Incoming Stanford freshmen will be reading three books on ethics and war this summer recommended by Scott D. Sagan. Here they are, along with other suggestions from CISAC researchers for summer reading on international affairs, technology, and security.

Jason R. Armagost Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State, by Garry Wills

Edward Blandford Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World, by Jill Jonnes

Martha Crenshaw In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin, by Erik Larson

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, by David Fromkin

Lynn Eden Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, by Richard J. Evans

Katherine D. Marvel Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty,
by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo

Scott D. Sagan Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, by S.C. Gwynne

“Three Books” Freshmen Reading

Selected by Scott Sagan, to "help our students evaluate when war is justified, how to fight justly the wars that do occur, and how best to manage the aftermath of war."

March, by Geraldine Brooks. A novel of the U.S. Civil War

The Violence of Peace: America's Wars in the Age of Obama, by Stephen Carter. An analysis of the current wars through the lens of just war theory

One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, by Nathaniel Fick. A young officer's memoir of Afghanistan and Iraq

"This is my way: I invite unto Allah with sure knowledge, I and whoever follows me."

It was with this these words, quoted from the Qur'an, that King Mohammed VI ended his speech on 17 June, urging Morocco's people to vote for his new constitution project in a referendum to be held on 1 July.

It takes quite a nerve to identify oneself with the prophet Muhammad and compare a political reform to Allah's path. It's also a paradox, coming from a monarch who is supposedly on the point of renouncing his own divine right.

According to Morocco's new draft constitution, the king won't be "sacred" any more. Instead, the people will owe him respect and tawqeer – an Arabic term which means something between reverence and adoration. So how much of a paradigm change is it really?

Although the US says it is "encouraged" by the draft constitution, this is not particularly good news for the monarchy. This mild praise from a rather unknown state department spokesperson during a routine press briefing demonstrates, if anything, the cautious retreat of US diplomacy.

It's a far cry from Hillary Clinton's heartfelt declaration on 30 March, commending Morocco for "achieving democratic change [in a way that is] a model for other countries in the region". At the time it was useful to highlight the difference between a ruthless US-bombed colonel slaughtering his people, and a nice US-backed monarch reacting to street protests by promising "comprehensive constitutional reform". But since then, the situation has changed.

After taking down two dictators, Arab revolutionary fever was tempered by war in Libya and the bloody repression in Syria. Inside Morocco, the 20 February youth-led, pro-democracy movement has petered out. Because it couldn't produce leaders, centralised structures and a focused, unifying claim, it lost momentum and finally proved harmless to the monarchy.

Since the king had already promised a new constitution, he had to deliver it. But with the pressure gone, the final draft is merely a democratic window dressing: each time a clause appears to bring genuine progress, another one seriously tones it down – or revokes it altogether.

To comply with democratic norms, the new constitution was supposed to curtail the king's prerogatives and to empower the elected prime minister, but the only real change is a semantic one. The prime minister will henceforth be called "chief of government" (CoG), though he's still bound hand and foot to the royal palace, not even controlling his own cabinet.

The king will still appoint and dismiss the ministers at will. At best, the CoG can "propose" ministers for nomination or "require" that they be dismissed, but the king is not bound to accept. On the other hand, the king can reshuffle government whenever he wants. He will now have to "consult" the CoG – but again, he's not bound to take his opinion into account.

To cut a long story short, the Moroccan king's absolutism, just like his "sacredness", has not gone. As for separation of powers, the king said it has been "bolstered" – and yet he still presides over the high council of magistrates, thus tightly controlling the courts of justice.

Optimists may see officialisation of the Tamazight (Berber) language as recognition of Morocco's ethnic and cultural diversity, but beyond the statement of intent, legislation is yet to be crafted. Morocco's regime has a history of undelivered promises on that matter. King Mohammed had already committed to implement Tamazight in the schools' curriculum in 2001, though little progress has been made since then.

