The Stanford Institute for International Studies assembled a panel of experts last night to discuss the aftermath of last month's devastating South Asian tsunami and the future of the affected region.

The speakers highlighted the scope of the international relief effort and agreed that the focus of the assistance should be on aiding nations in regaining self-sufficiency. They argued that affected countries must take a proactive role in the rebuilding process.

"The key for us is to start the reconstruction efforts in ways that do not undermine the well-being of the population," said Lizanne McBride, the director of the nonprofit International Rescue Committee and expert on Indonesian humanitarian issues.

When it comes to rebuilding countries ravaged by disaster, "the tendency for countries like the U.S. is to do it ourselves, and what we need to do is help them do it themselves," McBride said.

Eric Weiss, assistant professor of surgery and international health expert, agreed.

"One of the main things is to help bring the local people back to self-reliance," he said.

"In a lot of relief, we send people to help people who can't help themselves, but there is little focus of promoting self-sufficiency. I think that is critical to addressing these crises."

The panelists also addressed the barriers impeding the relief effort, like the political instability of the region. "Before the wave hit, one had to question the administrative capacity of the provincial government [in Indonesia]," said international relations professor Donald Emmerson.

"The governor [in one affected area] isn't giving out aid and taking charge because he is currently in prison on corruption charges."

For years, the relationship between the United States and Indonesia has been icy, some panelists noted, a fact that may have long-term effects on a sustained

aid effort.

"For us, security, logistical access, and political access are key; without these we are crippled," McBride said. "The Indonesian military are providing us with security, and rebel groups have remained quiet, but as the region stabilizes-and it will stabilize-we will probably be increasingly denied access."

Religious differences may also play a factor in the outcome of relief efforts, Emmerson added.

"There are in fact Christian aid-givers in Indonesia who say that they are here to lead by example and not to evangelize the population, but the predominately

Muslim population seems to be skeptical," he said. "I think this may pose a problem."

The panelists also argued that it will be difficult to maintain a long-term relief effort as time passes.

"The task for us is to hold attention to it," McBride said. "The hardest thing to do is to keep attention to the crisis after the cameras go away."

Donald Kennedy, University president emeritus and an environmental science and policy professor, agreed.

"Our political attention span about this sort of thing is notably short," he said. "The door won't be open for long."

This idea resonated with students in attendance as well.

"People seem to only want to do things that will make a quick impact," said freshman Aaron Berg. "There isn't a whole lot of popularity for groups or causes that pick a difficult task and try to stay with it until it is solved."

Political science professor Stephen Krasner, deputy director of the Stanford Institute for International Studies and moderator for the event, argued that this country still hasn't found an effective formula for providing humanitarian relief.

"We don't know how to do this," he said. "It isn't all about improving our political attention span. We just don't know how to do this."

For over five years the war in Chechnya has occupied a central and neuralgic place in Vladimir Putin's political agenda. In unleashing a renewed military campaign in September 1999-abrogating the cease-fire agreement that had terminated the earlier 1994-1996 war launched by then president Boris Yeltsin-President Putin sought to win American and Western acquiescence in, if not support for, Russia's military campaign by framing the conflict as a war on international terrorism.

However, far from extinguishing the conflict, or confining it within the territory of Chechnya, these policies have contributed to the spread of violence and instability far beyond the borders of the Chechen republic. Instead of pursuing strategies that would address the larger socioeconomic crisis of the predominantly Muslim regions of the Northern Caucasus, marginalize extremists, and win broad support from the population of the region, the brutality of Russian military forces and their local allies in the war in Chechnya and the repressive actions of the security services in neighboring republics have fanned the flames of hostility to Moscow and created conditions for the spread of radical Islamist ideologies and the recruitment of new adherents across the Northern Caucasus.

President Putin has treated the problems facing Russia as a product of state "weakness" and has called for strengthening Russia's unity and state power in response. Ostensibly in order to better combat terrorism, he has introduced a series of measures aimed at strengthening Russia's political unity and executive power at the expense of political pluralism, freedom of information, and civil society development. But by weakening or undermining Russia's fragile and weakly developed system of institutional checks and balances on central power, and reducing the transparency and accountability of official behavior, these policies may well be exacerbating rather than mitigating the challenges facing Russia today.

