The final class will pose nine questions, each question digging into
each of the nine topics covered over the quarter. Pizza at 6pm!
Bechtel Conference Center, EncinaHall
Understanding the nature of violent conflict in the world's most dangerous flashpoints may help find ways to peace and stability, according to a Stanford expert.
Once a soldier, now a scholar, Joe Felter knows better than most the intrinsic meaning of war and conflict – he served on the front lines in the U.S. Special Forces in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan and the Philippines.
Today, the senior research scholar at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperationand research fellow at the Hoover Institution is on a different kind of mission: building knowledge on the subject of politically motivated conflict.
For example, how are the most casualties suffered and under what conditions? Are there patterns to why rebels are surrendering? And how do armed battles affect development and education in local communities?
Answers to these and other questions are found in the Empirical Studies of Conflict project database, which is led by Felter and Jacob Shapiro, his former Stanford political science classmate, now a professor at Princeton University. The effort focuses on insurgency, civil war and other sources of politically motivated violence worldwide. Launched last year, it currently covers the Philippines, Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, Northern Ireland, Mexico, the Israeli-occupied territories, Pakistan and Vietnam. The site includes geospatial and tabular data as well as thousands of documents, archives and interviews.
Since 2009, Felter has collaborated with colleagues at Princeton, the University of California, San Diego, and other institutions in developing the database. Today, they are advising policymakers and military leaders on how best to curb conflict, reduce civilian casualties and promote prosperity. Felter and his colleagues have outlined some of their work in this Foreign Affairs article published in January 2015.
Felter's research on Filipino insurgencies, for instance, has produced significant results. The senior officials there have invited him to brief their military on battlefield trends and counterinsurgency strategy, as Felter and his colleagues have interviewed thousands of combatants as part of the project.
What do they learn about the insurgent mindset? One Islamic militant chief talked tactics with him, then revealed that his greatest tool was his men's belief that Allah was waiting for them on the other side. Others included a Roman Catholic nun who was running guns and money to help the poor and a young college freshman recruited with the promise of $40 a month to support her family.
In the case of the Philippines, Felter had access to more than 100,000 individual reports of conflict episodes dating back to 1975 and more than 13,000 interview transcripts from rebels who were captured or had surrendered over the last 30 years. That information was coded in detail and compiled as part of the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project database. The Philippines is home to some of the most protracted Muslim separatist and communist insurgencies in the world, and that is precisely why the government is interested in learning how to thwart it.
Crystal Lee, a Stanford senior and history major, has been Joe Felter’s research assistant since her freshman year.
"For me, it's kind of validating all the thousands and thousands of hours that went into all our coding," said Felter, adding that the information will help the Philippines government find ways to ease the costs and human suffering in the conflicts it faces.
It has been a transformational journey for Felter, who retired in 2012 from the U.S. Army as a colonel following a career as a Special Forces and foreign area officer with missions and deployments across Asia, Panama, Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2010-11, he commanded the International Security and Assistance Force Counter Insurgency Advisory and Assistance Team in Afghanistan.
"I spent a long time in the military deployed to environments where you could appreciate that what you were doing was having an impact," Felter said.
In higher education now, his vantage point is different from what it was on the front lines. Today, both perspective and policy are two of his main goals.
"Since I transitioned to academia, I haven't lost my commitment to trying to help practitioners in the field to better understand conflict – by using data," Felter said.
Stanford senior Crystal Lee, a history major, has been working with Felter as a research assistant since her freshman year, helping him code and compile the datasets.
"It's been really interesting for me to think about the implications that this type of data analysis has on governments and broader policy work," said Lee, who also has analyzed and reconstructed hundreds of interviews with former rebels for Felter's upcoming book.
She said that a romantic notion exists in Silicon Valley that if one uses a huge database, one can wave a magic wand and believe that so-called "big data" will solve everything. "But it's a really messy field and we've had to use best practices to make sense of the increasingly complicated picture of counterinsurgency and terrorism," she said.
