Stanford University

Aleeza Schoenberg Gelernt

Encina Hall, C139-d
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Aleeza is a Program Manager at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. She moved to Stanford from Boston in August 2024. Prior to working at CDDRL, she worked in programming and community engagement at a university and a synagogue, as well as in IT, customer success, and marketing. Aleeza received her bachelor’s in psychology from Princeton University. She loves creative writing, arts and crafts, animals, and long walks with friends.

Program Manager
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Information Session - Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program AY25-26

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CDDRL Fisher Family Honors Class of 2025 poses in front of the White House with faculty co-directors Didi Kuo and Stephen Stedman.

The Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) will be accepting applications from eligible juniors from any university department who are interested in writing their senior thesis on a subject touching upon democracy, economic development, and rule of law (DDRL). 

Join CDDRL faculty and current honors students on Wednesday, January 22, at 12:00 pm, to discuss the program and answer questions.

The application period opens on January 6, 2025, and runs through February 14, 2025.

For more information on the Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program, please click here.

Stephen J. Stedman

CDDRL
Encina Hall, C152
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 725-2705 (650) 724-2996
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
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Stephen Stedman is a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), an affiliated faculty member at CISAC, and professor of political science (by courtesy) at Stanford University. He is director of CDDRL's Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy, Development and Rule of Law, and will be faculty director of the Program on International Relations in the School of Humanities and Sciences effective Fall 2025.

In 2011-12 Professor Stedman served as the Director for the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy, and Security, a body of eminent persons tasked with developing recommendations on promoting and protecting the integrity of elections and international electoral assistance. The Commission is a joint project of the Kofi Annan Foundation and International IDEA, an intergovernmental organization that works on international democracy and electoral assistance.

In 2003-04 Professor Stedman was Research Director of the United Nations High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change and was a principal drafter of the Panel’s report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility.

In 2005 he served as Assistant Secretary-General and Special Advisor to the Secretary- General of the United Nations, with responsibility for working with governments to adopt the Panel’s recommendations for strengthening collective security and for implementing changes within the United Nations Secretariat, including the creation of a Peacebuilding Support Office, a Counter Terrorism Task Force, and a Policy Committee to act as a cabinet to the Secretary-General.

His most recent book, with Bruce Jones and Carlos Pascual, is Power and Responsibility: Creating International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2009).

Director, Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy, Development and Rule of Law
Director, Program in International Relations
Affiliated faculty at the Center for International Security and Cooperation
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Didi Kuo

Encina Hall, C150
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

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Center Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
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Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.

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Yoav Heller — The Fourth Quarter: What Will Israel Look Like in 2048?

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Yoav Heller webinar

In recent years, creeping demographic changes and deep political divisions have made many Israelis worry about the fragmentation of their society into several contending “tribes.” In a 2015 talk that became known as “The Four Tribes Speech,” Israel’s President, Reuven Rivlin, observed that Israel was rapidly transforming from a country defined by a unified national ethos into one where secular, nationalist-religious, ultraorthodox Jews, and Israeli Arabs increasingly possess separate identities. But some are fighting back, seeking to renegotiate the Israeli social contract and rejuvenate a cohesive center.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr. Yoav Heller is co-founder and chairman of “The Fourth Quarter”, an Israeli NGO and mass movement dedicated to rebuilding Israeli modern democratic centrism. A historian by training, Yoav has had a rich career in media – including Ynet, Israel's largest online media site, which he helped establish and in which he served as senior editor – education and community leadership. Yoav Heller holds a BA in Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies and an MA in Management and Education from Tel Aviv University. He completed his Ph.D. in History at the University of London, Royal Holloway College Holocaust Research Institute.

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Amichai Magen
Amichai Magen

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Yoav Heller
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Ari Shavit — Existential War: From Catastrophe, to Victory, to Revival

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Ari Shavit webinar

Ari Shavit – one of Israel’s most experienced, critical, and erudite political analysts – was one of the first people in the world to put pen to paper in the aftermath of the October 7th, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack. In his latest book (published in Hebrew, with an English edition forthcoming), Shavit argues that Israel now finds itself in an existential war with Iran. It is a crisis from which, Ari Shavit argues, Israel will either emerge victorious and transformed or cease to exist.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Ari Shavit is a leading Israeli columnist, author, and political analyst. Born in Rehovot, Israel, Shavit studied philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, before embarking on a distinguished career in journalism. In the early 1990s he was chairman of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, and in 1995 he joined Haaretz, where he served on the editorial board until 2016. His recent books include the New York Time bestseller My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (2013) and Existential War: From Catastrophe, to Victory, to Revival (2024) [Hebrew].

Virtual Event Only.

