FSI HOSTS PANEL ON MIDDLE EAST BUSINESSES DURING GLOBAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP SUMMIT AT STANFORD

Startup culture is growing fast in the Middle East, despite what you have (or more likely, haven’t) heard about the region.

“There have been at least two startup conferences this year that got 5,000 people each,” said venture investor Christopher Schroeder. “If it had been 10,000 people in the Middle East getting together to talk about the Muslim Brotherhood, I guarantee you would have heard about it.”

Together with Michael McFaul, Condoleezza Rice, and Stephen Hadley, Schroeder introduced one of the first partner events of the seventh annual Global Entrepreneurship Summit. The panel, titled “From the Valley to the Wadi: How Entrepreneurship is Making the Middle East More Peaceful, More Stable and More Prosperous,” was organized by Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Harari Center for the Middle East. The theme that quickly emerged, given the confluence of former Cabinet members and experienced businesspeople, was the role of government in economic growth.

FSI director McFaul, formerly the US ambassador to Russia, welcomed the audience to Stanford (this year’s GES host) and introduced former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. Rice described the connection between prosperity and democratic development – which, as she pointed out, is not a quick or easy process. “Today people think of the US as a consolidated democracy, but they forget that it took us time to get there,” she said. “The Constitution I swore to uphold as Secretary of State originally treated my ancestors as three-fifths of a man.”

Hadley, who served as national security advisor to President George W. Bush, moderated a discussion with successful entrepreneurs from the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region to challenge stereotypes, candidly discuss problems, and offer solutions for growth. Rice noted in her introduction that countries like Saudi Arabia must include the half of their potential workforce – women – whose economic participation is currently restricted. However, panelist Ruba Al Hassan, a UAE entrepreneur and founder of the Global Youth Empowerment Movement, reminded the audience that about 25% of MENA entrepreneurs are women, compared to 18% in Silicon Valley.

The panel discussed the roles that policy can and cannot play in economic development. “The government can help the private sector by focusing on education,” said Ahmed Alfi, whose Cairo-based venture capital firm Sawari Ventures has funded an online education platform used by millions of refugees around the region. “There is no such thing as ‘not enough money for education’ – only the misallocation of funds.”

Ala’ al Sallal, who grew up a refugee in Jordan and founded online retailer Jamalon, cautioned against resting all hopes for change in the private sector. “Businesses are not social problem solvers; when we can’t operate in one market, we move to another,” he said. While the panelists agreed with an audience member’s comment that economic growth in the Middle East is bottom-up, not top-down, they also pointed out that policy issues such as open borders, special economic zones and public infrastructure play a critical role in creating the conditions for entrepreneurship to flourish.

Follow @fsistanford on Twitter for details of this and other events at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.

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.

In the July/August edition of Foreign Affairs, Larry Diamond 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. 

Click here to read the full article. 

Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law congratulates its undergraduate honors class for completing their original research and undergraduate theses. They graduated from Stanford University on June 12 with honors in their respective disciplines.

Graduates include Vehbi “Deger” Turan, who was awarded the Firestone Medal for his thesis entitled “Augmenting Citizen Participation in Governance through Natural Language Processing.” Turan’s project employed existing literature on democratic participation, case studies and an original algorithm in order to devise a means by which government agencies can evaluate public comments received via the Internet on political issues.

The Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research recognizes Stanford's top ten percent of honors theses in social science, science and engineering among the graduating senior class.

Turan decided to explore this topic shortly after joining the Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program.

According to the program’s Director Stephen Stedman, “After listening to a research seminar at our Center, Deger believed that he could develop an aggregation tool to help policy makers understand such immense data.”

Francis Fukuyama, the Mosbacher Director of CDDRL also noted, “Deger is perhaps the best example to date of why interschool honors programs are valuable. He is a computer science major who came to us expressing an interest in using his background in artificial intelligence to help solve critical public policy problems.” Fukuyama together with Associate Professor of Political Science Justin Grimmer advised Turan on his honor’s thesis.

Turan will be starting a new position at Atomic Labs’ Zenreach start-up after graduation.

The CDDRL Award for Outstanding Thesis was given to Rehan Adamjee whose thesis explored the different factors at play in choosing between healthcare providers in a rural area of Pakistan.

Adamjee and Turan are just two members of a the 2016 cohort of 11 honors students, many of whom traveled to foreign countries to collect original data, conduct interviews and research their thesis topics. Their topics range from timely case studies on the use of social media as a tool of empowerment to a glimpse at the effects of regional politics on healthcare reform in Post-Soviet Russia.

The 2016 class joins 76 graduates from CDDRL’s honors program since its launch in 2007.

The Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program trains Stanford students from diverse majors to write theses with global policy implications on a subject related to democracy, development and the rule of law. Students attend a class on research methods the spring quarter of their junior year. During their senior year, in tandem with the CDDRL research community and their faculty advisor, students conduct both local and international research in order to write their theses. Students travel to Washington, DC for the annual honors college to meet policymakers and members of the development community to enrich their thesis topics.