In Morocco, practice often contradicts theory

In Morocco, practice often contradicts theory. For instance, the palace-promoted new supreme law "forbids" (again, in the absence of specific legislation) conflicts of interest by politicians and the abuse of dominant positions. Yet one can doubt the sincerity of this provision, knowing that the king's private holding company outrageously dominates Morocco's economy, to the extent that its global revenue equals 8% of GDP.

The main reason for viewing this new constitution with suspicion is that it is being validated at a breakneck pace. Political parties were given less than 24 hours to review the draft before the king threw it to referendum.

The 20 February activists immediately organised nationwide protests against what they saw as an "imposed" constitution. Unlike what happened in May, demonstrations were not brutally broken up by police but instead the authorities hired swarms of thugs who thronged the streets, looking for a fight with pro-democracy protesters and bawling that Mohammed VI is their "only king". The mood is turning ugly.

Meanwhile, the referendum campaign is obviously crooked. The state-controlled mosques are mobilised to preach the constitution's virtues – which is evidently unfair. As for public TV, the Election Watch Collective had asked, alongside Mamfakinch website (the online extension of the 20 February movement) for a fair and balanced airtime-sharing between "yes" and "no" arguments. But the government turned a deaf ear. A few days before the king's speech, an administrative decree was issued on the sly, splitting airtime only between officially recognised, mainly palace-subservient political parties and trade unions.

Because of the ongoing mass propaganda, there is no doubt that the outcome of the referendum will be "yes". But the government also needs to persuade large numbers of Moroccans to vote. If the participation rate is below 80%, the monarchy's motto of "unanimous popular support" will become harder to assert.

This is why the local authorities are preparing to transport armies of citizens to polling stations, even though it's illegal. For its part, the 20 February movement is calling for a boycott and preparing to video all suspicious "troop movements" during referendum day. A website has been created specially for that purpose with a new battle cry: Mamsawtinch, ou mamfakinch! – "We won't vote, and we won't give up!"

In reaction to the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Khan for allegations of rape in May, Kavita Ramdas and Christine Ahn argue in a piece for Foreign Policy in Focus that gender bias is embedded in the global policies and practices at the IMF, which unfairly target women. Kavita Ramdas is the president and CEO of the Global Fund for Women and a visiting scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

As Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the world’s most powerful financial institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), spends a few nights in Rikers Island prison awaiting a hearing, the world is learning a lot about his history of treating women as expendable sex objects. Strauss-Kahn has been charged with rape and forced imprisonment of a 32-year-old Guinean hotel worker at a $3,000-a-night luxury hotel in New York.

While the media dissects the attempted rape of a young African woman and begins to dig out more information about Strauss-Kahn’s past indiscretions, we couldn’t help but see this situation through the feminist lens of the “personal is political.” 

For many in the developing world, the IMF and its draconian policies of structural adjustment have systematically “raped” the earth and the poor and violated the human rights of women. It appears that the personal disregard and disrespect for women demonstrated by the man at the highest levels of leadership within the IMF is quite consistent with the gender bias inherent in the IMF’s institutional policies and practice.

Systematic Violation of Women’s Human Rights

The IMF and the World Bank were established in the aftermath of World War II to promote international trade and monetary cooperation by giving governments loans in times of severe budget crises. Although 184 countries make up the IMF’s membership, only five countries—France, Germany, Japan, Britain, and the United States—control 50 percent of the votes, which are allocated according to each country’s contribution.

The IMF has earned its villainous reputation in the Global South because in exchange for loans, governments must accept a range of austerity measures known as structural adjustment programs (SAPs). A typical IMF package encourages export promotion over local production for local consumption. It also pushes for lower tariffs and cuts in government programs such as welfare and education. Instead of reducing poverty, the trillion dollars of loans issued by the IMF have deepened poverty, especially for women who make up 70 percent of the world’s poor.