Amichai Magen
Amichai Magen

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Ari Shavit
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Einat Wilf — Twenty-First Century Zionism: Idea Foundations for Israel After October 7th

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Einat Wilf webinar

“Zionism” – once an innocuous term favored by socialists and liberals alike to denote support for the right of the Jewish People to equal national self-determination in the Land of Zion – has become a deeply contested word. Postcolonial and critical theories, in particular, have radically reinterpreted the term, with some weaponizing Zionism to accuse Israel and its allies of everything from racism and genocide to police brutality in Portland, Oregon, and even climate change. So, what is “Zionism”? Where did the word and concept come from? And why has it become so heatedly contested?

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr. Einat Wilf is a leading thinker on Israel, Zionism, foreign policy, and education. She was a Member of Knesset from 2010 to 2013, where she served as Chair of the Education Committee and Member of the influential Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. Born and raised in Israel, Einat served as Foreign Policy Advisor to then Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres and as a strategic consultant with McKinsey & Company. Her recent books include The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace (2020, co-authored with Adi Schwartz) and We Should All Be Zionists (2022) – a collection of her essays on Israel, Zionism and the path to peace.

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Amichai Magen
Amichai Magen

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Dr. Einat Wilf
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Israel Insights Webinar with Azar Gat — What Is The Problem With “The Palestinian Problem”?

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Despite the great progress made in Arab-Israeli rapprochement over the past several decades, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict appears as intractable today as it has ever been. Why has this conflict proved so difficult to resolve? Why have all attempts at a final peace settlement between Israelis and Palestinians failed since the launch of the Oslo Peace Process in the early 1990's? And what can be learned from this history of failure about the prospects of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Join Amichai Magen in conversation with Azar Gat.

Read the essay here.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Professor Azar Gat is the Ezer Weitzman Chair of National Security and Head of the International and Executive MA Programs in Security and Diplomacy in the School of Political Science, Government and International Affairs at Tel Aviv University. He is also Academic Advisor to the Executive Director of the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel-Aviv. Professor Gat is the author of 12 books - on democracy, nationalism, ideology, war and military history - which have been translated into numerous languages.

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Amichai Magen
Amichai Magen

Virtual Only Event.

Azar Gat
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Stanford experts detail democratic decline, authoritarian trends in the Middle East

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Hesham Sallam speaks at a podium with panelists Samia Errazzouki and Joel Beinin
Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, Israel has confronted a “clear and immediate democratic emergency,” said Joel Beinin, Donald J. McLachlan professor of Middle East history. | Nora Sulots
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Stanford scholars urged historical approaches to examine the impact of regional conflict in the Middle East and North Africa on authoritarian stability and dissent.

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Author Exchange

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The October 2024 issue of Democracy and Autocracy is dedicated to the theme “Making Sense of the Arab State,” for which the University of Michigan Press recently published an edited volume. Newsletter authors include Lisa Anderson (Columbia University), Toby Dodge (London School of Economics), Steven Heydemann (Smith College), Marc Lynch (George Washington University), and Bassel F. Salloukh (Doha Institute for Graduate Studies). Sofia Fenner (Colorado College) and Hesham Sallam (Stanford University) also exchange reviews of their recent books, Shouting in a Cage: Political Life after Authoritarian Co-optation in North Africa (Fenner, Columbia University Press, 2023) and Classless Politics: Islamist Movements, the Left, and Authoritarian Legacies in Egypt (Sellam, University of Columbia Press, 2023). Loay Alarab (University of Michigan) serves as guest editor.

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Applications for the 2025 Fisher Family Summer Fellows Program are Now Open

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Nora Sulots
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The Fisher Family Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development Program at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is now accepting applications for our summer 2025 program. The deadline to apply is 5:00 pm PST on Thursday, January 16, 2025.

The program brings together an annual cohort of approximately 30 mid-career practitioners from countries in political transition who are working to advance democratic practices and enact economic and legal reform to promote human development. Launched by CDDRL in 2005, the program was previously known as the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program. The new name reflects an endowment gift from the Fisher family — Sakurako (Sako), ‘82, and William (Bill), MBA ‘84 — that secures the future of this important and impactful program.

From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, our program participants are selected from among hundreds of applicants every year for the significant contributions they have already made to their societies and their potential to make an even greater impact with some help from Stanford. We aim to give them the opportunity to join a global network of over 500 alumni from 97 countries who have all faced similar sets of challenges in bringing change to their countries.

The Fisher Family Summer Fellows Program provides an intensive 3-week on-campus forum for civil society leaders to exchange experiences and receive academic and policy training to enrich their knowledge and advance their work. Delivered by a leading Stanford faculty team composed of Michael McFaul, Kathryn Stoner, Francis Fukuyama, Larry Diamond, Erik Jensen, and more, the program allows emerging and established global leaders to explore new institutional models and frameworks to enhance their ability to promote good governance, accountable politics, and find new ways to achieve economic development in their home countries.

