Business, government, and academic communities increasingly recognize the role that entrepreneurship and innovation play in addressing some of the world’s most complex problems. At Stanford, the new Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, also known as the d.school, takes innovative design approaches beyond the traditional disciplines of product and industrial design. There, students and faculty use design thinking to tackle difficult problems that demand interdisciplinary solutions. Research projects and classes range from building better elementary schools to enabling farmers to step out of poverty to changing how small businesses innovate.

Design thinking, a methodology that grew out of the Design Division at the School of Engineering at Stanford, has been refined over the years through programs such as Engineering 310, “Team Based Design Innovation with Corporate Partners.” At the core of Design thinking lie 1) a human-centered approach to finding solutions, 2) a strong collaborative culture that brings together multidisciplinary teams and encourages diverse perspectives, and 3) a continuous prototyping process.

In April 2007, Professor Larry Leifer, director of the Stanford Center for Design Research (CDR) and a member of the d.school, together with Philipp Skogstad, executive director of E 310, visited the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (PUJ) in Cali, Colombia. During the three-day visit, sponsored and facilitated by IOP, the Stanford University International Outreach Program (http://iop.stanford.edu/), the Stanford delegation negotiated a detailed plan to engage two teams of 5th-year students at PUJ with two Stanford master level teams on a corporate project in the E 310 program. Professors Larry Leifer and Mark Cutkosky will co-lead this nine-month international collaboration, which will start in fall 2007 and will include regular videoconferences, online collaboration, and short-term visits.

The goals of this collaboration are twofold. 1) Students and instructors at PUJ and Stanford will have an opportunity to learn from each other as they participate in E 310. For Stanford participants, it will be the first time to have a South American perspective represented in the globally distributed E 310 program. For PUJ participants, it will be an opportunity to learn more about design thinking as the university develops its own design program, allowing them to strengthen the connection between the university and industry, a bridge that traditionally has been weak across South America. 2) Both universities will be able to build upon the E 310 opportunity and apply the design thinking approach to other socially and economically useful innovations, with a particular emphasis on global challenges that have a strong impact on developing countries.

The collaboration between PUJ and Stanford is well matched with IOP’s goal of promoting new multidisciplinary curriculums that address global challenges, introduce innovative learning and teaching approaches, and take advantage of appropriate uses of information and communication technologies.

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.

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.

 

(Excerpted from Foreign Affairs, January/February 2008) The conventional explanation for Vladimir Putin’s popularity is straightforward. In the 1990s, under post-Soviet Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin, the state did not govern, the economy shrank, and the population suffered. Since 2000, under Putin, order has returned, the economy has flourished, and the average Russian is living better than ever before. As political freedom has decreased, economic growth has increased. Putin may have rolled back democratic gains, the story goes, but these were necessary sacrifices on the altar of stability and growth.

This conventional narrative is wrong, based almost entirely on a spurious correlation between autocracy and growth. The emergence of Russian democracy in the 1990s did indeed coincide with state breakdown and economic decline, but it did not cause either. The reemergence of Russian autocracy under Putin, conversely, has coincided with economic growth but not caused it (high oil prices and recovery from the transition away from communism deserve most of the credit). There is also very little evidence to suggest that Putin’s autocratic turn over the last several years has led to more effective governance than the fractious democracy of the 1990s. In fact, the reverse is much closer to the truth: To the extent that Putin’s centralization of power has had an influence on governance and economic growth at all, the effects have been negative. Whatever the apparent gains of Russia under Putin, the gains would have been greater if democracy had survived.

Bigger is not Better

The myth of Putinism is that Russians are safer, more secure, and generally living better than in the 1990s—and that Putin himself deserves the credit. The Russian state under Putin is certainly bigger than it was before. In some spheres, such as paying pensions and government salaries on time, road building, or educational spending, the state is performing better now than during the 1990s. Yet given the growth in its size and resources, what is striking is how poorly the Russian state still performs. In terms of public safety, health, corruption, and the security of property rights, Russians are actually worse off today than they were a decade ago.

