Linda Kirschke is a predoctoral fellow at CISAC. She is a PhD candidate at Princeton University, in the Department of Politics, and her research focuses on state politics and ethnic violence. She published "Informal repression, zero sum politics and late third wave transitions" in the Journal of Modern African Studies in 2000. Drawing on the cases of Cameroon, Rwanda and Kenya, this article shows that transitions to multiparty politics place Sub-Saharan South Africa at high risk for civil violence. Kirschke was a Eurasia Title VIII Fellow at the Social Science Research Council in 2002-03, working on Russian language training. In 2003-04, she was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Pre-Dissertation Fellowship at Columbia Universityís Council for European Studies. Kirschke has a BA in French and African studies and has worked for human rights organizations in France, London and Africa.

Marina S. Ottaway specializes in democracy and post-conflict reconstruction issues. She is a Senior Associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the Democracy and Rule of Law Project, a research endeavor that analyzes the state of democracy around the world and the efforts by the United States and other countries to promote democracy. Her new book, Democracy Challenged, a comparative study of semiauthoritarian regimes in Africa, the Caucasus, Latin America, and the Middle East, was published in January 2003. Her current works focus on political transformation in the Middle East and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan.

She is also a lecturer in African Studies at the Nitze School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Ottaway carried out research in Africa and in the Middle East and taught at the University of Addis Ababa, the University of Zambia, the American University in Cairo, and the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.

She received her undergraduate educatin at University of Pavia, Italy and her Ph.D. from Columbia University. Ottaway's selected Publications include, Democracy Challenged: The Rise of Semi-Authoritarianism (Carnegie, 2003); Funding Virtue: Civil Society Aid and Democracy Promotion, edited with Thomas Carothers (Carnegie, 2000); Africa's New Leaders: Democracy or State Reconstruction? (Carnegie, 1999)

Stanford Law School, the Stanford Rule of Law Program, the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, Santa Clara University School of Law, and the Santa Clara Institute of International and Comparative Law will host a Global Jurisprudence Colloquium at Stanford University on March 17-18, 2005, on the theme of Decisions of International Legal Institutions: Compliance and Enforcement. The Colloquium will provide leading judges from a number of key international courts and tribunals with an opportunity to interact and share with the Stanford community and the public their insights into issues presented by the growing use of international courts to promote the rule of law.

Distinguished international jurists scheduled to participate in the Colloquium include Judges Higgins and Owada of the International Court of Justice, Judges Pillay and Song of the International Criminal Court, President Meron and Judge Robinson of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Judge Mumba of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Judge Ameli of the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal, Judge Kokott of the European Court of Justice, Judge Greve of the European Court of Human Rights, and President Robertson of the Special Court for Sierra Leone.

On March 18, the Colloquium participants, joined by distinguished international law and international relations faculty, will hold three panel discussions, each on a particular theme related to the historic challenge to improve enforcement of international law and efforts to enhance the rule of law. These panel discussions will be held at Stanford Law School and are open to the University community and the public.

Ambassador Dobbins will review the American and United Nation's experience with nation building over the past sixty years and explore lessons for Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond. He will draw upon the just completed RAND History of Nation Building, the first volume of which deals with U.S. led missions from Germany to Iraq. The newly released second volume covers U.N.-led operations beginning with the Belgian Congo in the early 1960's. Dobbins will compare the U.S. and U.N. approaches to nation building, and evaluate their respective success rates.

Ambassador Dobbins directs RAND's International Security and Defense Policy Center. He has held State Department and White House posts including Assistant Secretary of State for Europe, Special Assistant to the President for the Western Hemisphere, Special Adviser to the President and Secretary of State for the Balkans, and Ambassador to the European Community. He has handled a variety of crisis management assignments as the Clinton Administration's special envoy for Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, and the Bush Administration's first special envoy for Afghanistan. He is principal author of the two-volume RAND History of Nation Building.

In the wake of Sept 11, 2001, Dobbins was designated as the Bush Administration's representative to the Afghan opposition. Dobbins helped organize and then represented the U.S. at the Bonn Conference where a new Afghan government was formed. On Dec. 16, 2001, he raised the flag over the newly reopened U.S. Embassy.

Earlier in his State Department career Dobbins served twice as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Europe, as Deputy Chief of Mission in Germany, and as Acting Assistant Secretary for Europe.

Dobbins graduated from the Georgetown School of Foreign Service and served 3 years in the Navy. He is married to Toril Kleivdal, and has two sons.

Mr. Faber will speak about the legal and political issues concerned in treating HIV/AIDS in Sub Saharan Africa from ther perspective of a major pharmaceuticals company.