Maria Sjöholm
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
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Anna Lindh Visiting Scholar at The Europe Center, 2014-2015
Maria Sjöholm currently holds the position as a post-doc researcher at the Faculty of Law of Stockholm University, Sweden. She is in the process of writing a monograph reviewing the integration of women’s human rights law into regional human rights treaties, analysing the methodological and theoretical frameworks with which such rights have been incorporated into these treaties. Her previous research includes the book “Defining Rape: Emerging Obligations for States under International Law?” (Brill) and an article on the approach by the European Court of Human Rights to human trafficking. She is a member of the Committee on Feminism and International Law of the International Law Association and has taught courses on international human rights law and international criminal law at various universities in Sweden.
Governance and Corruption
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FULL VIDEO: Governance and Corruption
In an effort to create new opportunities for secondary teachers, college faculty, and students to engage with Stanford scholarship, the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE) has launched Scholars Corner. Scholars Corner will feature videos of scholars from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) discussing contemporary issues and research in their fields of expertise, reflecting FSI’s research interest in the problems, policies, and processes that cross international borders and affect lives around the world.
Each video will be accompanied by a suggested short activity and/or lesson that can be used in the classroom to help students better understand the content being discussed.
The inaugural video features Francis Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at FSI, discussing issues of governance and corruption in politics. Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues relating to questions concerning democratization, governance, and international political economy. His latest book⎯Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy⎯ published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, will be available in early fall.
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The Europe Center February 2014 Newsletter
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Recap: Pascal Lamy Lecture, “World Trade and Global Governance”
On February 10, 2014, Pascal Lamy, the former Director-General of the World Trade Organization, visited Stanford University as a special guest of The Europe Center and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. During his two-term tenure at the helm of the WTO (from 2005 to 2013), Mr. Lamy successfully guided the organization through complex changes in the regulation of international trade. Among his many achievements, he oversaw the systematic integration of developing countries into positions of political leadership in the world economic order. Prior to the WTO, Mr. Lamy served as the European Commissioner for Trade, the CEO of the French bank Crédit Lyonnais, and in the French civil service.
At Stanford, Mr. Lamy first participated in a lunchtime question and answer roundtable with students that was moderated by Stephen Stedman, Deputy Director of the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Among other topics, he spoke about the necessary mix of economic, social, and political policies that determine the efficacy of free trade as an engine of global economic growth.
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Mr. Lamy then delivered a public lecture on “World Trade and Global Governance” before an audience of over a hundred members of the Stanford community. In this talk, Mr. Lamy outlined a statement of his thinking about the future of global governance, focusing on three overarching points. First, despite some setbacks, governments and international organizations have achieved major successes in regulating the liberalization of global trade. Tariffs are on average lower than ever before, and governments did not raise tariffs during the recent financial crisis as they did during the Great Depression. Second, a new feature of the global economy is that protectionism based on economic objectives has been replaced by ‘precautionism’ based on normative prerogatives. For example, competing national perspectives on product standards such as those related to safety or labor norms thwart efforts to achieve consensus on trade regulation. Third, in order to achieve regulatory convergence, we need to bring together stakeholders from the public and private sector to build coalitions that jointly negotiate conflicts in matters of global governance. For example, the “C20-C30-C40 Coalition of the Working” that comprises countries, companies, and cities is currently striving to overcome regulatory gridlock on climate change.
We welcome you to visit our website for additional details about this event.
Save the Date: The Europe Center Lectureship on Europe and the World
Please mark your calendars for the inaugural annual lectures in this series by Adam Tooze, Barton M. Briggs Professor of History, Yale University.
Dates: April 30, May 1, and May 2, 2014
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Meet our Visiting Scholars: Manfred Nowak
In each newsletter, The Europe Center would like to introduce you to a visiting scholar or collaborator at the Center. We welcome you to visit the Center and get to know our guests.
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Manfred Nowak was awarded the UNESCO Prize for the Teaching of Human Rights in 1994 and the Bruno Kreisky Prize for Human Rights in 2007.
