, to meet the Copenhagen Criteria for membership. However, elections, resignations, and new leaders in Europe’s traditional powers have clouded this optimistic vision, and the forum addressed pressing concerns along with the promise of expansion.

Four highly anticipated forum events—the French presidential election roundtable, a Europe Now: Integration, Society, and Islam in a New Europe lecture by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a Payne Lecture by Ian McEwan, and an address by German Ambassador Klaus Scharioth—raised issues for all forum programs. Throughout the year, the forum invited a spectrum of research centers to co-sponsor its events, including CISAC, CDDRL, the Program on Global Justice, the Woods Institute, the France-Stanford Center, Humanities Center, Abbasi Program on Islamic Studies, Mediterranean Forum, Stanford Law School, and the Graduate School of Business.

On prospects for integrating Europe’s polity and society, Cohn-Bendit and McEwan spoke on separate occasions to overflow FSI audiences. Cohn-Bendit, head of the European Parliament Greens/New Alliance party, noted the diverse political cultures in Western and Eastern Europe, as well as the region’s significant Muslim community, and envisioned the EU as the institution to create a polity governed federally and based nevertheless on commonly agreed upon European values. McEwan, delivering a preview of a work to be published soon, characterized post-9/11 Western modernity by tracing a history of fundamentalism since the origin of the Christian West. Communalism and exclusive claims to truth, in McEwan’s reading, are organic to the West and may plague the rationalizing project of a new Europe. Scharioth discussed German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ambition to revive a European constitution. Merkel, the first German post-war leader to have been a citizen of the GDR, sees integration not as an option but as a necessity after 1989 and is brokering with a group of European partners to carry the project forward. The chancellor may gain support from new French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who proposes to move forward by avoiding popular referenda in favor of parliamentary treaties.

On post-election France, five affiliated researchers from Stanford and UC Berkeley, representing different disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, joined for a roundtable discussion of the conduct and consequences of the French presidential election. Speaking to a standing-room-only audience, the panel debated voting patterns and the future of the main parties and offered an insider’s early look at where France is headed and the implications of the Sarkozy presidency for Francophone, EU, and trans-Atlantic relations.

France, of course, is one of the last of Europe’s major powers to elect a leader with no personal memory of World War II. Sarkozy, like Merkel, Blair, and Zapatero, also held government posts during Europe’s paralysis in the Balkan genocide. The boast that the EU eliminated war from Europe may therefore be increasingly less compelling for Europe’s new generation of leaders. Without articulating the origins of his policy, this new French president makes it difficult to divine his view of Europe. It has been noted that Sarkozy, in his inaugural speech, declared that “France is back in Europe”; however he confused both sides of the Atlantic on what “in Europe” means to him by categorically rejecting the EU Commission’s commitment to pursue Turkish accession. It remains to be explained how he understands what France is in a European polity and economy, who the French are in a post-colonial immigrant society, and how France will position itself as both a global actor and a trans-Atlantic partner.

The forum planned the faculty roundtable as the first pillar of a multi-year study of European elections, to continue in 2007–2008 with a major address on reform at the heart of European political culture. Next year, the forum will host an address by the president of France’s École Normale Supérieure on the vision of a new European liberalism—a political philosophy responding to European post-war socialism and U.S. neo-conservativism and labeled by some political theorists as “social liberalism.” This will coincide with programs on the United Kingdom and its run-up to elections and what could amount to a referendum on the earliest of the post-war generation governments—the Blair administration and Britain’s New Labor. Also planned is the forum’s 2007–2008 “Europe Now” lecture by Sweden’s former foreign minister Jan Eliasson, who currently serves as the U.N. special envoy for Darfur.

New Europe: Expansion and Global Reach

Finally, this author is conducting a study of European Union international intervention missions. The initiative to form a common European security and defense policy (ESDP), and to marshal member nation troops, is perhaps the greatest challenge confronting European ambition to address global issues. In 2007, the EU Council noted, “The idea that the European Union should speak with one voice in world affairs is as old as the European integration process itself.” Our study investigates case studies of EU missions in Kosovo, Congo, and Darfur, in which EU policies fluctuated between robust and tentative goals, revealing divisions on the goal of acting as one within and beyond Europe.

Walking down a side street in Shanghai’s French Concession, a partially preserved corner of that city’s gloried and turbulent past, visitors come upon an ivy-covered house that served as the headquarters for the Shanghai branch of the Communist Party in the 1940s. Here the spartan quarters of Mao’s second in command, Zhou Enlai, are carefully preserved, the narrow beds and wooden desks evoking a simpler, revolutionary China.

