Johan Swinnen, Visiting Professor at Stanford's Center on Food Security and the Enviroment, comments on Kym Anderson's Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium paper on "How can trade improve food security in sub-Saharan Africa?".

Social scientists often attribute the absence or moderation of ethnic conflict, in ethnically diverse societies, to the presence of cross-cutting cleavages - that is, to dimensions of identity or interest along which members of the same ethnic group may have diverse allegiances. Yet estimating the casual effects of cross-cutting cleavages is difficult. The authors develop an experimental research design to examine why ethnicity appears to have little political salience in Mali, an ethnically heterogenous sub-Saharan African country where ethnic identity is a poor predictor of vote choice and parties do not form along ethnic lines. They argue that the cross-cutting ties afforded by an informal institution called cousinage can help explain the weak association between ethnicity and individual vote choice. Ethnic and cousinage ties between voters and politicians both enhance the credibility of politicians' policy promises, yet neither dimension of identity becomes dominant as a basis for vote choice due to their cross-cutting nature.

This paper provides experimental evidence on the effect of "informed" public deliberation on electoral support for programmatic, non-clientelist platforms. The experiment takes place in Benin and involves real candidates running in the first round of the 2006 presidential elections. The treatment is a campaign strategy based exclusively on town meetings during which policy proposals made by candidates are "specific" and informed by empirical research. The control is the "standard" strategy based on campaign rallies and targeted or clientelist electoral promises. Wantchekon finds that the treatment has a positive effect on boter information about policies and candidates. He also finds that turnout and electoral support for the candidates participating in the experiment were higher in treatment villages than in control villages. He argues that political parties can overcome the need for distributing favors in order to win votes, by improving the extent to which their policy promises are informed by empirical policy research.

In a trip facilitated by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Rescue Committee, a group of Stanford students visited UNHCR refugee camps and their surrounding communities in Ethiopia. The students came away from the trip with a better understanding of the complex issues facing the refugees, as well as new ideas for possible solutions.

In this package of stories, video and photos by CISAC's communications manager, Beth Duff-Brown, you get an up-close look at the people and project.

An equilibrium search model of the Malawian HIV/AIDS epidemic is presented. Individuals engage in di¤erent types of sexual activity, which vary in their riskiness. When choosing a sexual activity, such as short-term sex without a condom, a person rationally considers its risk. A simulated version of the model is parameterized to match some salient facts about the Malawian epidemic. Some topical policies (e.g., male circumcision, treatment of other STDs, and promoting marriage) are studied and found to have potential to back…re: Moderate interventions may actually increase the prevalence of HIV/AIDS, due to shifts in human behavior and equilibrium e¤ects.

The explosion of mobile phones into a region that, until recently, was nearly devoid of telecommunications infrastructure provides a valuable opportunity to explore the potential effects of information and communication technology on various economic

and social outcomes. This article focuses specifically on the potential influence that mobile phones will exert on corruption in Africa. Two distinct empirical analyses test the hypothesis that mobile phones will reduce corruption in Africa, as a result of decentralizing information and communication and thereby diminishing the opportunities available to engage in corruption as well as increasing the potential of detection and punishment. The results of a fixed effects regression of panel data at the country level reveal a significant negative correlation between a country's degree of mobile phone penetration and that country's level of perceived corruption. In addition to this, a multivariate regression of survey data reveals that the degree of mobile phone signal coverage across 13 Namibian provinces is significantly associated with reduced perceptions of corruption at the individual level.

Ruby Gropas is a lecturer in international relations at the law faculty of the Democritus University of Thrace (Komotini) and research fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP). Gropas was in residence at CDDRL in 2011 as a visiting scholar. In this seminar she will discuss the ongoing Greek economic and political crisis, and what it means for the future of the European Union and monetary system. Is the crisis in Greece ‘internal’ or is it symptomatic of a wider European failure? Is the Greek crisis the result of failed modernity, or rather a precursor of things to come? Why has Greece become so important and why has it dominated global politics and world news for the past two years?  Are its malignancies purely domestic or are they representative of a wider malaise within Europe and possibly beyond? The collapse and orderly default of a eurozone country at the heart of the Western financial system arguably marks the end of an era. It has brought with it the deepest social and political crisis that modern Greecehas faced since the restoration of democracy and it has also led to Europe's deepest existential crisis. With the EU struggling to effectively managing the eurozone crisis and the burst of recent movements opposing neo-liberal orthodoxy and the “Occupy” movements – what does this mean for Europe? And what is next?