FSI researchers work to understand continuity and change in societies as they confront their problems and opportunities. This includes the implications of migration and human trafficking. What happens to a society when young girls exit the sex trade? How do groups moving between locations impact societies, economies, self-identity and citizenship? What are the ethnic challenges faced by an increasingly diverse European Union? From a policy perspective, scholars also work to investigate the consequences of security-related measures for society and its values.
The Europe Center reflects much of FSI’s agenda of investigating societies, serving as a forum for experts to research the cultures, religions and people of Europe. The Center sponsors several seminars and lectures, as well as visiting scholars.
Societal research also addresses issues of demography and aging, such as the social and economic challenges of providing health care for an aging population. How do older adults make decisions, and what societal tools need to be in place to ensure the resulting decisions are well-informed? FSI regularly brings in international scholars to look at these issues. They discuss how adults care for their older parents in rural China as well as the economic aspects of aging populations in China and India.
A criminal trial is likely the most significant interaction a citizen will ever have with the state; its conduct and adherence to norms of fairness bear directly on the quality of government, extent of democratic consolidation, and human rights. While theories of repression tend to focus on the political incentives to transgress against human rights, we examine a case in which the institutionalization of such violations follows an organizational logic rather than the political logic of regime survival or consolidation. We exploit a survey of the Mexican prison population and the implementation of reforms of the justice system to assess how reforms to criminal procedure reduce torture. We demonstrate that democratization produced a temporary decline in torture which then increased with the onset of the Drug War and militarization of security. Our results show that democracy alone is insufficient to restrain torture unless it is accompanied by institutionalized protections.
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Luis Rodriguez was born in Puerto Rico, where he spent most of his formative years. He studied at the University of Maryland where he studied political science and Latin American literature. Upon completing undergrad in 2014, He began a PhD at Stanford, focusing his research on issues of crime, violence, and state capacity in Latin America and using advanced quantitative methods to find creative ways of measuring these often elusive phenomena.
The dynamic game between political and business elites in both democratic and non-democratic countries has received much attention since the rise of the super-rich in global politics. How does the Chinese Communist Party manage its rising super-rich in the private sector in order to prevent state capture and stay in power? Using a mixed-method approach, this research project details how the super-rich have become a particular target of the party-state, which aims to monitor them and channel their involvement in politics in ways that minimize their potentials to capture the state and maximize their willingness to cooperate with the regime. This inquiry proposes a new perspective for understanding how China has maintained regime stability thus far with its rapid economic development, and what processes may lead to destabilization.
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Zhu Zhang is a pre-doctoral fellow at CDDRL and a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Tulane University, with a major field in comparative politics. She studies authoritarianism with particular interests in state-business relations and Chinese politics. Her dissertation book project, Wealth without Power: The Rise of Chinese Private Business Elites and Their Relationship to the Communist Party, examines how the party-state embraces its business elites while preventing them from preying on the state in autocracy. Zhu holds an M.A. in International Affairs from the Pennsylvania State University, and a B.A. in History from Shanghai Normal University.
What explains the political momentum of far right parties? I argue that the far right has broadened its base by mobilizing contingent extremists—supporters who have long held extreme beliefs, but who were inactive in more hostile political opinion climates. To test this theory, I field a priming experiment in Germany, Hungary, and France (n=4,776) to measure respondents’ willingness to identify as far right supporters when assigned to more or less ‘favorable’ information about far right party popularity through experimentally varied polls. I find strong evidence that (1) contingent extremists exist; and (2) that significantly more extremists are ‘contingent’ in voting districts where the far right is electorally weak. This suggests that extremists’ direct social environments moderate the effect of the media on their political mobilization. Moreover, I identify a minimal ‘climate of opinion’ threshold at which extremists begin to support the party openly.
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Laura Jakli is a Predoctoral Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, and a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines emerging threats to democracy, focusing on political extremism and authoritarian encroachment. Her related research examines how information networks shape migration patterns and refugee behavior. Her research appears in International Studies Quarterly, the Virginia Journal of International Law, and Democratization (Oxford University Press).
My research examines political extremism, destigmatization, and radicalization, focusing on the role of popularity cues in online media. My related research examines a broad range of threats to democratic governance, including authoritarian encroachment, ethnic prejudice in public goods allocation, and misinformation.
My dissertation won APSA's Ernst B. Haas Award for the best dissertation on European Politics. I am currently working on my book project, Engineering Extremism, with generous funding from the William F. Milton Fund at Harvard.