A short ride away, across the murky waters of the Huangpu River, monuments to the new China are being erected in what was farmland less than two decades ago. The Pudong New Area, with its clusters of highrise office towers and multi-story shopping malls, is emblematic of the rush to wealth and economic power that now drives China.

These were among the images from a visit to China by a delegation of scholars from the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center from April 8–14, 2007. Though time was short, the group managed to visit Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Beijing.

Fulfilling Shorenstein APARC’s mission to carry its work “into Asia,” the delegation met senior officials from government and business and held wide-ranging exchanges with Chinese scholars and policymakers at leading universities and research institutions. The conversation ranged from China’s development strategy to the current state of relations between China and its longtime rival and neighbor, Japan.

The delegation was led by Shorenstein APARC director and professor of sociology Gi-Wook Shin and by professor of political science Jean C. Oi, who has launched the center’s new China studies program. The group included Shorenstein distinguished fellow Ambassador Michael H. Armacost, associate director for research Daniel C. Sneider, and senior program and outreach coordinator Neeley Main. In Beijing, Freeman Spogli Institute director Coit D. Blacker joined the delegation, as did Shorenstein APARC’s Scott Rozelle.

The trip started in Shanghai, a dynamic center of finance and industry that has drawn in many Stanford graduates. State-owned enterprises such as Baosteel, one of the world’s largest steel producers, are in the midst of becoming players in the global marketplace. From Baosteel’s sprawling complex of docks, blast furnaces, and rolling mills along an estuary of the Yangtze River, products are now being dispatched around the world. In a meeting, the leadership of the Baosteel Group expressed an eagerness to tap into the educational and training opportunities offered at Stanford University.

Shanghai is not only the business capital but also a political center, rivaling Beijing. The Shanghai Institute for International Studies is an unofficial foreign relations arm of the Shanghai government. Shanghai Institute scholars are also players in national policy debate on many key issues facing China, such as relations with Taiwan, with Japan, and even with the Korean peninsula.

The scholars presented their views on a wide range of issues, from the preparations for the 17th Congress of the Communist Party this coming fall to emerging structures of regional integration in East Asia. Professor Xu Mingqi, who is also a senior leader of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, explained that China’s development strategy is shifting toward a more balanced approach. Whereas local government officials previously were pressed to meet targets for GDP growth, foreign investment, and export volume, now they must also raise employment levels, close the growing income gap, and provide social security.

Hangzhou, considered one of the most beautiful cities in China, is a two-hour drive south of Shanghai. The modern roadway passed a tableau of the suburbanization of this part of China’s countryside, with multi-story brick homes mushrooming amidst the fields. The delegation arrived at Zhejiang University, considered among the best of China’s provincial higher educational institutions and growing rapidly in size and scope.

The Shorenstein APARC delegation met with faculty members from Zhejiang’s social science departments, who briefed the delegation on their research work in areas such as distance education, international relations, Chinese history, even a school of Korean studies. Zhejiang is also the site of a new research institution, the Zhejiang Institute for Innovation (ZII), founded by Stanford engineering graduate Min Zhu, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who is determined to bring the lessons of Stanford and the valley to his home province and his undergraduate alma mater. ZII aims to foster applied research that can tie the university to the vibrant entrepreneurial culture of Zhejiang province. Shorenstein APARC researchers may soon be carrying out fieldwork in this laboratory of change, based at ZII.

Beijing, however, is still the place that matters most in China, not only in the realm of government but also when it comes to academic scholarship. The delegation met with two of Shorenstein APARC’s longtime corporate affiliates in China—PetroChina, the state-owned oil and gas giant, and the People’s Bank of China. Shorenstein APARC dined with a lively group of Chinese journalists, organized by former Stanford Knight fellow Hu Shuli, the editor of Caijing Magazine, considered China’s leading independent business publication.

The substantive task was to forge new ties with key research institutions. The current state of China’s development strategy was again on the agenda when the delegation met with senior officials from the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), formerly China’s State Planning Commission. Alongside the NDRC, the delegation met as well with the leadership of an offshoot of China’s State Council, the China Development Research Foundation, which is doing important work in promoting good governance in areas such as poverty alleviation, nutrition, and budgeting. Those conversations were echoed later in our meetings with scholars from Peking University’s School of Government.

