Stanford University

Foreign Policy Challenges for the Next President

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What will happen when a new US president is sworn in? Michael McFaul, former US ambassador to Russia and director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, leads a panel of faculty experts to discuss the imminent foreign policy challenges that the next president must face.

Michael McFaul

Larry Diamond

CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C147
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 724-6448 (650) 723-1928
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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
diamond_encina_hall.png MA, PhD

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.

Download full-resolution headshot; photo credit: Rod Searcey.

Former Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Faculty Chair, Jan Koum Israel Studies Program
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Abbas Milani

615 Crothers Way,
Encina Commons, Room 128A
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 721-4052
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Research Fellow, Hoover Institution
abbas_milani_photo_by_babak_payami.jpg PhD

Abbas Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University and a visiting professor in the department of political science. In addition, Dr. Milani is a research fellow and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution.

Prior to coming to Stanford, Milani was a professor of history and political science and chair of the department at Notre Dame de Namur University and a research fellow at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Milani was an assistant professor in the faculty of law and political science at Tehran University and a member of the board of directors of Tehran University's Center for International Studies from 1979 to 1987. He was a research fellow at the Iranian Center for Social Research from 1977 to 1978 and an assistant professor at the National University of Iran from 1975 to 1977.

Dr. Milani is the author of Eminent Persians: Men and Women Who Made Modern Iran, 1941-1979, (Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY, 2 volumes, November, 2008); King of Shadows: Essays on Iran's Encounter with Modernity, Persian text published in the U.S. (Ketab Corp., Spring 2005); Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Persian Modernity in Iran, (Mage 2004); The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution (Mage, 2000); Modernity and Its Foes in Iran (Gardon Press, 1998); Tales of Two Cities: A Persian Memoir (Mage 1996); On Democracy and Socialism, a collection of articles coauthored with Faramarz Tabrizi (Pars Press, 1987); and Malraux and the Tragic Vision (Agah Press, 1982). Milani has also translated numerous books and articles into Persian and English.

Milani received his BA in political science and economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970 and his PhD in political science from the University of Hawaii in 1974.

Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies
Co-director of the Iran Democracy Project
CDDRL Affiliated Scholar
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Amy Zegart

CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, E216
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

(650) 725-9754 (650) 723-0089
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
amyzegart-9.jpg PhD

Dr. Amy Zegart is the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. The author of five books, she specializes in U.S. intelligence, emerging technologies, and national security. At Hoover, she leads the Technology Policy Accelerator and the Oster National Security Affairs Fellows Program. She also is an associate director and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI; a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute; and professor of political science by courtesy, teaching 100 students each year about how emerging technologies are transforming espionage.

Her award-winning research includes the leading academic study of intelligence failures before 9/11: Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11 (Princeton, 2007) and the bestseller Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence (Princeton, 2022), which was nominated by Princeton University Press for the Pulitzer Prize. She also coauthored Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity, with Condoleezza Rice (Twelve, 2018). Her op-eds and essays have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Politico, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.

Zegart has advised senior officials about intelligence and foreign policy for more than two decades. She served on the National Security Council staff and as a presidential campaign foreign policy advisor and has testified before numerous congressional committees. Before her academic career, she spent several years as a McKinsey & Company consultant.

Zegart received an AB in East Asian studies from Harvard and an MA and a PhD in political science from Stanford. She serves on the boards of the Council on Foreign Relations, Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, and the American Funds/Capital Group.

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Infrastructural State Power in Putin's Russia

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Abstract:

The paper introduces the public sector as a major source of infrastructural state capacity that helps autocrats survive. Education or social services organizations are embedded in everyday life and trusted by the people, which makes them a unique tool in autocrats’ hands. These organizations significantly extend the ability of the state apparatus to implement political decisions on the ground. Using quantitative analysis of seventy-nine Russian regions and qualitative evidence from the media, I demonstrate that Vladimir Putin’s regime used schoolteachers, who were frequently members of local electoral commissions, to implement wide-scale electoral fraud during the 2012 presidential elections in Russia. The school system served as an organizational base for this maneuver, which allowed Putin’s regime to withstand the challenge of decreased popular support. The paper proposes a distinction between the redistributive and infrastructural roles of the public sector.

 

Speaker Bio:

natalia forat
Natalia Forrat is a Pre-doctoral Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. She will receive her PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University in 2017. She studies authoritarianism, state-society relations, state capacity, civil society, and trust with a focus on contemporary Russia. Her work has been published in Post-Soviet Affairs and supported by the Fulbright Program and the Open Society Institute. Before her doctoral studies, she received a master's degree from the University of Michigan and a bachelor's degree from Tomsk State University (Russia). She taught at TSU for a few years, while also working at a Russian NGO.