Security, the most basic public good a state can provide for its population, is a central element in the myth of Putinism. In fact, the frequency of terrorist attacks in Russia has increased under Putin. The murder rate has also increased, and public health has not improved. Despite all the money in the Kremlin’s coffers, health spending averaged 6 percent of GDP from 2000 to 2005, compared with 6.4 percent from 1996 to 1999. Russia’s population has been shrinking since 1990, thanks to decreasing fertility and increasing mortality rates, but the decline has worsened since 1998. Noncommunicable diseases have become the leading cause of death (cardiovascular disease accounts for 52 percent of deaths, three times the figure for the United States), and alcoholism now accounts for 18 percent of deaths for men between the ages of 25 and 54.

In short, the data simply do not support the popular notion that by erecting autocracy Putin has built an orderly and highly capable state that is addressing and overcoming Russia’s rather formidable development problems.

A Eurasian Tiger?

The second supposed justification for Putin’s autocratic ways is that they have paved the way for Russia’s spectacular economic growth. As Putin has consolidated his authority, growth has averaged 6.7 percent. The last eight years have also seen budget surpluses, the eradication of foreign debt and the accumulation of massive hardcurrency reserves, and modest inflation so far. The stock market is booming, and foreign direct investment, although still low compared to other emerging markets, is growing rapidly. Since 2000, real disposable income has increased by more than 10 percent a year, consumer spending has skyrocketed, unemployment has fallen from 12 percent in 1999 to 6 percent in 2006, and poverty has declined from 41 percent in 1999 to 14 percent in 2006. Russians are richer today than ever before.

The correlations between democracy and economic decline in the 1990s and autocracy and economic growth in this decade provide a seemingly powerful excuse for shutting down independent television stations, canceling gubernatorial elections, and eliminating pesky human rights groups. These correlations, however, are mostly spurious.

Economic decline after the end of communism was hardly confined to Russia. It followed communism’s decline in every country throughout the region. Given the dreadful economic conditions, every postcommunist government was compelled to pursue some degree of price and trade liberalization, macroeconomic stabilization, and, eventually, privatization. During this transition, the entire region experienced economic recession and then began to recover several years after the adoption of reforms. Russia’s economy followed this same general trajectory—and would have done so under dictatorship or democracy.

Putin’s real stroke of luck came in the form of rising world oil prices. Growing autocracy inside Russia obviously did not cause the rise in oil and gas prices. If anything, the causality runs in the opposite direction: increased energy revenues allowed for the return to autocracy. With so much money from oil windfalls in the Kremlin’s coffers, Putin could crack down on or co-opt independent sources of political power; the Kremlin had fewer reasons to fear the negative economic consequences of seizing a company like Yukos and had ample resources to buy off or repress opponents in the media and civil society.

If there is any causal relationship between authoritarianism and economic growth in Russia, it is negative. Russia’s more autocratic system in the last several years has produced more corruption and less secure property rights. Asset transfers have transformed a thriving private energy sector into one that is effectively state-dominated and less efficient. Renationalization has caused declines in the performance of formerly private companies, destroyed value in Russia’s most profitable companies, and slowed investment, both foreign and domestic.

Perhaps the most telling evidence that Putin’s autocracy has hurt rather than helped Russia’s economy is provided by regional comparisons. Between 1999 and 2006, Russia ranked ninth out of the 15 post-Soviet countries in terms of average growth. Similarly, investment in Russia, at 18 percent of GDP, although stronger today than ever before, is well below the average for democracies in the region.

One can only wonder how fast Russia would have grown with a more democratic system. The strengthening of institutions of accountability—a real opposition party, genuinely independent media, a court system not beholden to Kremlin control—would have helped tame corruption and secure property rights and would thereby have encouraged more investment and growth. The Russian economy is doing well today, but it is doing well in spite of, not because of, autocracy.

Larry Diamond—Hoover Institution senior fellow, CDDRL democracy program coordinator, and former senior advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq—has just discussed causes and consequences of corruption and international efforts to control it with a room full of visiting fellows. This is not just a group of learned political scientists, however, and Diamond does not hesitate to follow a sophisticated piece of analysis with a hard-nosed, view-from-the-ground assessment. He has, for instance, just told the fellows what he thinks of a major development institution. (“I think the World Bank needs to be ripped apart and fundamentally restructured.”) He has extended the concept of a “resource curse” to include not just oil but also international assistance. (“In many countries, aid is like oil; it’s used for outside rents.”) He has recommended that institutions learn the “dance of conditionality” and exercise selectivity, choosing countries to invest in based on demonstrated performance. But the 27 fellows around the table know a thing or two about corruption. Most of them face it in their home countries; many of them have made fighting it part of their work. And almost all of their hands go up to tell Diamond that there is something he missed, or something he got right.