My published work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, Governance, International Studies Quarterly, Public Administration Review, and the Virginia Journal of International Law, along with an edited volume in Democratization (Oxford University Press). My research has been featured in KQED/NPR, The Washington Post, and VICE News.
I received my Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley in 2020. I was a Predoctoral Research Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University and the Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet. I hold a B.A. (Magna Cum Laude; Phi Beta Kappa) from Cornell University and an M.A. (with Distinction) from the University of California, Berkeley.
Julien is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Public Policy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research focuses on how technology interplays with society and international security through various topics such as nuclear technologies, energy transition, and technological risks, specifically in the Asia Pacific region and in the context of the U.S-China rivalry. A nuclear engineer by training, Julien has also worked to promote open-source and transparent scientific tools that can contribute to research in nuclear security and nuclear technologies. He is the project lead for the open-source nuclear reactor physics code ONIX (https://onix-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/latest/).
Julien was a postdoctoral fellow at the Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard’s Belfer Center from 2021 to 2022 and a nuclear security postdoctoral fellow at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) from 2019 to 2021. He was also part of the Science and Global Security research team at Princeton University from 2014 to 2019 and regularly contributes to projects with the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM). Julien holds a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Princeton University, an M.Sc. in Nuclear Science and Technology from Tsinghua University Beijing, and a Diplôme d'Ingénieur (M.Sc. and B.Sc.Eng.) from Ecole Centrale de Marseille.
Dr. Melissa Carlson is currently working with the Defense Security Cooperation Agency's Assessment, Monitoring, and Evaluation unit, where she promotes rigorous standards of measuring the effectiveness of the U.S.'s security cooperation and assistance programming. During her tenure at CISAC, she was a postdoctoral research and teaching fellow. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in international relations, comparative politics, and methodology. Dr. Carlson's primary research examines the factors that influence the variation and intensity of partnerships between governments and foreign militant groups with a focus on the recent conflicts in Iraq and Syria. Her book-style dissertation project finds that, when foreign militant groups and state armed forces share similar organizational characteristics, they are more likely to deploy forces to conduct joint combat operations and provide each other with advanced weapons systems. In other research, Dr. Carlson examines the factors that influence informal and secret security cooperation between states and how misinformation and rumors influence refugees' relationships with host governments, service providers, and smugglers. Her research has been published in the American Political Science Review, the Review of International Organizations, and International Studies Quarterly, among other outlets. Outside of academia, Dr. Carlson has worked as a consultant for the International Organization for Migration's Iraq and Jordan Missions.
The Stanford China Scholars Program (CSP) is about to launch its fifth session this fall, with 20 high school students from across the country participating in the online course. The Northeast, South, Midwest, Pacific Northwest, Texas, and California are all represented in this cohort of 10th through 12th graders. Thursday evenings, these high school students will log in and join a real-time session with a scholar from Stanford or another university to discuss an aspect of contemporary China—the U.S.–China trade war, perhaps, or the legacy of the Mao era, or internet censorship and surveillance technologies in China, or China’s efforts to combat pollution and climate change. The rest of the week is filled with readings on that theme, discussed online with classmates.
The Stanford CSP’s focus on contemporary China means that the course material is constantly changing, to keep up with the ever-shifting political landscape under the leadership of Xi and Trump. It also requires the students to engage with the idea of China as not only a thoroughly modern nation but a forward-looking one, challenging the tendency to essentialize China as an ancient civilization mired in the past. Former CSP student Angela Yang (Fall 2018) credits the online course with helping her “contextualize China’s transformation as it’s happening, which is something you wouldn’t really be able to study in any other kind of course.”
Although all of the high school students are exceptionally well prepared academically, their background knowledge on China at the beginning of the online course varies considerably. Some bring strong knowledge of international issues generally, but little specific to China; some have already studied China in some depth. A few come from Chinese families, and a third to a half of the students have been studying Chinese language for several years.
Over the past year, attention has gravitated towards the U.S.–China trade war, perhaps inevitably, and its roots and possible outcomes, as well as the PRC’s ramping up of censorship and surveillance technologies, particularly in Xinjiang. Yet overall, discussions with our guest experts and among the students are fundamentally optimistic: constructive change is possible, and the United States and China have far more to gain from peace than from conflict.