What began as a secular conflict over the political status of Chechnya has progressively been transformed into a wider struggle involving more radical fighters from other Muslim republics with an avowedly Islamist agenda that now threatens to destabilize the broader region of the Northern Caucasus. The past few years have also seen a rising tide of terrorist actions directed against local authorities and security services in other republics of the Northern Caucasus as well as against the Russian government and population more broadly, including terrorist acts aimed at targets in the city of Moscow itself.

From the dramatic seizure of some 800 hostages in a Moscow theater in October

2002, in which 129 hostages died from the effects of a lethal gas used by Russian security services in a bungled rescue operation, to the September 2004 horrific siege of an elementary school in Beslan, Southern Ossetia, in which over 300 civilians died-over half of them children-these episodes have not only challenged the official assertions that the war could be confined to Chechnya alone but have dramatized the inability of the Russian government to adequately protect the security of its population.

The inept and chaotic handling of many of these terrorist attacks has brought into stark relief the poor performance of the security services, the incompetence of local officials, serious intelligence failures, and above all widespread official corruption. In the Beslan episode, to take just one example, the siege was carried out by some thirty-two terrorists, of several different nationalities, who were apparently able to bribe their way across a series of checkpoints to enter the republic and to utilize weapons and explosives stored on the site beforehand. The local authorities and the federal security services proved incapable of coordinating their actions to control the situation, and the Moscow-appointed president of the republic proved completely inept. Indeed, the most courageous and effective actor was Ruslan Aushev, the former president of Ingushetia, a figure removed from power by Moscow for resisting pressure for more coercive policies.

The Putin government has used these events to justify a series of measures which

are ostensibly intended to more effectively combat terrorism but which appear to

have little relation to the real terrorist threat. First, it has refused to seek a political solution to the conflict in Chechnya and has deliberately sought to undermine possible negotiations or international mediation and to delegitimize potential negotiating partners by demonizing a broad array of Chechen political figures within the country and abroad as "terrorists."

Conflating Chechen resistance with international terrorism, President Putin has explicitly refused to distinguish between more moderate figures and extremists and has exaggerated their ties to international terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda.

Domestically, the Russian government has used security concerns to justify ever greater restrictions on freedom of information, on civil rights, and on the role of nongovernmental organizations, particularly those engaged in the defense of human rights. The military and the organs of law enforcement have been given an ever freer hand, rarely if ever held accountable for their abusive behavior and atrocities against civilians.

Refugee camps in the neighboring republic of Ingushetia were closed and the international non-governmental organizations providing medical care and humanitarian assistance to refugees there were compelled to depart. The mass media have largely lost their independence and editors and journalists have been dismissed or attacked for expressing critical views.

A whole series of measures aimed at further centralization of political power and the strengthening of the executive branch have eroded the already fragile elements of federalism and separation of powers in the Russian political system. The autonomy and political influence of regions and republics has been sharply reduced. Parliament, now dominated by a single pro-presidential party, no longer acts as an independent check on executive power, and liberal political parties and their leaders have been marginalized. Most recently, the popular election of regional governors was abolished in favor of their appointment by Moscow, and a discussion is now under way of bringing even local government under tighter central control by eliminating the election of mayors as well.

Moreover, a high proportion of President Putin's appointees to key positions in

the regions are drawn from the military and security services, selected for their presumed loyalty to the president but often lacking political skills or understanding of local conditions. But the substitution of appointed for elected officials does not necessarily guarantee either loyalty or competence.

In the absence of a competitive party system in which political parties help create a web of ties between the central government and local populations, Putin's centralizing measures could well widen the chasm between state and society.