Shorenstein APARC’s own China program, as Oi explained, is focused on understanding the tensions that arise as China grapples with the consequences of its rapid economic development. Out of the meetings in Beijing, an ongoing dialogue has begun, to be advanced this summer with a visit from a NDRC delegation and in the fall with an international conference at Stanford on China’s Growing Pains.

The delegation also engaged in frank and useful exchanges on a variety of international relations issues. We had an extended meeting with scholars and leaders of the China Reform Forum (CRF), a think-tank associated with the Communist Party’s Central Party School, the premier institution for training party leaders and officials. The CRF is credited with authoring important concepts such as the foreign policy doctrine of China’s “Peaceful Rise.” These discussions were followed by a visit and exchange with scholars from Peking University’s widely respected School of International Studies.

The scholars shared analysis of the current state of the North Korean nuclear negotiations, as well as evaluating the outcome of Chinese Premier Wen Jibao’s visit that week to Japan. Over dinner with CRF Vice Chairman Ding Kuisong, the conversation turned to the American presidential politics and the future direction of U.S. foreign policy.

Professors Blacker, Shin, and Oi also met with senior officials of Peking University, as part of an ongoing dialogue about cooperation between these two premier institutions of higher education.

 

What are the preconditions for democracy? National identity? Economic wealth? Relative economic equality? How does an unstable, illiberal democracy become a well-functioning, stable one? And what role can assistance play in a country that is transitioning to democracy?

On March 5–6, 2007, the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and The National Academies co-sponsored a conference at Stanford that opened with just such questions. The conference, Understanding Democratic Transitions and Consolidation from Case Studies: Lessons for Democracy Assistance, brought scholars on democracy and development together with democracy assistance practitioners from organizations such as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), National Endowment for Democracy, and Freedom House. Their goal: to review research and methodologies in the field of “applied democratic development.”

“Mobilize democracy as a feminist movement and you mobilize half the population worldwide. It is the same for farmers.”

Applied democratic development is a relatively new field, one that “melds insights from the academic, policy, and practitioner worlds,” according to USAID. Although democracy and governance programs have a 20-year history in U.S. foreign policy, there are few comparative analyses of the effectiveness of this programming, the various factors that interact with it, and how these factors affect each program’s likelihood of success. Recognizing the limited rigor in best-practice handbooks and in-house program evaluations, USAID turned to the academic community to help assess and improve methodologies for cross-national research—research that will ultimately provide recommendations for improving existing programs and identify optimal conditions for future ones.

Commissioned to help with this outreach, The National Academies asked scholars including CDDRL and CISAC faculty member Jeremy M. Weinstein to join a Committee on the Evaluation of USAID Democracy Assistance Programs (CEUDAP). The six-member committee will oversee an independent, third-party study on how to apply quantitative political science research to on-the-ground democracy assistance programs. In addition to ongoing committee meetings in Washington D.C., CEUDAP held a workshop on democracy and governance indicators and the Understanding Democratic Transitions and Consolidation From Case Studies conference in order to draw on the work and insight of a larger academic community.

At the end of the yearlong project, CEUDAP will have produced three field studies and a set of recommendations for USAID and other democracy assistance organizations and will incorporate the conference proceedings into the final CEUDAP report. This information will help not only democracy assistance practitioners but also policymakers weighing which programs to support, in what countries.

CDDRL director Michael A. McFaul, who co-authored Revolution in Orange: The Origins of Ukraine's Democratic Breakthrough (2006) with Anders Aslund, opened the conference with an overview of the CEUDAP project and goals for the discussion over the next two days. He also outlined CDDRL’s own research project, sponsored by the Smith Richardson Foundation, which seeks to assess all external dimensions of democratization, including European efforts as well as democracy assistance programs conducted by private actors. “We in academia have to do a better job of helping our colleagues in government understand what works and what does not,” McFaul remarked. “Democracy assistance is simply too important an enterprise to continue to do without learning from past successes and failures.”

In the first morning session, CEUDAP chair and George Mason University professor Jack Gladstone moderated a panel discussion on democratic transitions that included McFaul and CDDRL senior research scholar Terry L. Karl. Two more afternoon panels also looked at various factors in transitions. Does research support a connection between state strength and regime type? What does democratization in Germany, France, and Spain tell us about preconditions for democratic transitions? Can external actors manipulate the impact of wealth distributions, since countries with highly stratified economies have the hardest time making a transition to democracy?