The students round out the program with an independent research paper. Students’ chosen research topics in 2018–19 were as diverse as they were. Example research papers included a discussion of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea as it applies to China’s claims in the South China Sea; the mental health of rural “left-behind” children; China’s economic expansion in Africa; rock ‘n’ roll in the democracy movement of the 1980s; the international effects of China’s restrictions on imported waste for recycling; and many others.
In synthesizing knowledge this diverse, students come to understand just how complex China and the challenges it faces are. They can no longer reduce China to simple generalizations. “The truth is that all of China’s problems aren’t just limited to numbers, statistics or graphs,” Junhee Park (CSP Spring 2018) wrote in response to a documentary film on migrant workers. “They affect everyone of us, whether we are Chinese or not.”
Anti-corruption efforts by authoritarian regimes are often assumed to be political charades or excuses to purge rivals. The common view is that meaningful corruption control involves strengthening democratic institutions, such as judicial independence and the rule of law, which autocrats are largely unwilling to do. However, I argue that successful anti-corruption reform by nondemocratic governments is more common than is widely acknowledged. Using a novel scoring system for anti-corruption efforts, I show that there have been at least nine successful reforms in autocracies in recent decades. Moreover, my research finds that in these cases autocrats did not reduce corruption through the conventional democratic approach, but instead used decidedly authoritarian methods, and often strengthened their regimes in the process. I illustrate these points by analyzing Xi Jinping’s ongoing anti-corruption campaign in China, alongside cases in authoritarian South Korea, Taiwan, and elsewhere.
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Christopher Carothers is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. His research in comparative politics focuses on East Asia, authoritarianism, and the politics of corruption, and has previously been published in the Journal of Democracy and various media outlets. He received his Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University in 2019.
I am a scholar of comparative politics and currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Contemporary China. My research is on authoritarianism and corruption control with a regional focus on East Asia—especially China, the Koreas, and Taiwan. My first book, Corruption Control in Authoritarian Regimes: Lessons from East Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2022), is about why some autocrats are motivated to curb corruption, why their efforts succeed or fail, and what the political consequences of such efforts are. I received my Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University in 2019.
My writing has been published or is forthcoming in numerous academic and policy journals, including Perspectives on Politics, Government and Opposition, the Journal of Democracy, Politics and Society, the Journal of Contemporary China, the Journal of East Asian Studies, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the China Leadership Monitor, and TheNational Interest.
Before academia, I lived and traveled in East Asia for several years, learning Chinese and Korean along the way. I worked for The Wall Street Journal Asia in Hong Kong, taught English in Xinjiang, and studied Korean in Seoul. I received my B.A. (summa cum laude), also from Harvard, in Social Studies and East Asian Studies.
Postdoctoral fellow at Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL)
SPICE’s Stanford e-Japan Manager and Instructor Waka Takahashi Brown has won the 2019 Elgin Heinz Outstanding Teacher Award for her teaching excellence with Stanford e-Japan, an online course that introduces U.S. society and culture and U.S.–Japan relations to high school students in Japan. Stanford e-Japan is currently supported by the Yanai Tadashi Foundation. Initial funding for Stanford e-Japan was provided by the U.S.-Japan Foundation. Brown will formally accept the award at a ceremony at Stanford University on December 5, 2019.
“Waka walks in the footsteps of Elgin Heinz as a key leader in educating the next generation about the U.S.–Japan relationship,” stated David Janes, Chair of the Board, EngageAsia. Janes has overseen the Elgin Heinz Outstanding Teacher Award since its inception in 2001.
EngageAsia administers the Elgin Heinz Outstanding Teacher Award, which is funded by the United States-Japan Foundation. The Award recognizes exceptional teachers who further mutual understanding between Americans and Japanese. The 2019 Award focused on the humanities and the 2020 Award is expected to focus on Japanese language. It is named in honor of Elgin Heinz for his commitment to educating students about Asia as well as for the inspiration he has provided to the field of pre-collegiate education.
Americans have witnessed repeated mass shootings. The carnage in Texas and Ohio last weekend claimed another 31 lives and has left the nation stunned and angry.
Many are demanding that members of Congress pass tougher gun-control laws; others blame mental health and violent video games for the rampant shootings.
Stanford Health Policy’s David Studdert — an expert on the public health epidemic of firearms violence — acknowledges that mass shootings are on the rise in the United States.
“It’s been a horrific weekend,” said Studdert, a professor of law at Stanford Law School and professor of medicine at Stanford School of Medicine. “Experts now generally agree that mass shootings are becoming more common — and that a common thread is disaffected young men who have access to high-caliber, high-capacity weapons.”