Felter pointed out that to truly comprehend the nature of counterinsurgency in places like the Philippines, Iraq or Afghanistan, one must realize that its roots are in local communities.
"You need to study it at the local level to really understand it," Felter said. "And the Philippines is like a petri dish for studying both insurgency and counterinsurgency because you have multiple, long-running insurgencies, each with distinct characteristics, and with an array of government and military responses to address these threats over time."
The coders are now doubling back over the dataset from 1975 to 2012 to make sure it's accurate and cleaned of any potentially sensitive details before it goes public. The data are the basis for two of Felter's ongoing book projects and dozens of working papers and journal articles.
A Stanford alum, Felter was in the Philippines in 2004 conducting field research as part of his doctoral dissertation when he was first able to gain access to what would become a trove of detailed incident-level data on insurgency and counterinsurgency.
Stanford scholar Joe Felter with members of the First Scout Ranger Regiment, Philippine Army. His research in the Philippines helps inform the Empirical Studies of Conflict database.
After bringing back the data and meeting with his faculty advisers – Stanford political science Professors David Laitin and James Fearon – he realized the extensive incident-level data could be coded in a manner that would make it a tremendous resource for scholars studying civil wars, insurgencies and other forms of politically motivated violence.
"This comprehensive conflict dataset is going to be the holy grail of micro-level conflict data," Felter said. "It has the potential to drive a significant number of publications, reports and analyses, and enable conflict researchers to develop insights and test theories that they would not have been able to do before."
The network is expanding. A dozen young scholars who were supported by funding for the Empirical Studies of Conflict (ESOC) project as postdoctoral fellows have now been placed in tenure-track positions at universities.
"What's unique about ESOC is that we're trying hard to make it easier for others to study conflict by pulling together everything we can on the conflicts we've studied," said Jake Shapiro, an associate professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University and the project's co-director.
On Iraq, for example, the website provides data on conflict outcomes, politics and demographics, in addition to maps, links to other useful information sources and other types of research on Iraq, he said.
Shapiro says researchers working for the Canadian Armed Forces, the World Bank and the U.S. military have already turned to the database for help. Insurgencies cost human lives and dollars, enough so that the United States and the international community are now focused on rebuilding social and political orders in those troubled countries.
As Felter put it, "We are devoted to learning from all those experiences and to making it easier for others to do so as well, so that we can all live more peacefully and safely in the future."
The Empirical Studies of Conflict project includes the following scholarly advances:
• Research on insurgent compensation paid during the U.S. Iraq conflict shows that pay was not based on risk factors.
• Findings show rebel violence will decrease when projects are secure and valued by community members and when implementation is conditional on the behavior of non-combatants.
• A journal article describes the preference for "certainty" in the relationship between violence and economic risk in wartime Afghanistan.
Beth Duff-Brown, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6488,bethduff@stanford.edu
Clifton B. Parker, Stanford News Service: (650) 725-0224, cbparker@stanford.edu
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has just won another landslide victory from snap election last December. After two years of governance, his cabinet is still popular and powerful. There are high chances for him to accomplish tax reform and win the LDP presidential election this fall. The current political situation is often reported as “Prime Minister’s Office’s dominance” or “Abe dominates.” This Abe cabinet is becoming a sharp contrast to past six cabinets, including his own first cabinet. All six cabinets were short tenured, serving just for around a year, and prime ministers’ leadership were weak. Before these six prime minister, however, Junichiro Koizumi commanded strong power and leadership, succeeding in a series of reforms. Why do we witness two totally different outcomes of Japanese prime ministers’ power in the last decade?
In this presentation, Professor Takenaka gives an institutionalist explanation to this puzzle by examining the Japanese parliamentary system. To highlight its nature, he will make a brief comparison with the British system.