Natalia Forrat Pre-doctoral Fellow at CDDRL, Stanford
Seminars

Brexit: What's next for the UK and Europe?

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The United Kingdom's vote to leave the European Union this summer promises to fundamentally alter the political and economic future of the UK and the rest of the European Union. Stanford faculty Nick Bloom and Christophe Crombez will lead a discussion about the future of the UK's relationship with Europe and Brexit's most important political and economic consequences.

Image of Professor Nick Bloom.


 

Nicholas (Nick) Bloom is the William Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University, a Senior Fellow of SIEPR, and the Co-Director of the Productivity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research focuses on management practices and uncertainty. He previously worked at the UK Treasury and McKinsey & Company.

Nick is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the recipient of the Alfred Sloan Fellowship, the Bernacer Prize, the European Investment Bank Prize, the Frisch Medal, the Kauffman Medal and a National Science Foundation Career Award. He has a BA from Cambridge, an MPhil from Oxford, and a PhD from University College London.

Image of Christophe Crombez


 

Christophe Crombez is a political economist who specializes in European Union politics and business-government relations in Europe. His research focuses on EU institutions and their impact on policies, EU institutional reform, party politics, and parliamentary government. Crombez is Senior Research Scholar at The Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University (since 1999). He teaches Introduction to European Studies and The Future of the EU in Stanford’s International Relations Program. Furthermore, he is Professor of Political Economy at KU Leuven in Belgium (since 1994). His teaching responsibilities in Leuven include Political Business Strategy and Applied Game Theory. Crombez obtained a B.A. in Applied Economics from KU Leuven in 1989, and a Ph.D. in Business, Political Economics, from Stanford University in 1994.

 

Nicholas Bloom William Eberle Professor of Economics; Senior Fellow, SIEPR; Co-Director of the Productivity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program, NBER Panelist Department of Economics

Christophe Crombez

Encina Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 723-0249 (650) 723-0089
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Senior Research Scholar at The Europe Center
cc3.jpg PhD

Christophe Crombez is a political economist who specializes in European Union (EU) politics and business-government relations in Europe. His research focuses on EU institutions and their impact on policies, EU institutional reform, lobbying, party politics, and parliamentary government.

Crombez is Senior Research Scholar at The Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University (since 1999). He teaches Introduction to European Studies and The Future of the EU in Stanford’s International Relations Program, and is responsible for the Minor in European Studies and the Undergraduate Internship Program in Europe.

Furthermore, Crombez is Professor of Political Economy at the Faculty of Economics and Business at KU Leuven in Belgium (since 1994). His teaching responsibilities in Leuven include Political Business Strategy and Applied Game Theory. He is Vice-Chair for Research at the Department for Managerial Economics, Strategy and Innovation.

Crombez has also held visiting positions at the following universities and research institutes: the Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane, in Florence, Italy, in Spring 2008; the Department of Political Science at the University of Florence, Italy, in Spring 2004; the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan, in Winter 2003; the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, Illinois, in Spring 1998; the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Summer 1998; the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, in Spring 1997; the University of Antwerp, Belgium, in Spring 1996; and Leti University in St. Petersburg, Russia, in Fall 1995.

Crombez obtained a B.A. in Applied Economics, Finance, from KU Leuven in 1989, and a Ph.D. in Business, Political Economics, from Stanford University in 1994.

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European Governance
European Governance Seminar Series

Deadly Truck Attack on French Riviera a New Twist on an Old Terror Tactic

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When a Tunisian-born man drove a 19-ton rented truck into a crowd of revelers celebrating France’s national holiday in the Mediterranean town of Nice last week, killing 84 people and injuring hundreds more, it was a deadly new example of an old terrorist tactic of turning vehicles into weapons, according to Stanford experts.

French authorities identified the man behind the wheel as Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a 31-year-old immigrant from Tunisia who had lived in France since around 2005 and had been working as a delivery driver. Police shot him dead on the scene.

Martha Crenshaw, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), said the fact that Bouhlel already had a commercial driver’s license gave him easy access to his weapon of choice.

“It was just unfortunate that he was somebody who already drove big trucks,” said Crenshaw.

“He did not have to go do something special, like train for a pilot’s license in the way that the 911 hijackers did, in order to acquire the means to kill people.”

Vehicles as tools of terror

Crenshaw said there had been around 30 incidents worldwide since 1994 where terrorists used vehicles as their primary weapon in attacks on civilians (not including car and truck bombs where explosives were used). Crenshaw noted that not all those vehicle attacks caused casualties.