Workshop Schedules
The Europe Center invites you to attend the talks of speakers in the following workshop series:
Europe and the Global Economy
February 20, 2014
Alan Deardorff, John W. Sweetland Professor of International Economics & Prof. of Economics and Public Policy, University of Michigan
RSVP by Feb 19, 2014
Mar 6, 2014
Sophie Meunier, Research Scholar, Woodrow Wilson School and Co-Director, EU Program at Princeton, Princeton University
“Beggars Can’t be Choosers: The European Crisis and Chinese Direct Investment in the European Union”
RSVP by Mar 3, 2014
Mar 13, 2014
Randy Stone, Professor of Political Science, University of Rochester
RSVP by Mar 10, 2014
Apr 3, 2014
Kåre Vernby, Associate Professor, Department of Government, Uppsala University
RSVP by Mar 31, 2014
Apr 17, 2014
Mark Hallerberg, Professor of Public Management and Political Economy, Hertie School of Governance
RSVP by Apr 4, 2014
May 15, 2014
Christina Davis, Prof. of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University
RSVP by May 12, 2014
European Governance
May 22, 2014
Wolfgang Ischinger, Former German Ambassador to the U.S.; Chairman, Munich Security Conference
RSVP by May 19, 2014
May 29, 2014
Simon Hug, Professor of Political Science, University of Geneva
RSVP by May 26, 2014
The Europe Center Sponsored Events
We invite you to attend the following events sponsored or co-sponsored by The Europe Center:
March 6, 2014
“Promise and Critique of Capitalism: Changing Discourses Since the 18th Century”
Jürgen Kocka, Professor and Former President of the Social Science Research Center, Berlin
Location: Watt Room, Stanford Humanities Center
March 6 and 7, 2014
Indian Ocean Conference
“Connecting Continents: Setting an Agenda for a Historical Archaeology of the Indian Ocean World”
Location: Stanford Archaeology Center, Building 500, 488 Escondido Mall
March 31, 2014
Simon Hix, Professor of European and Comparative Politics, London School of Economics and Political Science
Political Science Comparative Politics Workshop
Location: Encina Hall West Room 400
April 15, 2014
Ulrich Wilhelm, Director General, Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation
“Assessing the Impact of the NSA Spy Scandal on American-European Relations”
The Europe Center and FSI Stanford Special Event
Location: Oksenberg Conference Room, Encina Hall
RSVP by April 10, 2014
Other Events
The Europe Center also invites you to attend the following events of interest:
February 20, 2014
Gregory Shaffer, Melvin C. Steen Professor of Law, University of Minnesota Law School
“How the WTO Shapes Regulatory Governance”
Room 185, Stanford Law School
European Entrepreneurship & Innovation @Stanford Engineering
February 24, 2014
“Switzerland and Turkey - Venture Capital and Product Design Firms”
Giuseppe Zocco, Founding Partner, Index Ventures; Emrah Yalaz, CEO, Spring Ventures
March 3, 2014
“Flanders and Sweden - Enterprise Software and VC Funds”
Lieven Vermaele, CEO, SDNsquare; Martin Hauge, Founding Partner, Creandum
March 10, 2014
“Hungary and Italy - Digital Infrastructure Startups and ‘Maker’ Movements”
Gyula Feher, CTO & Co-Founder, Ustream
Location: Hewlett 201 Auditorium, Engineering School
We welcome you to visit our website for additional details.
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The Logic of Violence in Drug Wars: Cartel-State Conflict in Mexico, Brazil and Colombia
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Why have militarized interventions to curtail violence by drug cartels had wildly divergent results? In the past six years, state crackdowns drove a nine-fold increase in cartel-state violence in Mexico, versus a two-thirds decrease in Brazil. Prevailing analyses of drug wars as a criminal subtype of insurgency provide little traction, because they elide differences in rebels’ and cartels’ aims. Cartels, I argue, fight states not to conquer territory or political control, but to coerce state actors and influence policy outcomes. The empirically predominant channel is violent corruption— threatening enforcers while negotiating bribes. A formal model reveals that greater state repression raises bribe prices, leading cartels to fight back whenever (a) corruption is sufficiently rampant, and (b) repression is insufficiently conditional on cartels’ use of violence. Variation in conditionality helps explain observed outcomes: switching to conditional repression pushed Brazilian cartels into nonviolent strategies, while Mexico’s war “without distinctions” inadvertently made fighting advantageous.
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Diamond assesses democratic crises worldwide
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In a recent seminar at Stanford University, CDDRL Director Larry Diamond addresses the question of whether or not there is an emerging global crisis of democracy. Though brazen corruption, democratic breakdown, democratic paralysis and military authoritarian rule threaten to undermine the integrity of democracy, Diamond argues that hope is not lost and that the human species today has done better with democracy than what history might predict.
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Is There an Emerging Crisis of Democracy?
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Political polarization has paralyzed the functioning of democracy in Thailand, Bangladesh, and Taiwan, where students have recently occupied the parliament building. Civil liberties and political opposition are under intensified assault by an abusive prime minister in Turkey. Indian democracy is increasingly diminished by brazen corruption and rent-seeking. Several African democracies have failed, and others are slipping. The Arab Spring has largely imploded, and Egypt is in the grip of military authoritarian rule more repressive than anything the country has seen in decades. After invading and swallowing a piece of Ukraine, Russia now poses a gathering threat to its democratic postcommunist neighbors. For the eighth consecutive year, Freedom House finds that the number of countries declining in freedom have greatly exceeded the number improving. And most of the advanced industrial democracies, including the United States, seem unable to address their long-term fiscal and other policy challenges. Is there an emerging global crisis of democracy? And if so, why?
Speaker Bio:
Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, where he directs the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Diamond also serves as the Peter E. Haas Faculty Co-Director of the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford. He is the founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and also serves as Senior Consultant (and previously was co-director) at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. During 2002-3, he served as a consultant to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has also advised and lectured to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other governmental and nongovernmental agencies dealing with governance and development. His latest book, The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World (Times Books, 2008), explores the sources of global democratic progress and stress and the prospects for future democratic expansion.