Jennifer Windsor, executive director of Freedom House, a nonprofit organization that promotes democracy and political transparency, wanted to know what the discussion’s implications were for a democracy practitioner. Even in the non-applied fields of democratic development and “quality of democracy,” someone offered, researchers are often working toward a shifting target with incomplete information. Risto Volanen, state secretary in the Finnish Prime Minister’s Office, suggested changing how we frame democratization. “Democracy is a long historical process that happens in the mind of ordinary humans,” he said. “On both sides of the Atlantic, we misunderstand the condition of our democracies.”

The second morning examined procedures that work better in consolidating, rather than transitioning to, democracy—stabilizing new democracies rather than trying to “move countries from column A, undemocratic, to column B, democratic,” for example. Weinstein suggested looking at indicators of growth rather than growth itself and trying to define a “set of different transition paths we could imagine each country taking.”

In the panel that followed, CDDRL democracy program coordinator Larry Diamond and CDDRL predoctoral fellow Amichai Magen discussed combining democratic assistance with other forms of aid to promote consolidation. “Beware,” Diamond told the room. “None of this works without political will.” He draws from experience as well as research; Diamond was senior advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, perhaps one of the highest-profile experiments in democracy intervention this decade.

While participants disagreed on specific, ground-level dynamics of democratic development, a few points of consensus broadly took shape. Most people in the room —scholars, policymakers, and practitioners alike— recognized the need to have realistic expectations and to take a long view of democratization. Another area of agreement was that intervention seemed to work best in countries where internal forces are already moving. Finally, a precondition for new democracies seemed to be the development of the “democratic mind”—a democratic culture marked by a robust and engaged civil society. “Mobilize democracy as a feminist movement and you mobilize half the population worldwide,” Volanen pointed out. “It is the same for farmers.”

Kathryn Stoner, CDDRL associate director for research, moderated the first of two roundtables that concluded the conference. Seeking consensus on factors at work in democratization, many in the room realized just how elusive a precise set of guidelines for democracy assistance and intervention actually was. But there are many more months left on the CEUDAP project timetable and many more angles to come at the issue from.

“This is not physics,” Diamond said. “It’s virtually impossible to control for all forms of data.”

The 2005–06 Iraqi trial of Saddam Hussein highlighted the increasingly prominent role of “transitional justice”—the various institutional approaches taken by societies emerging from situations of mass atrocity to address abuses perpetrated in the past—and in particular the role of criminal prosecutions. But the reasons for holding such trials are not always obvious. Trials can surely lead to punishment of the perpetrators, but it is also possible to exact retribution without the formality of a trial. (History is replete with instances of revenge killings at the conclusion of violent conflicts.) And while we rely on trials, in normal times, to determine the actual guilt or innocence of accused persons, this may be less important in the mass atrocity context, at least where evidence of crimes and a leader’s responsibility for them is well-established in the public record. What functions, then, do trials in transitional justice settings advance beyond those served by extrajudicial retribution? Although such trials are justified by a range of rationales, we know little about whether the criminal prosecutions in fact promote those goals.

VICTIM-CENTERED JUSTICE

Proponents of criminal trials argue that they enable victims to confront their abusers in an official forum, a psychologically important step in the social reintegration of victim groups. But in the context of mass atrocities, only a handful of victims are likely to have an opportunity to testify. Whether trials can serve a therapeutic effect for victims who do not participate in court proceedings is understudied and unclear.

CONTRIBUTING TO PEACE AND RECONCILIATION

Criminal trials sometimes are said to contribute to peace and reconciliation in societies emerging from conflict. Particularly in conflicts with ethnic or sectarian dimensions, criminal trials focus responsibility for abuses on particular perpetrators. By individualizing guilt, trials allow victims to move beyond collective condemnation of the groups from which their abusers came, thereby enabling once-divided groups to begin to reconcile. But in view of the vast number of persons likely to have participated in crimes in a mass atrocity situation, there is little chance that all guilty individuals will be brought to justice. Whether representative or even symbolic trials can produce individualization of guilt is unclear. And the passions generated during the Saddam trial suggest that such proceedings can in some cases fuel, rather than ameliorate, ethnic group conflicts.

PROMOTING THE RULE OF THE LAW

Subjecting a former dictator to a court of law, rather than a firing squad, can reflect a transitional regime’s commitment to the rule of law. It represents the new government’s acknowledgement that the state may exercise authority over citizens solely on the basis of general rules and transparent procedures applied by neutral decision makers, and not merely based on the whims or caprice of the ruler. Particularly in trials before national courts, however, the demands of victim groups for swift and decisive retribution can create severe pressure on courts to deliver politicized outcomes, “victor’s justice,” rather than affirm the rule of law.