This year’s 27 Stanford Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development—outstanding civic, political, and economic leaders from developing democracies—were selected from more than 500 applicants to take part in the program, which FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) hosted July 30–August 17, 2007. They traveled to Stanford from 22 countries in transition, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, China, Russia, Egypt, Nigeria, Kenya, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And like their academic curriculum during the three-week program, which examines linkages among democracy, economic development, and the rule of law, their professional experiences and fields of study center on these three areas, assuring that each fellow brings a seasoned perspective to the program’s discussions.

“Should the United States promote democracy? Can the United States promote democracy?” The curriculum for the first week focused on defining the concepts of “democracy,” “development,” and the “rule of law” and identifying institutions that support democratic and market development. Using selected articles and book chapters as starting points for discussion, CDDRL Director Michael A. McFaul and Marc Plattner, National Endowment for Democracy vice-president for research and studies, began the weeklong module with an examination of what democracy is and what definition or definitions might apply to distinguish electoral democracy, liberal democracy, and competitive authoritarianism. Another question discussed was whether there was such a thing as Islamic democracy, Asian democracy, Russian democracy, or American democracy.

Faculty including Diamond, CDDRL associate director for research Kathryn Stoner, Stanford president emeritus and constitutional law scholar Gerhard Casper, Stanford Law School lecturer Erik Jensen, and economists Avner Greif and Seema Jayachandran “team-taught” individual sessions as the week progressed. Fellows and faculty discussed how to define and measure development, the role and rule of law in societies, how legal systems affect democratic development, constitutionalism, electoral systems, parliamentary versus presidential systems, horizontal accountability, and market development. Fellows worked in groups to discuss and present their conclusions about an issue to their colleagues, comparing experiences and sharing insights into how well political parties and parliaments constrained executive power and how civil society organizations contributed to democratic consolidation.

In addition to discussing their personal experiences with democracy promotion, economic development, and legal reform, fellows met with a broad range of practitioners, including USAID deputy director Maria Rendon Labadan, National Endowment for Democracy president Carl Gershman, U.S. Court of Appeals Ninth Circuit Judge Pamela Rymer, IREX president Mark Pomar, Freedom House chairman and International Center on Nonviolent Conflict founding chair Peter Ackerman, International Center on Nonviolent Conflict president Jack DuVall, The Orange Revolution documentary filmmaker Steve York, and government affairs attorney Patrick Shannon. Guest speakers talked about their fieldwork, offered practical advice, and answered fellows’ questions.

This component grounded the classroom discussions in a practical context. “It was important for our visiting fellows to interact with American practitioners, both to learn about innovative techniques for improving democracy practices but also to hear about frustrations and failures that Americans also face in working to make democracy and democracy promotion work more effectively,” explained McFaul. “We Americans do not have all the answers and have much to learn from interaction with those in the trenches working to improve governance in their countries.”

As the program’s curriculum shifted to democratic and economic transitions for week two, McFaul and Stoner-Weiss balanced the structure of the classroom with guest lecturers, a documentary film premiere, and field trips to Google headquarters and San Francisco media organizations to put into practical context the components discussed theoretically in the classroom. The field trip to San Francisco included a session with KQED Forum executive producer Raul Ramirez, a briefing with the editorial board at the San Francisco Chronicle, and a discussion of links between violence against women and children and poverty, health, and security at the Family Violence Prevention Fund.

“We are building an extraordinary community of democratic activists and officials who have a deeper understanding of the types of institutions that secure freedom, control corruption, and foster sustainable development.” The third week’s curriculum looked at international and domestic efforts to promote democracy, development, and the rule of law. This integrative module drew on the teaching caliber of Stephen D. Krasner (FSI senior fellow), Peter B. Henry (Graduate School of Business), Allen S. Weiner and Helen Stacy (Stanford Law School), and Nicholas Hope (Stanford Center for International Development) as well as Casper, Jensen, McFaul, and Stoner-Weiss. Through case studies and, in particular, comparison of successes and failures in the fellows’ own experiences, faculty and fellows explored and assessed international strategies for promoting rule of law, reconciliation of past human rights abuses, democracy, and good governance. The discussions, occasionally contentious, circled in on a set of central questions: Should the United States promote democracy? Can the United States promote democracy? What are the links between democracy and increasing the rule of law, controlling corruption, rebuilding societies shattered by massive human rights violations, and promoting good governance?