He received a B.A. from the Faculty of Law of the University of Tokyo and an M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University. He is the author of Failed Democratization in Prewar Japan: Breakdown of a Hybrid Regime, (Stanford University Press, 2014), and Sangiin to ha [What is House of Councillors], (Chuokoron Shinsha, 2010).
Philippines Conference Room
Encina Hall, 3rd Floor, Central
Douglas Rutzen, president and CEO of the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL), and adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., gave a talk on defending civil society for the Stanford Program on Human Rights’ Winter Speaker Series, “U.S. Human Rights NGOs and International Human Rights,” on January 7, 2015.
Rutzen sounded the alarm of today’s disturbing trend of governments around the world using the rule of law to restrict civic spaces of congregation and protestation. Highlighting that national governments are constitutionally committed to a rule of law, Rutzen claimed this is not being applied in the interests of the citizen but rather to restrict citizens’ criticism of government. Rutzen emphasized that this misuse of the rule of law to restrict civil society is a tool of manipulation utilized not just by nations with a history of civic control, such as Cuba and Russia, but also by liberal democracies, including the United States.
Rutzen noted that the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) established in 2000 were dramatically altered by the attacks of September 11, 2001. NGOs were targeted as potential terrorist organizations, while at the same time recognized for their potential to fight terrorism. This contradiction shows the tension in the role of NGOs in civil society. The challenge now lies in a long-term transformation of the relationship between NGOs representing civil society and national governments.
The talk continued with a discussion with Helen Stacy, director of the Program on Human Rights, and Rutzen. Stacy posed provocative questions that challenged Rutzen to defend his stance with questions on U.S. cultural imperialism; “good” and “bad” civil society groups; and the need to understand domestic civil society engagement with human rights issues as part of international human rights activism.
-Dana Phelps, Program Associate, Program on Human Rights
The White House announced it will host a Summit on Cybersecurity and Consumer Protection at Stanford on Feb. 13, convening major stakeholders to help shape public and private sector efforts to protect consumers and companies from growing network threats.
The all-day event will include senior leaders from the White House and across federal government; CEOs from a wide range of industries including financial services, technology, retail and communications companies; law enforcement officials; and consumer advocates. Stanford faculty members and students currently researching cybersecurity issues will be involved throughout the summit.
"We are honored to host this White House summit at Stanford University and are excited to play a pivotal role in convening experts from government, industry and academia," said Amy Zegart, co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford. "Stanford is very engaged in studying cyber-related issues, and we look forward to enhancing this work by sharing our expertise on the cybersecurity issues that are so critical for the United States, its consumers and its businesses."
Topics at the summit will include "increasing public-private partnerships and cybersecurity information sharing, creating and promoting improved cybersecurity practices and technologies, and improving adoption and use of more secure payment technologies," the White House said in a statement.
Stanford announced a major Cyber Initiative in November that will apply broad campus expertise to the diverse challenges cyber-technologies pose for virtually every facet of our personal, governmental and economic lives. Funded with a $15 million grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Stanford Cyber Initiative draws upon Stanford's experience with multi-disciplinary, university-wide initiatives to focus research on the core themes of trustworthiness, governance and the unexpected impacts of technological change.
"Stanford has tremendous depth in the information security field, which is playing a deepening role in every facet of our lives," said Stanford Law Professor George Triantis, who chairs the Cyber Initiative. "Stanford is conducting extensive research into Internet security across a wide swath of disciplines – computer science, law, engineering, medicine, political science, economics and education. Collaborations with industry and government are vital, and we applaud the White House for drawing us all together here at Stanford."
Cybersecurity is expected to be raised as a key priority by President Obama in his State of the Union address next week. The White House Summit is also the next step in the President's BuySecure Initiative, which was launched in November 2014, and will help advance national efforts the government has led over the last two years with executive orders on consumer financial protection and critical cybersecurity infrastructure.
Details are still being finalized for the summit at Stanford, which will feature keynote speeches, panel discussions, and small group workshops, allowing participants to build on efforts in the public and private sectors to further improve cybersecurity practices.