This growing emphasis on centralization, unity, repression, and secrecy is arguably exacerbating rather than mitigating the problems and making state power even more dysfunctional. In Chechnya and in the broader Caucasus region the brutality as well as the corruption of Russian military and security forces and their local allies-and their extensive reliance on torture, mass roundups, indiscriminate executions, disappearances of civilians, and simple extortion-has embittered many toward Moscow and made it increasingly difficult to win "hearts and minds" and build popular support. Indeed, the lack of transparency, and the difficulty of holding Russian officials accountable for abusive behavior, has led unprecedented numbers of Russian citizens frustrated by the unresponsiveness of their own government to seek redress at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Lacking a positive agenda for ameliorating socioeconomic conditions in the Northern Caucasus, the expanding operations of security forces across the Northern Caucasus, the closure of mosques, and the wave of often indiscriminate arrests have served to drive Islam underground and facilitated the spread of extremist ideologies. Without a coherent and sustained program of economic development that would create employment, housing, and education and offer alternative opportunities to an impoverished and alienated population, particularly young males, and absent a serious effort to eliminate corruption, these trends are likely to worsen.

Russia under Putin is facing a somber future.

Coit D. Blacker, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, recently named Professor Michael McFaul as the new director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). McFaul, a reknowned specialist on the former Soviet Union, is currently associate professor of political science at Stanford as well as the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also an alumnus of Stanford University.

In appointing McFaul to lead CDDRL, Blacker expressed his confidence that the center will continue to establish itself as one of the leading research units in the United States devoted to exploring the interactions between the establishment of democracies, promoting development, and the rule of law. The center's previous director was Stephen D. Krasner, who took Ppublic service leave from Stanford in the winter of 2004 to serve as the director for policy planning at the U.S. Department of State.

Before joining the Stanford faculty in 1995, McFaul worked for two years as a senior associate for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in residence at the Moscow Carnegie Center. McFaul is also a research associate at the Center for International Security and Arms Control (CISAC) and a senior adviser to the National Democratic Institute. He serves on the board of directors of the Eurasia Foundation, Firebird Fund, International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy, Institute of Social and Political Studies, Center for Civil Society International, and Institute for Corporate Governance and Law; the steering committee for the Europe and Eurasia division of Human Rights Watch; and the editorial boards of Current History, Journal of Democracy, Demokratizatsiya, and Perspectives on European Politics and Society. He has served as a consultant for numerous companies and government agencies.

McFaul's current research interests include democratization in the post-communist world and Iran, U.S.-Russian relations, and American efforts at promoting democracy abroad. With Abbas Milani and Larry Diamond, he codirects the Hoover project on Iran.

McFaul is the author and editor of several monographs including one with Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, After the Collapse of Communism: Comparative Lessons of Transitions (Cambridge University Press, 2004). With Nikolai Petrov and Andrei Ryabov, Between Dictatorship and Democracy: Russian Post-Communist Political Reform (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2004); with James Goldgeier, Power and Purpose: American Policy toward Russia after the Cold War (Brookings Institution Press, 2003); with Timothy Colton, Popular Choice and Managed Democracy: The Russian Elections of 1999 and 2000 (Brookings Institution Press, 2003); Russia's Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin (Cornell University Press, 2001); Russia's 1996 Presidential Election: The End of Bi-Polar Politics, (Hoover Institution Press, 1997); with Tova Perlmutter, Privatization, Conversion and Enterprise Reform in Russia (Westview Press, 1995); Post-Communist Politics: Democratic Prospects in Russia and Eastern Europe (CSIS, 1993); and, with Sergei Markov, The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy: Political Parties, Programs and Profiles (Hoover Institution Press, 1993). His articles have appeared in Constitutional Political Economy, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, International Organization, International Security, Journal of Democracy, Political Science Quarterly, Post-Soviet Affairs, and World Politics.

McFaul also comments on current Russian and U.S.-Russian affairs, including articles in the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Moscow Times, New Republic, New York Times, San Jose Mercury News, Washington Post, Washington Times, and the Weekly Standard, as well as television appearances on ABC, BBC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, NBC, and PBS. During the 1995 parliamentary elections in Russia, he worked as senior consultant and commentator for CBS News. During the 1996 presidential election, 1999 parliamentary election, and 2000 presidential election in Russia, he served as a commentator and adviser for CNN. While in Moscow in 1994-95, he also coproduced and appeared in his own television program on democracy for the Russian Television Network (RTR).

McFaul was born and raised in Montana. He received his BA in international relations and Slavic languages and his MA in Slavic and East European Studies from Stanford University in 1986. He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford where he completed his PhD in international relations in 1991.