Despite the intellectual rigor of the coursework and discussion, and the exploration of practical applicability with guest speakers and field trips, the Stanford Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development Program was designed as much to stimulate connections among field practitioners and to provide a forum in which to exchange ideas. “Through the summer fellows program, we are building an extraordinary community of democratic activists and officials who have a deeper understanding of the types of institutions that secure freedom, control corruption, and foster sustainable development, and who are keeping in touch with us and with one another,” said Diamond. “When I meet our ‘alumni’ fellows in subsequent years, they speak movingly of the bonds they formed and the insights they gained in these three fast-paced weeks.”

To ensure they fulfill their goal of building a small but robust global network of civic activist and policymakers in developing countries, CDDRL launched a Summer Fellows Program Alumni Newsletter. The newsletter is based on an interactive website that will allow the center to strengthen its network of leaders and civic activists and facilitate more groundbreaking policy analysis across academic fields and geographic regions, the results of which will be promptly fed back to its activist alumni in a virtual loop of scholarship and policymaking. “We envision the creation of an international network of emerging political and civic leaders in countries in transition,” said Stoner-Weiss, “who can share experiences and solutions to the very similar problems they and their countries face.”

 

SSFDD ALUMNI FOCUS: VIOLET GONDA
A producer and pre s ent er for SW Radio Africa (London), Violet Gonda was a Stanford Summer Fellow on Democracy and Development in 2006, the same year her station was named the International Station of the Year by the Association of International Broadcasters. "CDDRL brings together a cross-section of people from different backgrounds, different careers," Gonda said. "Politicians, lawyers, activists ... all in the same room. It is an amazing group of people."

Banned from returning to her home country because of her journalism work at the radio station-"we are welcome in Zimbabwe but only in the prisons"-Gonda "literally eat[s], breathe[s], and dream[s] Zimbabwe." The summer fellows program, she said, gave her a broad perspective on what's going on in other countries; "it is so intensive ... you can really compare and contrast democracy on every continent." One thing Gonda found is that "when you look at these leaders, you'd think they all were born of the same mother ... and the ways people respond to these crises are the same."

Gonda had such a positive experience at Stanford that she decided to apply for, and was accepted to, the prestigious John S. Knight Fellowships for journalists for the academic year 2007-08. "It's always been Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe," she said. "Now I finally have time to sit down and read a book, write an article, go to seminars, sharpen my skills." She is not exactly sitting still however. In December she gave a presentation on Zimbabwe's political situation for the Center on African Studies, and will also be discussing Zimbabwe at the Palo Alto Rotary Club and the Bechtel International Center. "Media in America does not have a lot of international news, particularly on Africa," Gonda said. "So it's a good opportunity to talk about Zimbabwe, and I will take advantage of it."

She is also working on developing new content for SW Radio Africa and plans to interview FSI scholars she met through the summer fellows program so "We are building an extraordinary community of democratic activists and officials who have a deeper understanding of the types of institutions that secure freedom, control corruption, and foster sustainable development." that Zimbabweans can understand what is going on in different countries. Close contact with program alumni means that she has friends and colleagues in other parts of that world who can be called on for their perspective on situations. While SW Radio Africa's mission is "to record and to expose" developments in Zimbabwe, Gonda explained, "it's good to compare, to show people we are not alone, that this is happening elsewhere."

A panel of Carnegie Russia experts presented analysis of the current state of Russia's political and economic development and the likelihood of continuity or change in Dmitry Medvedev's first term as president of Russia. The panel included scholars-in-residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center Nikolay Petrov and Maria Lipman and Carnegie senior associate Michael A. McFaul. Thomas Carothers, vice president for studies, served as moderator.

Petrov emphasized structural conditions delimiting the options available to the Russian leadership over the ability of any particular personality to radically change course. He noted that Medvedev, as Vladimir Putin's protégé, was unlikely to introduce major modifications to Putin's established trajectory and that he could not do so even if such was his desire.

He described his conception of the Kremlin-designed political system in Russia today, making reference to what he called the "mechanical configuration of power": the creation of elements that cannot operate indepedently and a highly hierarchical administration that is inherently inefficient and divorced from the realities of society.