IMF-mandated government cutbacks in social welfare spending have often been achieved by cutting public sector jobs, which disproportionately impact women. Women hold most of the lower-skilled public sector jobs, and they are often the first to be cut. Also, as social programs like caregiving are slashed, women are expected to take on additional domestic responsibilities that further limit their access to education or other jobs.

In exchange for borrowing $5.8 billion from the IMF and World Bank, Tanzania agreed to impose fees for health services, which led to fewer women seeking hospital deliveries or post-natal care and naturally, higher rates of maternal death.  In Zambia, the imposition of SAPs led to a significant drop in girls’ enrollment in schools and a spike in “survival or subsistence sex” as a way for young women to continue their educations.

But IMF’s austerity measures don’t just apply to poor African countries. In 1997, South Korea received $57 billion in loans in exchange for IMF conditionalities that forced the government to introduce “labor market flexibility,” which outlined steps for the government to compress wages, fire “surplus workers,” and cut government spending on programs and infrastructure. When the financial crisis hit, seven Korean women were laid off for every one Korean man. In a sick twist, the Korean government launched a "get your husband energized" campaign encouraging women to support depressed male partners while they cooked, cleaned, and cared for everyone.

Nearly 15 years later, the scenario is grim for South Korean workers, especially women. Of all OECD countries, Koreans work the longest hours: 90% of men and 77% of women work over 40 hours a week.  According to economist Martin Hart-Landsberg, in 2000, 40 percent of Korean workers were irregular workers; by 2008, 60 percent worked in the informal economy. The Korean Women Working Academy reports that today 70 percent of Korean women workers are temporary laborers.

Selling Mother Earth

IMF policies have also raped the earth by dictating that governments privatize the natural resources most people depend on for their survival: water, land, forests, and fisheries. SAPs have also forced developing countries to stop growing staple foods for domestic consumption and instead focus on growing cash crops, like cut flowers and coffee for export to volatile global markets. These policies have destroyed the livelihoods of small-scale subsistence farmers, the majority of whom are women.

“IMF adjustment programs forced poor countries to abandon policies that protected their farmers and their agricultural production and markets,” says Henk Hobbelink of GRAIN, an international organization that promotes sustainable agriculture and biodiversity. "As a result, many countries became dependent on food imports, as local farmers could not compete with the subsidized products from the North. This is one of the main factors in the current food crisis, for which the IMF is directly to blame."

In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), IMF loans have paved the way for the privatization of the country’s mines by transnational corporations and local elites, which has forcibly displaced thousands of Congolese people in a context where women and girls experience obscenely high levels of sexual slavery and rape in the eastern provinces. According to Gender Action, the World Bank and IMF have made loans to the DRC to restructure the mining sector, which translates into laying off tens of thousands of workers, including women and girls who depend on the mining operations for their livelihoods. Furthermore, as the land becomes mined and privatized, women and girls responsible for gathering water and firewood must walk even further, making them more susceptible to violent crimes.

We Are Over It

Women’s rights activists around the globe are consistently dumbfounded by how such violations of women’s bodies are routinely dismissed as minor transgressions. Strauss-Kahn, one of the world’s most powerful politicians whose decisions affected millions across the globe, was known for being a “womanizer” who often forced himself on younger, junior women in subordinate positions where they were vulnerable to his far greater power, influence, and clout. Yet none of his colleagues or fellow Socialist Party members took these reports seriously, colluding in a consensus shared even by his wife that the violation of women’s bodily integrity is not in any sense a genuine violation of human rights.

Why else would the world tolerate the unearthly news that 48 Congolese women are raped every hour with deadening inaction? Eve Ensler speaks for us all when she writes, “I am over a world that could allow, has allowed, continues to allow 400,000 women, 2,300 women, or one woman to be raped anywhere, anytime of any day in the Congo. The women of Congo are over it too.”