Both suspects in the Dayton and El Paso shootings fit this profile.
Studdert notes, however, that while mass shootings have become the public face of gun violence, they account for less than 1% of the 40,000 firearm deaths each year.
“So as a public health researcher, I do care about mass shootings and I am interested in understanding and their causes — but the focus of my ongoing research is the other 99 percent.”
Largest investment in firearms research in two decades
It’s that focus the Studdert will be pursuing in a recently-awarded $668,000 grant from the National Collaboration on Gun Violence Research. The private collaborative’s mission is to fund nonpartisan, scientific research that offers the public and policymakers a factual basis for developing fair and effective gun policies.
Studdert, Yifan Zhang, a statistician with Stanford Health Policy, and Stanford political scientist Jonathan Rodden are working with colleagues at UC Davis, Northeastern University and Erasmus University Rotterdam on the Study of Handgun Ownership and Transfer, or LongSHOT.
The team is following several million Californians over a 12-year period to better understand the causal relationship between firearm ownership and mortality. They launched in 2016 with the initial goal of assessing the risks and benefits of ownership for firearm owners.
“The implications of firearm ownership for owners is important because they usually are the ones making the decision to purchase and own,” Studdert said. “But we knew from the beginning that this was only part of the picture. The presence of a firearm in the home may also have health implications for the owners’ family members.”
In the new study, the researchers will identify the cohort of adults in California who live with firearm owners but are not themselves gun owners, and then compare their risks of mortality to a group who neither own weapons, nor live with others who do.
Surprisingly little is known about the “secondhand” effects of having guns in the home.
“Existing studies don’t differentiate between owners and non-owners within households, and that is something we have the ability to look at,” Studdert said. “And a very large proportion of non-gun-owners who are living in homes with guns are women — so this is a group that has really been understudied.”
There is already substantial evidence that a gun in the home is associated with increased risks of suicide. But it is not clear how particular subgroups, such as women who don’t own guns, are affected.
“Because our cohort is so large,” Studdert said, “we will also be able to explore whether gun ownership confers certain benefits, as gun-rights advocates often claim, such as enhanced safety in dangerous neighborhoods.”
Studdert said a better accounting of the risks and benefits that firearm ownership poses for non-owners could help inform decisions regarding gun ownership and storage, as well as policies aimed at improving gun safety.
The politics of federal funding for firearms research
The National Collaboration on Gun Violence Research is funded through private philanthropic donations. It was seeded with a $20 million gift from Arnold Ventures and intends to raise another $30 million in private funding for firearms research.
“It’s the biggest investment in firearms research since the late 1990s,” Studdert said.
Research on the impact and causes of firearm violence was dealt a huge blow in 1996 when the so-called Dickey Amendment was passed by Congress. The law has been interpreted as prohibiting the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from conducting firearms research.
Studdert said that the growth of research funding from philanthropies like the Arnold Foundation and Joyce Foundation is a welcome development, but that it will take a large and sustained investment to move the science of firearm violence forward.
“The core funder of large-scale research essentially vacated the space for 20 years,” he said. “It’s going to take some time to recover. Developing a generation of researchers with expertise will take give to 10 years. But it has to be done — the size of the social problem demands it.”
Every summer, the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program brings together international leaders who are pioneering new approaches to advance social and political change in some of the most challenging global contexts. The fellows spend three weeks living and taking classes on the Stanford campus, visiting Silicon Valley tech companies and building a network.
Representing business, government and the nonprofit sector, fellows are working on the frontlines of democratic change to combat the global rise of authoritarianism and populism. The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies spoke to five of the fellows about the impact of the Draper Hills program on their work and activism. These are their stories.
Shaili Chopra, India
Shaili Chopra, founder of SheThePeopleTv. Photo: Alice Wenner
“I run a platform called SheThePeopleTv. It's a platform for women, and it aims to share news, opinions, data and statistics through a gendered lens. Women are a critical part of democracy — from where I come, in India, we have 600 million women. That's half of the country's population. I think they must also have half of the country’s voice, which they don't.
“I think a big plus of a program like Draper Hills is that when we are all working in the general construct of democracy, we have shared problems, and we also look for shared solutions. It's very empowering to be around people who understand these situations, or have found solutions or overcame them in their countries, or are going through similar problems. You can discuss them and get a sense of solidarity and a sense of empathy.”
