According to a common view in Mexico today, the attempt to transform Mexican political institutions according to liberal values since the nineteenth century has been a complete failure. On this view, the reasons for this failure are, primarily, that liberal values and ideas were “foreign” and “imported”, such that they could hardly have taken root in a society that had recently emerged from three centuries of colonial rule and was, therefore, backwards and “traditional”. Scholars often complain that liberals failed to realize the values of freedom and equality, that there is no rule of law, no public culture of toleration, and no effective enforcement of fundamental individual rights either civil or political.

On May 10-11, 2010 the Program on Good Governance and Political Reform in the Arab World at CDDRL held its international inaugural conference. In line with the Arab Reform Program's vision, the conference featured internationally renowned scholars, activists, and practitioners from the Arab world, Europe and the United States. Over the two days, conference participants engaged in multidisciplinary debates addressing hard politics as well as soft politics, and analyzing political reform from different angles, with panels on the economy, state systems, the media, civil society, political opposition, youth politics, and the role of international actors. Problems facing political reform in the Arab world today were discussed and scrutinized, as were possible paths forward. The conference debates unearthed the need for a deep understanding of the problems facing political reform in the region that is driven by an analysis of long-term and often ignored issues that are at the core of political developments. The debates also highlighted that problems and prospects for reform are different in each Arab country because each country has its own unique set of issues and because within each country different ethnic groups, classes, and locales have different takes on and stakes in political developments. The conference closed with a speech by Dr. Saad Eddin Ibrahim.

Access to life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical treatments is a nagging problem for millions of Latin Americans. In several countries of the region, judicial actions for the protection of basic rights have proved to be instrumental for gaining access to such goods. Brazil and Colombia are, allegedly, the two Latin American countries with the largest number of right to health cases. Everaldo Lamprea suggests that dismantling right to health litigation in order to reduce public costs--as was recently proposed by the Colombian government-- would be a catastrophic event for many Colombians, trapped in a heavily privatized and deregulated health system where many life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical treatments are out of the reach of most pockets. Lamprea will suggest that a more reasonable governmental reaction should include an analysis of the role played in the current health-sector crisis by global actors such as International Financial Institutions and BigPharma companies

On November 5-6  2010, the global Network of Democracy Research Institutes (NDRI) convened a conference in Quito, Ecuador, on "Political Clientalism, Social Policy, and the Quality of Democracy: Evidence from Latin America, Lessons from Other Regions." The meeting was cosponsored by three NDRI member institutes: the Washington-based International Forum for Democratic Studies (IFDS) of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Ecuador's Grupo FARO, and the Program on Poverty and Governance at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL).

The conference aimed to explore, in comparative framework, the modus operandi of political clientalism in the realm of social policies as well as the strategies that might be employed to combat it. The conference brought together 21 scholars and practitioners from around the world, including several from South America, particularly the Andean region. Participants from CDDRL included; Larry Diamond, Beatriz Magaloni, Francis Fukuyama, and Simeon Nichter.

Please see the attached conference report, which summarizes the main issues and key findings discussed at the meeting. The papers presented at the conference will be compiled into a volume edited by Diego Abente, deputy director of the International Forum for Democratic Studies at NED.

Egyptian activists made history in February 2011 when they overturned a thirty-year dictatorship, in part thanks to their mastery of social media.

On April 4, the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University together with the Cloud to Street Initiative, will be holding a Digital Townhall meeting to connect activists who were leading the protest movement in Cairo with researchers at Stanford, Harvard, and the University of British Columbia. This will be an opportunity to hear directly from activists about their experiences leading protests, using social media to influence events, and what assistance they could use to increase their influence going forward. 

The format will include a panel of four activists speaking by live video feed, with participants in North America sending questions by chat. You may log in to the conversation from any internet connection, or you may join us in person from the CISAC conference room in Encina Hall.

Early in the Supreme Court oral arguments in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., Justice Kennedy alerted the plaintiffs' lawyer that, for him, "the case turns on this:... 'No other nation in the world permits its court to exercise universal civil jurisdiction over alleged extraterritorial human rights abuses to which the nation has no connection." That statement, quoting an amicus brief filed for one of the defendants, is true when taken literally, but is misleading inasmuch as it fails to take into account that analogous suits are allowed in teh civil-law world of Continental Europe if one knows how to go beyond the literal, as transposing from one legal system into another requies. Universal jurisdiction for jus cogens violations has found a fooring in the criminal law of civilian States for reasons tied to deep systemic attributes not shared by the United States legal order.