This last justification is less prudential than the others; holding trials is important not because of what the affected society gets, but what it is, or wants to be. But a society that elects to pursue criminal accountability to express its commitment to the value of rule of law may discover that such trials generate few, if any, short-term practical or policy benefits.

The Stanford Program on International and Cross-cultural Education (SPICE) serves as a bridge between FSI’s research centers and elementary and secondary schools throughout the United States. Over the past year, SPICE curriculum writer Rylan Sekiguchi and Joon Seok Hong (MA, East Asian Studies, 2007) have been developing a curriculum unit for secondary schools called “U.S.–South Korean Relations” in consultation with Professor Gi-Wook Shin, director of the Korean Studies Program (KSP). The KSP was formally established in 2001 at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center with the appointment of Professor Shin as the founding director. “U.S.–South Korean Relations” is the result of SPICE’s first formal collaboration with the KSP.

For more than half a century, the United States and South Korea have been close and strong allies, a relationship nurtured under war and the pursuit of common interests. Despite this long and established alliance, U.S.–South Korean relations and Korean history are not adequately taught in American secondary schools. “U.S.–South Korean Relations” seeks to fill the gap by exposing students to the four core pillars of the alliance: democracy, economic prosperity, security, and sociocultural interaction. Each pillar supports the U.S.–South Korean relationship in a different and important way.

Lesson One examines South Korea’s maturing democracy, providing students an overview of South Korean democratization and engaging them on the concept of democracy. Students also study how the U.S.–South Korean relationship affected South Korea’s democratization and vice versa. Ultimately, students consider how common political and social values serve to strengthen relations between two countries and societies.

Lesson Two introduces students to the economic aspect of the U.S.–South Korean relationship and encourages them to recognize how economic interdependence between the two countries has served to draw them closer together. Students examine modern-day trade,such as the recently concluded U.S.–South Korean Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA), and also learn about the historical role the United States played in helping South Korea industrialize after the Korean War.

Lesson Three outlines the security concerns that South Korea and the United States have shared since the Korean War and the signing of the Mutual Defense Treaty in 1953 to the recent nuclear weapons issue with North Korea. Students study the history of the U.S.–South Korean security alliance and evaluate why both Seoul and Washington have considered the alliance so important and beneficial.

Lesson Four complements the broad country-tocountry perspective of the first three lessons and encourages students to consider how the U.S.–South Korean relationship has influenced the individual lives of Koreans and Americans. Students contemplate how the cultural interactions between the two countries have influenced both societies and changed the lives of their people.

The U.S.–South Korean relationship is one of the most successful bilateral relationships in the world. SPICE hopes that the curriculum unit, “U.S.–South Korean Relations,” not only offers U.S. secondary students a broad overview of this relationship but also inspires students to enroll in college courses on Korea through programs such as the KSP.

During 2007–2008 the forum on contemporary Europe launched the second phase of its comprehensive, multi-year analysis of Europe and the EU’s global relations in the context of an expanding European Union. What began last year with analysis of political membership this year added a focus on implications of expanded membership in key areas, including social integration of immigrant communities. Forum researchers and invited scholars addressed questions central to understanding the process of European integration and areas of concern it raises. During the fall of 2007, in seminars, keynote speeches, and international conferences, Forum researchers addressed such questions as:

• What explains the electoral results of populist parties, with their nationalist and anti-immigrant platforms, gaining where they had previously remained marginal (Switzerland) and declining where they had regularly held influence (France)?
• How should OSCE member states and election monitors respond to the denial of visas for monitoring Russia’s parliamentary elections?
• What is inflaming renewed outbursts of violence in multiple urban centers? Do the riots reveal urban youth segregated by race? Compelled by fundamentalism? Or disaffected with the promised EU economic mobility?
• Do instances of violence against ethnicminorities reveal a return to a pre-modern xenophobia or an old behavior used to express a new rejection of EU integration?
• Will laws protecting historical memory, such as the Spanish act to rebury victims of Fascist forces and German and Austrian laws criminalizing holocaust denial, resolve or inflame neo-fascist parties?
• What stance can the EU take in regard to Turkey’s article 301 criminalizing historical comments as denigrating the heritage of the Turkish state?
• Does EU membership mollify or magnify cultural tensions behind separatist movements in cases such as Flanders, Catalonia, Corsica, Basque homelands, and, potentially, Kurdish regions of Turkey?

Highlights of the following fall 2007 events illustrate forum research on these vital questions.