If you include assaults on police and military targets, there have been more than 155 attacks where a vehicle has been used as a weapon in the way the truck was used in Nice, with over 75 of those attacks occurring in just the last three years, according to data from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START).

However, the exceptionally high number of casualties puts the attack in Nice in a league of its own. Most of the vehicle attacks on police and military only result in one or two casualties at a checkpoint or other hard target.

Stanford terrorism expert and former U.S. Special Forces Colonel Joe Felter said he was concerned that the attack in Nice “lowered the threshold” for aspiring terrorists who would be motivated to carry out copycat attacks.

“This was a disturbingly effective attack,” said Felter, a senior research scholar at CISAC.

“The message for would-be terrorists is that you don’t have to become a bomb maker to successfully execute a mass casualty attack. With a driver’s license and a credit card you can weaponize a rental truck.”

A challenge for law enforcement

Former CISAC fellow Terrence Peterson said it would be particularly difficult for law enforcement agencies to prevent terrorists from gaining access to vehicles.

“The types of people who would show up on other lists…like the no-fly list, are not going to show up when they rent a car,” said Peterson.

“A car is such a mundane object. How do you control using an everyday object for a terrorist attack? It’s nearly impossible.”

Al Qaeda had previously advocated using pickup trucks to target civilians, in the “Open Source Jihad” section of its propaganda magazine “Inspire.”

“The idea is to use a pickup truck as a mowing machine, not to mow grass but mow down the enemies of Allah,” according to a translation on the Web site MEMRI Cyber and Jihad Lab, which tracks jihadist postings online.

The article also advised would-be terrorists to, “pick your location and timing carefully. Go for the most crowded locations. Narrower spots are also better because it gives less chance for the people to run away…Therefore, it is important to study your path of operation before hand.”

French prosecutors said that Bouhlel carried out surveillance of the Promenade des Anglais prior to his attack there, and that he conducted online research into the mass shootings in Orlando and Dallas.

Murky motivations

It is still unclear what motivated Bouhlel. He had a history of domestic violence, psychological problems and money troubles, according to media reports. Acquaintances said the divorced father of three was not an outwardly religious Muslim. He reportedly drank alcohol, used drugs, ate pork and had sexual encounters with other men, all of which are forbidden under strict interpretations of Islam.

However, French authorities have suggested that he may have undergone a rapid conversion to radical Islam. And a Web site affiliated with the terror group ISIS has claimed Bouhlel as “a soldier of the Islamic State.”

[[{"fid":"223450","view_mode":"crop_870xauto","fields":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"A reproduction of the picture on the residence permit of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the man who rammed his truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice on July 14.","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"A reproduction of the picture on the residence permit of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the man who rammed his truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice on July 14.","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"A reproduction of the picture on the residence permit of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the man who rammed his truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice on July 14.","field_credit[und][0][value]":"AFP/Getty Images","field_caption[und][0][value]":"A reproduction of the picture on the residence permit of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the man who rammed his truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice on July 14.","field_related_image_aspect[und][0][value]":"","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"A reproduction of the picture on the residence permit of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the man who rammed his truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice on July 14.","title":"A reproduction of the picture on the residence permit of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the man who rammed his truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice on July 14.","width":"870","style":"width: 250px; height: 362px; float: right; margin-left: 15px","class":"media-element file-crop-870xauto"}}]]“It's plausible that the message of ISIS resonated with him as a Muslim immigrant living on the fringes of society, which would be consistent with my research team’s finding that people who feel “culturally homeless” experience a lack of purpose in their lives, which, in turn, is associated with stronger support for fundamentalist groups and causes,” said Sarah Lyons-Padilla, a Stanford research scientist in the Department of Psychology’s Center for Social Psychological Answers to Real-World Questions who’s studying the marginalization of Muslim immigrants at risk for radicalization.

The apocalyptic ideology of jihadist groups like the Islamic State (also known as “Daesh”) could be particularly appealing to “petty criminals, psychologically deranged or otherwise lost souls” such as Bouhlel, said David Laitin, James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins professor of Political Science.

“Spurred by Salafist propaganda, these recruits can work privately, away from any institutional connection with Daesh, to cause horror,” Laitin said.

“And many police forces are out of touch with vulnerable populations and are slow to identify potential recruits.”

"Confrontation is unavoidable"

Regardless of Bouhlel’s motivation, his attack would likely bolster the anti-immigrant agenda of France’s far-right political parties such as the National Front, which advocate policies such as closing the borders, exiting the European Union and deporting bi-nationals with links to Islamist groups, said Cécile Alduy, associate professor of French and an affiliated faculty member with the Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

“The attacks will only strengthen the feeling that the political elites in power failed, and that the National Front “told us so” and are the only ones left to trust,” Alduy said.