Wiem Zarrouk, Tunisia
Wiem Zarrouk, senior advisor to the Minister of Development, Investment and International Cooperation in Tunisia. Photo: Alice Wenner
“I’ve been working for the Tunisian government for three years as an advisor to the Minister of Development, Investment and International Cooperation. I am leading the government reforms to improve Tunisia's ranking in the World Bank Competitiveness Report - Doing Business.
“In Tunisia, we’ve set up most of our democratic institutions, and now we want to improve the business environment to attract more investment in local businesses. Eight years ago, the people went into the streets demanding more jobs. The challenge in Tunisia right now is economic, that’s why economic reforms are important to our government.
“I think the impact of the Draper Hills program will be immediate. I’ve learned a lot here about the link between development and democracies, so it really covers the scope of my work. And it's been great to learn about the theoretical side — the professors are really speaking about things that impact our daily work.”
Ujwal Thapa, Nepal
Ujwal Thapa, president of the BibekSheel Nepali youth movement. Photo: Alice Wenner
“Bibeksheel Nepali is basically a political startup. It’s a youth-led movement, and we’re focused on changing the norms and mindsets of the culture in Nepal. We work a lot with citizens to instill the values of transparency, empathy and humility because we think democracy needs to be more emotional instead of just logical. I think liberal democracy needs to be understood more in the context of humanity. So it’s an experiment that we're doing in Nepal.
“When we started with the experiment, we decided not to focus only on the state, but thought about a few more components: one is our citizens, another is the society and the third is the government. Nepal recently came out of a violent civil war, and we just built a new constitution that is much more tolerant. Transparency is another value that we want to instill, because of the long isolationist and autocratic dictatorship that has existed in the past.
“Draper Hills is bringing all of these practitioners together who are experimental and innovative. And the world needs better collaboration from people who really believe in the ideals of the 21st century, which are liberal, democratic and more humanistic. That’s one of the strongest aspects of the Draper Hills program.”
N.S. Nappinai, India
N.S. Nappinai, senior practitioner in the Supreme Court of India and Bombay High Court. Photo: Alice Wenner
“I'm a lawyer — I specialize in cyber laws. My work throughout my career has been focused on ensuring responsible technology and the use of technology to fight crime. Two years ago I was appointed by the Supreme Court of India as Amicus Curiae on a matter related to protecting against the uploading of videos and images of gang rape and child pornography online.
“Some of the social media platforms had very good reporting mechanisms, whereas it was more hidden on other platforms. So we ensured that this issue was brought to the forefront so that people know that these are things that can be reported and some action can be taken. The whole idea was that as long as you identify such content at the earliest possible time, then you help the victim that much more.
“For me, balancing victims' rights with free speech is very important. This was a big dilemma that I faced, in terms of ‘How much of what I am doing is likely to stifle free speech?’ A lot of discussions at Draper Hills have helped formulate and structure my thoughts, and it's very nice to get the perspective from people from 26 other countries.”
Hinda Bouddane, Morocco
Hinda Bouddane, the first vice president of the elected provincial council of the city of Fez. Photo: Alice Wenner
“I'm involved in women's empowerment and education for girls in Morocco. And especially for women in rural areas — they are less privileged, and many of them don't know their rights. So my fight through JA Worldwide and my activism is to empower these women and to raise awareness about their rights and the importance of education for girls.
“Education for girls is really important in fighting discrimination against women. Education empowers women to become financially independent, say no to violence, and to get engaged in the public sphere. Through that, women can be a part of the democratic process not only by voting, but also by taking part from within and running for office.
At Draper Hills, we're deepening our knowledge about topics like the rule of law, democracy and human rights, and hearing many different perspectives. And importantly, we are building a great network to connect many intelligent people from around the world, and we will work together to foster democratic values.”
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The 2019 Draper Hills Class of 2019 at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Photo: Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
FSI researchers work to understand continuity and change in societies as they confront their problems and opportunities. This includes the implications of 
Shaili Chopra, founder of SheThePeopleTv. Photo: Alice Wenner
Wiem Zarrouk, senior advisor to the Minister of Development, Investment and International Cooperation in Tunisia. Photo: Alice Wenner
Ujwal Thapa, president of the BibekSheel Nepali youth movement. Photo: Alice Wenner
N.S. Nappinai, senior practitioner in the Supreme Court of India and Bombay High Court. Photo: Alice Wenner
Hinda Bouddane, the first vice president of the elected provincial council of the city of Fez. Photo: Alice Wenner