INTERNATIONAL CONVERENCE ON ETHNICITY IN TODAY'S EUROPE

The forum joined with the Stanford Humanities Center to organize an international conference on “Ethnicity in Today’s Europe.” Amir Eshel, director of the forum, opened the conference with remarks on the growth of immigrant communities, and their increasingly widespread origins, as well as implications for security and integration. The Stanford faculty organizing committee identified and attracted the top scholars on the subject from both sides of the Atlantic, including professors Saskia Sassen (sociology, Columbia), Alec Hargreaves (French, Florida State), Leslie Adelson (German studies, Cornell), Kader Konuk (Germanic languages and literatures, Michigan), Rogers Brubaker, (sociology, UCLA), Carole Fink (history, Ohio State), Salvador Cardus Ros (sociology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), and Bassam Tibi (international relations, University of Gottingen). Panels were moderated by Stanford faculty: Helen Stacy (law school), J.P. Daughton (history), Joshua Cohen (political science, philosophy, FSI), Pavle Levi (art), and Josef Joffe (FSI).

Panelists and a large, engaged public audience convened for a screening of the award-winning film Fortress Europe and a discussion with the film-maker Zelimir Zilnik. The conference-related Presidential Lecture by Partha Chatterjee (political science, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta; anthropology, Columbia), brought a capacity audience to open the conference with a study of the historical foundations of inter-ethnic relations in post-colonial Europe. The forum’s assistant director, Roland Hsu, has invited participants to contribute to a volume he will edit and introduce on Ethnicity in Today’s Europe to be published in 2008.

FSI INTERNATIONAL CONFERNCE: FCE PANEL ON EUROPE - A CHANGING CONTINENT?

The forum invited three leading figures on EU policy to speak on the FCE panel at the FSI international conference. Engaging the theme of power and prosperity, Wolfgang Münchau, writer for the Financial Times; Monica Macovei, former justice minister, Romania; and Mark Leonard, executive director of the European Council on Foreign Relations and Open Society [Soros] Foundation, spoke on the challenge of interpreting recent EU electoral, juridical, economic, and social reforms. This panel examined economic growth in the newest member states in the East, the challenge of political and social integration in the West, and countervailing pressures for consolidating post-communist governments and transparency reforms. The European Union’s expansion to 27 member nations promises a vast Euro-zone and a stronger trans-Atlantic partner. Questions from the audience engaged the panel on what level of confidence should be placed in this promise. The dilemma over Kosovo, pending Serbian EU accession, the expansion eastward to include societies bordering former Soviet republics, the question of Turkey’s membership, as well as tightening labor markets and welfare budgets in Western Europe, led the panel and audience to anticipate with cautious optimism the potency of EU integration and foreign policy initiatives.

AN EVENING WITH ORHAN PAMUK

Forum-affiliated faculty brought such questions to a special lunch with Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk; and then joined an overflow audience event at Memorial Auditorium titled An Evening with Orhan Pamuk. The forum co-sponsored the visit by Pamuk, along with Mediterranean Studies, the Office of the Provost, and the FSI S.T. Lee lecture series.

Research and public programs on these subjects will continue at the forum in the following selected events:

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON THE TRAFFICKING OF WOMEN POST-COMMUNIST EUROPE

Designed by forum acting director Katherine Jolluck, this international conference will examine the trafficking of women for sexual slavery, a trade that has rapidly expanded since the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the USSR. The conference will bring together scholars, policy experts, and NGO analysts to discuss the issue from economic, legal, and human rights perspectives. Special attention will be devoted to strategies to combat the problem and address the needs of victimized females. Madeline Rees, head of Women’s Rights and Gender Unit, U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, former U.N. high commissioner for human rights in Bosnia, has been invited to give the keynote speech.

JAN ELIASSON: THE FUTURE OF DARFUR

The forum has invited Jan Eliasson, former Swedish foreign minister and current U.N. special envoy to Darfur, to speak on his work on behalf of the international community and the EU-African Union mission to bring peace and humanitarian relief to Darfur and its neighboring states.

KOSOVO: PROSPECTS FOLLOWING THE DECEMBER 2007 U.N. STUTS TALKS

The forum has invited multiple affiliated centers including the Center for Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies, the Department of History, and the Stanford Law School to co-sponsor a panel discussion following the December 2007 U.N.-EU deadline for status talks. Elez Biberaj, director of the Eurasia division at VOA, and Obrad Kesic, formerly at IREX and also former advisor to Yugoslav President Panic, will speak on prospects for the status of Kosovo and the efficacy of potential EU membership to mediate Kosovo-Serbian relations.