Patrick Calvar, the head of France’s counter-terrorism intelligence agency DGSI, warned earlier this year that the recent series of terror attacks on French soil could trigger “inter-ethnic clashes” between far-right vigilante groups and Muslims living in France.

“One or two more terrorist attacks” and “the confrontation [between the two sides] is unavoidable,” said Calvar.

Alduy said she feared the shift in French public opinion could make Calvar’s prediction more likely.

“An opinion poll…in March 2015 put “sadness” as the primary feeling that respondents identified with following the Charlie Hebdo attacks,” Alduy said.

“After the November attacks, it was “anger”, with “hatred” following closely for over 60% of them. Now what will it be?”

 

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Police officers and rescue workers stand near the truck that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel drove into a crowd leaving a fireworks display in the French Riviera town of Nice on July 14, 2016, killing at least 84 people.
Police officers and rescue workers stand near the truck that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel drove into a crowd leaving a fireworks display in the French Riviera town of Nice on July 14, 2016, killing at least 84 people.
VALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images
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Andrew Moravcsik: "The European Crisis"

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Andrew Moravcsik, Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and Director of the European Union Program at Princeton, spoke about the four major crises faced by Europe today and presented his arguments as to why they present less cause for concern than current discourse would suggest.

Andrew Moravcsik Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and Director of the European Union Program at Princeton Speaker Princeton University
Lectures
European Governance
European Governance Seminar Series

**Cancelled** Brexit, Trump and the politics of fear: is populism here to stay?

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**This event has been cancelled**

 
With the backdrop of the Brexit vote in the UK, Nick Clegg will explore the factors behind the rise of the politics of identity, populism and nationalism in the UK, the US and around the world. Drawing on his personal experiences in politics and government, and unique insights on the European debate, he asks how liberals and those who believe in the politics of reason and moderation can rise to the new economic and social challenges of the 21st century.
 
 

[[{"fid":"223705","view_mode":"crop_870xauto","fields":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"Image of Nick Clegg, MP ","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Image of Nick Clegg, MP ","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Image of Nick Clegg, MP ","field_credit[und][0][value]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","field_related_image_aspect[und][0][value]":"","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto"},"type":"media","attributes":{"alt":"Image of Nick Clegg, MP ","title":"Image of Nick Clegg, MP ","width":"870","style":"width: 150px; height: 197px; float: left; margin-right: 15px; margin-top: 8px;","class":"media-element file-crop-870xauto"}}]]Nick Clegg MP is a Liberal Democrat politician who served as Deputy Prime Minister in Britain’s first post war Coalition Government from 2010 to 2015 and as Leader of the Liberal Democrats from 2007 to 2015. He is the Member of Parliament for Sheffield Hallam, where he was first elected in 2005, and was previously a Member of the European Parliament.

Nick Clegg led his party into Government for the first time in its modern history in a coalition with the Conservatives. As Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg occupied the second highest office in the country at a time when the United Kingdom was recovering from a deep recession following the banking crisis of 2008. Despite the hugely controversial decisions needed to restore stability to the public finances, Nick Clegg successfully maintained his party’s support for a full five-year term of office.

During that time, he was at the heart of decisions surrounding the conflict in Libya, new anti-terrorism measures, the referenda on electoral reform and Scottish independence, and extensive reforms to the education, health and pensions systems. He was particularly associated with landmark changes to the funding of schools, early years education and the treatment of mental health within the NHS. During the coalition years he also established himself as the highest profile pro-European voice in British politics and is well known and respected in capitals across the continent.

He remains an outspoken advocate of civil liberties and centre ground politics, of radical measures to boost social mobility, and of an internationalist approach to world affairs. Following the UK referendum on EU membership in June 2016, Nick has returned to the Liberal Democrat front bench as the party’s European Union spokesperson in order to hold the Government to account over its plans for Brexit.

 
Nick Clegg, Member of Parliament and Former Deputy Prime Minister of the UK Speaker
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European Governance

Call for papers: Conference on the economics of ageing

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The Asia Health Policy Program at Stanford’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, in collaboration with scholars from Stanford Health Policy's Center on Demography and Economics of Health and Aging, the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and the Next World Program, is soliciting papers for the third annual workshop on the economics of ageing titled Financing Longevity: The Economics of Pensions, Health Insurance, Long-term Care and Disability Insurance held at Stanford from April 24-25, 2017, and for a related special issue of the Journal of the Economics of Ageing.