Although poorly governed autocracies can last for a long time, if there is a crisis and Russia still lacks the democratic instruments to deal with it there could be a serious authoritarian retrenchment.
-Michael McFaul

At the same time, he argued that change is inevitable -- not because of Medvedev's intentions, but because of evolving facts on the ground, such as the demographic situation and the need to transition from recovery-based economic growth to modernization and expansion. Petrov said that one of the major features of the Russian regime -- controlled elections -- is becoming a source of major weakness as Russia faces a number of serious political, social, and economic challenges. Although these elections nominally legitimize the authorities, they do not provide any feedback from the population nor do they offer any opportunity for genuine political competition of the kind that could introduce diversity and accountability. He compared the Russian leadership to a dinosaur, with a small head far removed from the body politic.

Lipman focused on the evolution of the media from the relative pluralism of Boris Yeltsin's presidency to the tight control of Putin's system. She contrasted the interview Putin had as he was coming into the presidency in 2000 with the interview that his successor has recently had. While the journalists interviewing Putin were inquisitive and at times confrontational, Medvedev enjoyed a far more passive and respectful tone from the journalists who interviewed him. This, she said, was a sign of the success of Putin's project for the media.

She noted that the state and Gazprom were the two largest players in the national media market and that loyalty to the state is a requirement for sucess in any business sector, including media. The state's control of broadcast media is particularly important, as television is the overwhelmingly primary source of information for the Russian public. Meanwhile, on a regional level, journalists are routinely punished for attempting to uncover local malfeasance or corruption.

Although the Russian leadership has consolidated a majority of the media under its control, Lipman said, media with independent editorial content still exists. She speculated that there were a number of functions that having a tiny minority of independent media could serve: existing for the sake of external consumption, a valve to let off some steam, and potentially an in-house bulletin board for the use of elites to signal dissatisfaction or to inform the leadership of conflicts.

McFaul began his remarks by noting he would not use the term "democracy" to refer to the political system in place in Russia today. He said that political science as a discipline is struggling to properly code and understand systems such as Russia's and other countries whose regimes are "between" dictatorship and democracy. He illustrated this lack of clarity by referring to the lack of correspondence between various freedom coding scores when it comes to regimes that do not fall into either extreme of the political freedom spectrum.

With regard to Russia, McFaul noted the crucial significance of the fact that there was an election and that a new leader was appointed. In that way, he said, Russia is not like Uzbekistan. He elaborated on what he sees as three possible reasons that the Russian leadership decided to construct the system that exists today: (1) Putin has decided that this system is necessary for the modernization project he wishes to undertake; (2) in order to allow for theft by the elites, for which McFaul noted a controlled national media was crucial; and (3) to manage the transition. Now that Putin's plan for the transition has been fulfilled, it is an open question whether the regime can become a system for governance.

Having delineated the "why," McFaul put forward what he sees as the chief characteristics of the Russian regime: a lack of any defining ideology; little connection to citizenry -- the fact that this is not an autocracy of mobilization; no charismatic leader; the fact that the regime is not a military junta, and that a strategy of massive repression is not a viable alternative; the existence of foreign enemies, which is important for autocracies to survive; and the dependence of the regime's legitimacy upon performance, particularly in the economic sphere. McFaul believes Putin knows that this system is not sustainable over the long term, but that paradoxically he nonetheless emphasizes continuity. He expressed cautious hope that Medvedev's liberal-sounding speech in Krasnoyarsk -- which contained criticism of the current state of affairs in Russia and lacked a real precedent in recent Russian political history -- could signal a change in policy in the Kremlin.

He noted that he would not predict the future course of Russia's political development and reiterated his point about the failings of political science: although scholars can understand the structural conditions that make potential social and political crises in such regimes possible, the political science community does not do well at predicting when they will occur. McFaul sounded a note of warning on this point, saying that although poorly governed autocracies can last for a long time, if there is a crisis and Russia still lacks the democratic instruments to deal with it there could be a serious authoritarian retrenchment.

In response to questions, Petrov and Lipman made clear that they did not believe Medvedev's liberal rhetoric should be treated seriously. McFaul noted that such changes, if they were to take place, would likely occur at the margins and said that the situation is more optimistic than if hawk Sergei Ivanov had been chosen as president.