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Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Larry Diamond
CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C147
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
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ldiamond@stanford.edu
Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and Sociology
Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.
Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad. A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has edited or coedited more than fifty books, including China’s Influence and American Interests (2019, with Orville Schell), Silicon Triangle: The United States, China, Taiwan the Global Semiconductor Security (2023, with James O. Ellis Jr. and Orville Schell), and The Troubling State of India’s Democracy (2024, with Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha Mistree).
During 2002–03, Diamond served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other organizations dealing with governance and development. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq.
Among Diamond’s other edited books are Democracy in Decline?; Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab World; Will China Democratize?; and Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, all edited with Marc F. Plattner; and Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran, with Abbas Milani. With Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, he edited the series, Democracy in Developing Countries, which helped to shape a new generation of comparative study of democratic development.
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Former Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Faculty Chair, Jan Koum Israel Studies Program
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Electoral System Reform
On March 14-15, the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective at the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, held a workshop on electoral system alternatives in the United States. The workshop brought together a number of scholars of American electoral institutions, practitioners working to implement electoral reforms, and experts on electoral systems reforms in advanced democracies. The workshop examined how different electoral systems options have worked in other countries, and what the implications of similar reforms might be in the United States.
Among other things, the workshop asked:
- How might plurality elections in single-member districts in the United States skew democratic outcomes? Is there a relationship between the electoral system and the problems we see today, such as ideological and political polarization?
- What lessons might be drawn from reforms in other countries? Examples include the single-transferable vote (STV) in Ireland, the alternative vote (AV) in Australia, and mixed-member systems in Italy, Japan, and New Zealand;
- How might we go about reforming American electoral systems -- through local, state, or federal means, and through engagement with which types of political and civil service actors?
- How has ranked-choice voting (RCV) worked in local experiments in the United States, including in Minneapolis, MN; San Francisco, CA; Oakland, CA; and Cambridge, MA?
- How might electoral systems reforms interact with other proposed political reforms in the United States, including the National Popular Vote for the Electoral College, top-four primaries, and the adoption of redistricting commissions?
CONFERENCE PAPERS
Roberto D'Alimonte: Electoral Reforms ‘Italian Style’
David Farrell: The Challenge of Reforming a ‘Voter-Friendly’ Electoral System: Debates Over the Future of Ireland’s Single Transferable Vote
Arend Lijphart: Polarization and Democratization
Jack Nagel: Importing MMP to the U.S.: Possibiltiies and Choices and Ingredients Conducive to Successful (and Lasting) Electoral Reform
Benjamin Reilly: Three Distinctive Aspects of Australian Elections: Compulsory, Preferential, and Independent
Nick Stephanopoulos: Our Electoral Exceptionalism
Caroline Tolbert: Experiments in Election Reform: Voter Perceptions of Campaigns Under Preferential and Plurality Voting
Electoral System Reform in the U.S.
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Oksenberg Conference Room
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Open Budgets: The Political Economy of Transparency, Participation and Accountability
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Decisions about “who gets what, when, and how” are perhaps the most important that any government must make. So it should not be remarkable that around the world, public officials responsible for public budgeting are facing demands—from their own citizenry, other government officials, economic actors, and increasingly from international sources—to make their public financial management more transparent and their decision-making around budgets more participatory. Surprisingly, rigorous analysis of the causes and consequences of fiscal openness is thin at best. Open Budgets seeks to fill this gap in existing knowledge by answering a set of key empirical questions: How and why do improvements in fiscal transparency and participation come about? How are they sustained over time? When and how do increased fiscal transparency and participation lead to improved government responsiveness and accountability? Theoretically, it seeks to examine the relationships between fiscal openness and democracy, development and the rule of law.
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Sanjeev Khagram is the holder of the $12million endowed John Parke Young Chair in Global Political Economy at Occidental College, and also currently a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum. He was previously Professor and Director of the Center for International Development at the University of Washington, Visiting Professor at Stanford's Institute of International Studies, Wyss Visiting Professor at the Harvard Business School, and Assistant and Associate Professor at Harvard's JFK School of Government. Khagram has published widely including authoring the award winning book, "Dams and Development," co-editing the volumes "Restructuring World Politics," and, "The Transnational Studies Reader," as well as writing numerous peer reviewed articles including, "Inequality and Corruption," in the American Sociological Review and, "Future Architectures of Global Governance," in Global Governance. In the world of practice, Khagram was Deputy Secretary General of the World Commission on Dams (where he authored the widely acclaimed Final Report of the Commission), Dean of the Desmond Tutu Peace Center, and Author of the UN Secretary General's Report on the Impacts of the Global Economic Crisis in 2009. Most recently, Dr. Khagram was the Architect/Coordinator of the mullti-stakeholder Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency and Founder/Head of Innovations for Scaling Impact. He has worked with global networks, multi-stakeholder initiatives, international agencies, governments, corporations, civil society organizations, professional organizations and universities all over the world. Dr. Khagram received his BA, MA, PhD Minor and PhD all from Stanford University.
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
Sanjeev Khagram
John Parke Young Chair in Global Political Economy
Speaker
Occidental College
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