We live in a world where millions of women don’t speak their truth, don’t tell their dark stories, don’t reveal their horror lived every day just because they were born women.  They don’t do it for the same reasons that the women in the Congo articulate – they are tired of not being heard. They are tired of men like Strauss-Kahn, powerful and in suits, believing that they can rape a black woman in a hotel room, just because they feel like it. They are tired of the police not believing them or arresting them for being sex workers. They are tired of hospitals not having rape kits. They are tired of reporting rape and being charged for adultery in Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia.

Fighting Back

For each one of them, and for those of us who have spent many years investing in the tenacity of women’s movements across the globe, the courage and gumption of the young Guinean immigrant shines like the torch held by Lady Liberty herself. This young woman makes you believe we can change this reality. She refused to be intimidated.  She stood up for herself. She fought to free herself—twice—from the violent grip of the man attacking her. She didn’t care who he was—she knew she was violated and she reported it straight to the hotel staff, who went straight to the New York police, who went straight to JFK to pluck Strauss-Kahn from his first-class Air France seat.

In a world where it often feels as though wealth and power can buy anything, the courage of a young woman and the people who stood by her took our breath away. These stubborn, ethical acts of working class people in New York City reminded us that women have the right to say “no.”  It reminded us that “no” does not mean “yes” as the Yale fraternities would have us believe, and, most importantly that no one, regardless of their position or their gender, should be above the law.  A wise woman judge further drove home the point about how critically important it is to value women’s bodies when she denied Strauss-Kahn bail citing his long history of abusing women.

Strauss-Kahn sits in his Rikers Island cell. It would be a great thing if his trial succeeds in ending the world’s tolerance for those who discriminate and abuse women. We cannot tolerate it one second longer.  We cannot tolerate it at the personal level, we must refuse to condone it at the professional level, and we must challenge it every time it we see it in the policies of global institutions like the International Monetary Fund.

The Korean Studies Program (KSP) at Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) announces that Katharina Zellweger, currently the North Korea country director for the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), will be the program’s 2011–2012 Pantech Fellow.

Zellweger joins KSP this November after five years of living in Pyongyang, where she works side-by-side with a large North Korean staff on aid and development projects. Through her SDC and earlier work, she has witnessed modest economic and social changes not visible to most North Korea observers. Her research at Shorenstein APARC will draw on her over fifteen years of humanitarian work in North Korea and explore how aid intervention can stimulate positive sustainable change there.

While heading SDC’s Pyongyang office, Zellweger has focused on sustainable agricultural production and income generation projects. She is well versed in observing and reporting on political, social, and economic trends and developments. As the Swiss government’s top official living in North Korea, Zellweger also represents her country at official meetings with North Korean leaders when the Swiss ambassador, who resides in Beijing, is unavailable.

Prior to joining the SDC, Zellweger worked for nearly thirty years at the Caritas Internationalis office in Hong Kong, the center of its international activities. She organized and led aid and development projects related to North Korea for ten years there. Her work included collaborating with the media to generate national and international awareness about North Korean humanitarian issues.

Zellweger holds an MA in international administration from the School of International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont, and a Swiss diploma in trade, commerce, and business administration. She also apprenticed with Switzerland’s national agricultural management program.

In 2006, the Vatican named Zellweger as a Dame of St. Gregory the Great, and in 2005 South Korea’s Tji Hak-soon Justice and Peace Foundation honored her with its annual award. She is an active member of the International Women’s Forum and of the Kadoorie Charitable Trust.

“No one in the world has more experience than Director Zellweger in dealing with North Korean humanitarian and development issues,” says KSP director Gi-Wook Shin. “We are delighted that she will join us to reflect on and teach about her experiences and insights gained over a lifetime of work in that troubled country.”

Established in 2004, the Pantech Fellowship for Mid-Career Professionals, generously funded by Pantech Co., Ltd., and Curitel Communications, Inc. (known as the Pantech Group), is intended to cultivate a diverse international community of scholars and professionals committed to and capable of grappling with challenges posed by developments in Korea.