Prospective fellows from Ukraine are also invited to apply for our Strengthening Ukrainian Democracy and Development (SU-DD) Program, which runs concurrently with the Fisher Family Summer Fellows Program. The SU-DD program provides a unique opportunity for mid-career practitioners working on well-defined projects aimed at strengthening Ukrainian democracy, enhancing human development, and promoting good governance. Applicants to the SU-DD program will use the Fisher Family Summer Fellows Program application portal to apply and indicate their interest there. You will then be directed to a series of supplemental questions specific to the SU-DD program, including requiring a detailed description of your proposed project.

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Fisher Family Summer Fellows Class of 2024
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Announcing the 2024 Cohort of the Fisher Family Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development Program

In July 2024, the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law will welcome a diverse cohort of 26 experienced practitioners from 21 countries who are working to advance democratic practices and economic and legal reform in contexts where freedom, human development, and good governance are fragile or at risk.
Announcing the 2024 Cohort of the Fisher Family Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development Program
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Empowering Ukrainian Democracy: Innovative Training Program Nurtures Projects for Recovery and Development

Meet the six fellows selected to participate in the first cohort of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law’s Strengthening Ukrainian Democracy and Development Program.
Empowering Ukrainian Democracy: Innovative Training Program Nurtures Projects for Recovery and Development
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The program will run from Sunday, July 20, through Friday, August 8, 2025. Applications are due by 5:00 pm PST on Thursday, January 16, 2025.

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The Impact of Regional Conflict in MENA on Authoritarian Stability and Dissent

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The Impact of Regional Conflict in MENA on Authoritarian Stability and Dissent

This panel examines the impact of the ongoing wars in Gaza and Lebanon on regime stability in the region. How have ruling establishments managed popular sentiment and protests as Israel’s military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon have continued with no end in sight? How have opposition forces and protest movements responded to these developments? What challenges have they faced? What is the relationship between movements in solidarity with Palestine and Lebanon and domestic oppositional politics? The panelists will discuss the major trends and contextualize them in historical perspective.

PANELISTS:

  • Joel Beinin, Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History, Emeritus
  • Samia Errazzouki, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History and Humanities Center 
  • Hesham Sallam, Associate Director, Program on Arab Reform and Development


This event is co-sponsored by CDDRL's Program on Arab Reform and Development and Democracy Day at Stanford University.

About the Speakers

Bengi Gümrükçü

Joel Beinin

Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History, Emeritus
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Joel Beinin is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History, Emeritus at Stanford . His research and writing focus on the social and cultural history and political economy of modern Egypt, Palestine, and Israel, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He received his A.B. from Princeton University in 1970, A.M. from Harvard University in 1974, and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1982. He taught at Stanford from 1983 to 2019 with a hiatus as Director of Middle East Studies and Professor of History at the American University in Cairo in 2006-08.

Samia Errazzouki

Samia Errazzouki

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of History and Humanities Center
full bio

Samia Errazzouki is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History and Humanities Center at Stanford University. She holds a PhD in History from UC Davis and MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University. She is also the social sciences editor for the Journal of North African Studies and co-editor with Jadaliyya. Samia is a former Morocco-based journalist, where she reported for the Associated Press and, later, for Reuters.

Portrait of Hesham Sallam

Hesham Sallam

Associate Director, Program on Arab Reform and Development
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Hesham Sallam is a Senior Research Scholar at CDDRL, where he serves as Associate Director for Research. He is also Associate Director of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He is author of Classless Politics: Islamist Movements, the Left, and Authoritarian Legacies in Egypt (Columbia University Press, 2022), co-editor of Struggles for Political Change in the Arab World (University of Michigan Press, 2022), and editor of Egypt's Parliamentary Elections 2011-2012: A Critical Guide to a Changing Political Arena (Tadween Publishing, 2013). Sallam received a Ph.D. in Government (2015) and an M.A. in Arab Studies (2006) from Georgetown University.  
 

Levinthal Hall (424 Santa Teresa St., Stanford)

This in-person event is open to Stanford affiliates only.

Joel Beinin
Samia Errazzouki

Hesham Sallam

Encina Hall, E105
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Senior Research Scholar
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Hesham Sallam is a Senior Research Scholar at CDDRL, where he serves as Associate Director for Research. He is also Associate Director of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. Sallam is co-editor of Jadaliyya ezine and a former program specialist at the U.S. Institute of Peace. His research focuses on political and social development in the Arab World. Sallam’s research has previously received the support of the Social Science Research Council and the U.S. Institute of Peace. He is author of Classless Politics: Islamist Movements, the Left, and Authoritarian Legacies in Egypt (Columbia University Press, 2022), co-editor of Struggles for Political Change in the Arab World (University of Michigan Press, 2022), and editor of Egypt's Parliamentary Elections 2011-2012: A Critical Guide to a Changing Political Arena (Tadween Publishing, 2013). Sallam received a Ph.D. in Government (2015) and an M.A. in Arab Studies (2006) from Georgetown University, and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh (2003).

 

Associate Director for Research, Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Associate Director, Program on Arab Reform and Development
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