Stanford units expected to be involved in the summit include the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Stanford Cyber Initiative, the Center for International Security and Cooperation, the Hoover Institution and the schools of Engineering, Law, Business, Medicine and Education, among others.
Public Welcome • Light Refreshments
The Silicon Valley - New Japan Project
Cypress Semiconductor Auditorium (CISX Auditorium)
Paul G. Allen Building, Stanford University
330 Serra Mall, Stanford CA 94305
https://www.google.com/maps?q=CISX+Cypress+Semiconductor+Auditorium@37.4295793,-122.1748332
This event has been cancelled. We will update our website once the new date has been determined.
Encina Hall, C148
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305
Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a faculty member of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also Director of Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy, and a professor (by courtesy) of Political Science.
Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His book In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir will be published in fall 2026.
Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation, and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004. He is editor-in-chief of American Purpose, an online journal.
Dr. Fukuyama holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), Aarhus University (Denmark), the Pardee Rand Graduate School, and Adam Mickiewicz University (Poland). He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Trustees of Freedom House, and the Board of the Volcker Alliance. He is a fellow of the National Academy for Public Administration, a member of the American Political Science Association, and of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.
(October 2025)
Karl Eikenberry, a William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at FSI, believes the humanities belong at the center of American foreign policy. The retired U.S. Army lieutenant general and former ambassador to Afghanistan put cultural ventures, such as the Turquoise Mountain project, at the heart of his diplomacy.
Eikenberry continues his advocacy through his leadership on the congressionally commissioned report "The Heart of the Matter: The Humanities and Social Sciences for a Vibrant, Competitive, and Secure Nation." You can listen to him in conversation with Jerome McDonnell, long-time host of Worldview, the global affairs program on WBEZ public radio in Chicago. The program, recorded on Nov. 8, 2014, was presented in partnership with the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, as part of the 25th Anniversary Chicago Humanities Festival, Journeys.
To predict how agriculture will be affected by future climate change, scientists often rely on a single crop model – a computer simulation of how a specific crop’s yield responds to temperature changes. By combining 30 such models into a single study, and comparing each model against data from existing experimental wheat fields around the world, a team of researchers including Stanford professor David Lobell have developed a more powerful and accurate way to predict future wheat yields.
In a new analysis published in Nature Climate Change, the team’s results support previous work suggesting that wheat yields around the world are sensitive to rising temperatures. Using the new method of analysis, the team estimates an average six percent future yield loss for every one degree Celsius rise in global mean temperature.
“Combining 30 models gives us a much greater ability to predict future impacts and understand past impacts,” said Lobell. “This is a clear step forward.”
Lobell is professor of environmental earth system science in the School of Earth Science at Stanford and the deputy director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment. He is a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
The estimated six percent yield loss for every degree increase is equivalent to about a quarter of the current volume of wheat traded globally in 2013. Yields at some sites, notably those in Mexico, Brazil, India and Sudan, show simulated wheat yield losses of more than 20 percent - in Sudan’s case, more than 50 percent - under a scenario in which global mean temperature rises by two degrees Celsius.
With higher temperatures also comes an increase in the variability of wheat yields, both by location and between years. More fluctuation in wheat yields could mean greater global price volatility for the staple crop.
Approximately 70 percent of the wheat produced today is grown either on irrigated plots or in rainy regions. The research team accounted for this factor by focusing its simulations on multiple regional-specific varieties of wheat that are commonly grown under these conditions.
The new paper includes several suggestions for avoiding some of the predicted yield losses. For example, some varieties of wheat are more heat tolerant than others, and farmers in the places hardest hit by rising temperatures could switch varieties to capitalize on this heat resistance. The effects of rising temperatures could also be managed, in part, by adjusting sowing and harvesting dates, or changing the way fertilizers are applied to crops.
Contact: David Lobell, dlobell@stanford.edu