The triumph of longevity can pose a challenge to the fiscal integrity of public and private pension systems and other social support programs disproportionately used by older adults. High-income countries offer lessons – frequently cautionary tales – for low- and middle-income countries about how to design social protection programs to be sustainable in the face of population ageing. Technological change and income inequality interact with population ageing to threaten the sustainability and perceived fairness of conventional financing for many social programs. Promoting longer working lives and savings for retirement are obvious policy priorities; but in many cases the fiscal challenges are even more acute for other social programs, such as insurance systems for medical care, long-term care, and disability. Reform of entitlement programs is also often politically difficult, further highlighting how important it is for developing countries putting in place comprehensive social security systems to take account of the macroeconomic implications of population ageing.

The objective of the workshop is to explore the economics of ageing from the perspective of sustainable financing for longer lives. The workshop will bring together researchers to present recent empirical and theoretical research on the economics of ageing with special (yet not exclusive) foci on the following topics:

  • Public and private roles in savings and retirement security
  • Living and working in an Age of Longevity: Lessons for Finance
  • Defined benefit, defined contribution, and innovations in design of pension programs
  • Intergenerational and equity implications of different financing mechanisms for pensions and social insurance
  • The impact of population aging on health insurance financing
  • Economic incentives of long-term care insurance and disability insurance systems
  • Precautionary savings and social protection system generosity
  • Elderly cognitive function and financial planning
  • Evaluation of policies aimed at increasing health and productivity of older adults
  • Population ageing and financing economic growth
  • Tax policies’ implications for capital deepening and investment in human capital
  • The relationship between population age structure and capital market returns
  • Evidence on policies designed to address disparities – gender, ethnic/racial, inter-regional, urban/rural – in old-age support
  • The political economy of reforming pension systems as well as health, long-term care and disability insurance programs

 

Submission for the workshop

Interested authors are invited to submit a 1-page abstract by Sept. 30, 2016, to Karen Eggleston at karene@stanford.edu. The authors of accepted abstracts will be notified by Oct. 15, 2016, and completed draft papers will be expected by April 1, 2017.

Economy-class travel and accommodation costs for one author of each accepted paper will be covered by the organizers.

Invited authors are expected to submit their paper to the Journal of the Economics of Ageing. A selection of these papers will (assuming successful completion of the review process) be published in a special issue.

 

Submission to the special issue

Authors (also those interested who are not attending the workshop) are invited to submit papers for the special issue in the Journal of the Economics of Ageing by Aug. 1, 2017. Submissions should be made online. Please select article type “SI Financing Longevity.”

 

About the Next World Program

The Next World Program is a joint initiative of Harvard University’s Program on the Global Demography of Aging, the WDA Forum, Stanford’s Asia Health Policy Program, and Fudan University’s Working Group on Comparative Ageing Societies. These institutions organize an annual workshop and a special issue in the Journal of the Economics of Ageing on an important economic theme related to ageing societies.

 

More information can be found in the PDF below.

 

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Fukuyama & Diamond on Democracy

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FSI SENIOR FELLOWS FRANCIS FUKUYAMA & LARRY DIAMOND DISCUSS DEMOCRACY IN THE JULY/AUGUST ISSUE OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS

Larry Diamond and Francis Fukuyama, senior fellows at the Freeman Spogli Institute, have both written essays in the July/August 2016 issue of Foreign Affairs. Follow the links below to read the full articles without a subscription block:

Diamond, who is also the former director of the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), takes stock of the global democratic recession and urges the next president to make democracy promotion a pillar of his or her foreign policy agenda in his article "Democracy in Decline."

In "American Political Decay or Renewal?" Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at FSI and the Mosbacher Director of CDDRL, analyzes the rising tide of populism as represented by the current candidates for the US Presidential elections.

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Geir Hiller Holom

117 Encina Commons, Room 182
Stanford, CA 94305

(+47) 22845013
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Geir H. Holom, MD, is a Visiting Scholar at Stanford School of Medicine (CHP/PCOR) from the University of Oslo. His research focuses on the expansion of private for-profit hospitals in the Nordic countries and its effect on prices, quality of care and selection of patients. He received a BSc in Economics and Business Administration from the Norwegian School of Economics and an MD from the University of Bergen. While in medical school, he conducted research on patients diagnosed with head and neck cancer who underwent head and neck reconstruction using microsurgery. Since receiving his MD, he has worked as a physician in both primary care and specialized health services. Prior to entering the field of medicine, he worked in the business and finance sector.

Adjunct Affiliate at the Center for Health Policy and the Department of Medicine
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