A list of our graduating students along with links to all their theses can be found below.

Meet our Class of 2017 

Millions of people in the developing world could be spared from lifelong disability — or possible death — from parasitic worm diseases under a vastly expanded treatment program that is cost-effective, according to a new analysis led by Stanford University School of Medicine researchers.

Secretaries Rice & Albright anchor joint event with the Carnegie Endowment

At FSI in May 2016, Washington DC met Silicon Valley and the results were enlightening.

On May 11 and 12, FSI director Michael McFaul welcomed the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to Stanford for a series of in-depth discussions on technology and international affairs. Anchored by appearances from Carnegie president William Burns, LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman, and former secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and Madeleine Albright, the inaugural Carnegie Forum on Technology, Innovation and International Affairs offered a close examination of the intersection of geopolitics and technology.

The invitation-only event opened with a fireside chat between Burns and Hoffman, covering questions from China’s digital future to European privacy concerns with U.S. trends in between. Despite waves of nationalism and violent extremism worldwide, Burns struck a note of long-term optimism about the ways in which technology affects individuals’ and nations’ relationships to one another.

On the second day, a lineup of regional and subject-matter experts from Stanford, Carnegie and beyond addressed longstanding concerns in the Middle East, new challenges in Asia, and the myriad opportunities for both connection and conflict offered by rapid technological advances. “We tend to have just one narrative for the Middle East, and that is crisis and conflict,” said venture capitalist Christopher Schroeder, who moderated a discussion among Carnegie and FSI senior scholars on the region. “But I would submit that something else is happening too. Last December I went to a gathering of 5,000 entrepreneurs – the type of event that you would all recognize here in Silicon Valley – but it was in Cairo.”

It was a familiar theme throughout the day, from a forward-looking panel on the growth of Asian economies to a comparison of privacy and cybersecurity issues around the world. Moderated by World Affairs Council CEO Jane Wales, the final panel on “Disrupting International Affairs” featured Carnegie visiting scholar James Rothkopf and Matthew Stepka, the former VP of Google Special Projects.

In an off-the-record keynote conversation, Rice, Albright and Burns discussed the foreign policy highlights of their own tenures and offered candid thoughts on today’s challenges. “In many ways, the digital age poses similar challenges to the nuclear age,” said Burns. “Scholars at Carnegie and at Stanford made profound contributions to the international response to nuclear proliferation. The challenges of the 21^st century require the same focus and discipline, the same commitment to understanding divergent international perspectives, and working toward shared solutions.”

Could out of pocket drug costs be responsible for pandemics? In this Public Health Perspectives article, Marcella Alsan discusses how copayments for antibiotics can cause people in poor areas to turn to unregulated markets.

On May 26, 2016, researchers at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center reported the first case of what they called a “truly pan-drug resistant bacteria.” By now, the story has been well-covered in the media: a month earlier, a 49 year old woman walked into a clinic in Pennsylvania with what seemed to be a urinary tract infection. But tests revealed something far scarier—both for her and public health officials. The strain of E. Coli that infiltrated her body has a gene that makes it bulletproof to colistin, the so-called last resort antibiotic.

Most have pinned the blame for the impending doom of a “post-antibiotic world” on the overuse of antibiotics and a lack of new ones in the development pipeline. But there’s another superbug incubator that hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves: poverty.

Last month at the IMF meeting in Washington, D.C., UK Chancellor George Osborne warned about the potentially devastating human and economic cost of antimicrobial resistance. He called for “the world’s governments and industry leaders to work together in radical new ways.” But Gerry Bloom, a physician and economist at the Institute for Development Studies, argued that any measures to stop overuse and concoct new drugs must be “complemented by investments in measures to ensure universal access to effective antibiotic treatment of common infections.”

“In many countries, poor people obtain these drugs in unregulated markets,” Bloom said. “They often take a partial course and the products may be sub-standard. This increases the risk of resistance.”

For at least fifteen years, we’ve known about these socioeconomic origins of antimicrobial resistance. Other studies have revealed problems with mislabeled or expired or counterfeit drugs. But the clearest link between poverty and the rise of antimicrobial resistance is that poor people may not see a qualified health care provider or complete a course of quality antibiotics. Instead, they might turn to unregulated markets for substandard drugs.

But why do people resort to unregulated markets or take drugs that aren’t that great if they are available? Marcella Alsan, an assistant professor of medicine at the Stanford School of Medicine who studies the relationship between socioeconomic disparities and infectious diseases, led a study that answered this question. In last October’s Lancet Infectious Diseases, Alsan and her colleagues showed that it might have a lot to do with requiring copayments in the public sector. To show this, they analyzed the WHO’s 2014 Antibacterial Resistance Global Surveillance report with an eye toward the usual suspects, such as antibiotic consumption and antibiotic-flooded livestock.

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