Rising leaders from some of the world’s most complex and challenging nations, including China, Russia, Ukraine, Iraq, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, have just completed a three-week seminar at Stanford as Draper Hills Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development. This year’s extraordinary class of fellows included members of parliament, government advisors, civic activists, leading jurists, journalists, international development experts and founders of non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

Each year, several hundred applicants apply to FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), the convener of the program, for the 26-28 slots available to study and help foster linkages among democracy, economic development, human rights, and the rule of law. Now in its fifth year, the program has received generous gifts from William Draper III, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, in honor of his father, Maj. Gen. William H. Draper, Jr., a chief advisor to Gen. George Marshall and chief diplomatic administrator of the Marshall Plan in Germany, and Ingrid von Mangoldt Hills, a former journalist, in honor of her husband, Reuben Hills, a leading San Francisco philanthropist and president and chairman of the board of Hills Bros. Coffee.

Draper Hills Summer Fellows are innovative, courageous, and committed leaders, who strive to improve governance, enhance civic participation, and invigorate development under very challenging circumstances," said CDDRL Director Larry Diamond. “This year’s fellows were absolutely extraordinary, learning from us we hope, but also teaching all of us about the progress they are making and the obstacles they confront in a diverse set of countries.  We were not only sobered by the difficulties they must address on a daily basis but also uplifted by their accounts of programs that are working to deepen democracy, improve government accountability, strengthen the rule of law, energize civil society, and enhance the institutional environment for broadly shared economic growth.”

The three-week seminar is taught by an all star faculty, which in addition to Diamond, includes CDDRL Deputy Director Kathryn Stoner, Stanford president emeritus and constitutional law expert Gerhard Casper, FSI Deputy Director and political science professor Stephen D. Krasner, Erik Jensen and Allen S. Weiner from the Stanford law school, Avner Greif from the Department of Economics, Peter Henry from the Graduate School of Business, FSI Senior Fellow Helen Stacy, former FSI Director and current Program on Food Security and the Environment deputy director Walter P. Falcon, Mark C. Thurber, acting director of FSI’s Program on Energy and Sustainable Development, and Nicholas Hope, director of the Stanford Center on International Development.

Other leading experts and practitioners who engaged the fellows included democracy and governance expert Francis Fukuyama, who joins CDDRL as Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow in July 2010, National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman, United States Court of Appeals Judge Pamela Rymer, International Center on Nonviolent Conflict founding chair Peter Ackerman, the center’s president, Jack DuVall, former Peruvian president Alejandro Toledo, and former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Condoleezza Rice.

Faculty devoted the first week of the seminar to defining the fundamentals of democracy, good governance, economic development, and the rule of law, and in the second week turned to the issue of transitions and the feedback mechanisms between democracy, development, and a predictable rule of law. The third week examined the critical – and often controversial – role of international assistance to foster and support democracy, judicial reform, and economic development, including the proper role of foreign aid.

Against this backdrop, fellows emphasized domestic imperatives for fostering growth, social inclusion, and transformation, centering on the importance of political will and sound institutions.  In session after session, they wrestled with the concrete and all too common impediments to progress—from corruption, cronyism, and authoritarian regimes, to the fragility of conflict-ridden, multi-ethnic polities.  As an activist from strife-torn Iraq said, “Democracy is not just a way of governing. It is a way of living, a way of thinking about life.”“Democracy is not just a way of governing. It is a way of living, a way of thinking about life”

In spirited debates, in the formal seminar sessions and beyond the classroom to the Munger residence where the fellows stayed, the fellows stressed how they had all taught and learned from each other.  A rising leader from South Africa aptly summarized, “We have dispelled each other’s myths.”

As the Draper Hills Fellows expressed their profound gratitude to their faculty and mentors, they reinforced the importance of staying in touch through a virtual online community – a “common space” as defined by a member of parliament from Ukraine, that would let them look forward and look back, perhaps a decade from now, at case studies of success and failure, and the all important roles that political will and leadership played in determining outcomes.  “Stay tuned,” said Diamond and Stoner-Weiss. “Important lessons are still to come.”

Notices of the demise of Iran’s Green Revolution are premature. Without question, the tyrannical triumvirate — Ayotallah Ali Khamenei, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Revolutionary Guard — have dealt a crippling blow to the popular movement protesting their electoral coup of June 12.

Thousands of Iranians have been arrested and savagely tortured — from street protesters to election campaign organizers for Mir Hussein Moussavi, the likely victor in that contest. Many are now being forced to “confess” to having been agents of the United States or Britain.

We have seen this play before, not simply in Iran but in other tyrannies that suppressed mass movements for democratic change with massive violence and terror.

But Iran in 2009 is not China in 1989, Burma in 1990 or Belarus in 2006. The crisis in the Islamic Republic has exposed and widened massive cracks within the ruling elite. Such divisions are always a sign of an impending crackup of dictatorship.

Despite the rush to bury Iran’s reformist movement as another lost cause, Iran remains at a possible political tipping point. Democracies around the world have a duty — not simply to themselves, but to their strategic interests — to weigh in. They must not be deterred by threats to shun talks over Iran’s nuclear program.

President Obama has gotten it right by signaling America’s support for peaceful protest, human rights and the rule of law. More explicit language, not to mention action, would only play into the hands of the most cynical and vicious conservative elements in Iran. Moreover, with no diplomatic ties and all but no trade with Iran, there is little more the U.S. could do right now to pressure the regime.

But there are over 100 other democracies in the world. It is time that their voices were heard and their actions felt in Tehran.

Britain shares with the U.S. the handicap of a past history of negative interference in Iran. But Britain has diplomatic and economic ties to the regime, and breaking or suspending those will weaken Ayatollah Khamenei and his reactionary allies.

Moreover, Britain can have a unique kind of impact in Iran: For more than a century, Iranians have believed in the omnipotence of the “British hand” in the affairs of their country. Any indication that Britain is no longer willing to do business with the Islamic regime will hearten the Iranian people and undermine the regime’s aura of invincibility.

Germany, France and Italy are major trading partners with Iran. They have little history of colonial interference in Iranian affairs. Their decision to refuse to recognize the Ahmadinejad regime would have an immense effect. More compelling still would be a similar declaration from the entire Group of 8 at its impending summit.

The smaller and less powerful democracies can also have an impact. It would be preposterous for Iranian hardliners to attribute ulterior strategic motives to actions by the Scandinavian countries or the Netherlands, Ireland, Canada or Slovenia. If a coalition of such countries were to condemn the crackdown, call for a release of political prisoners and demand full respect for human rights — and back up these positions with a downgrading of diplomatic and trade ties — this would send a powerful message to both sides in Iran.

Many democracies around the world, including the above, have diplomatic ties with Iran. It is important that they maintain their embassies in Tehran. But they should now refuse to recognize the legitimacy of Ahmadinejad’s government.

The most powerful coalition of democracies in the world, the 27-member European Union, is now debating whether to withdraw their ambassadors from Tehran in protest over the detention of the British Embassy’s Iranian personnel.

The withdrawal of E.U. ambassadors would send a stunning message to the Iranian hardliners that coups and bloody suppression of peaceful protests carry a heavy price in international standing.

With the simple diplomatic act of denying legitimacy — something nearly all democratic forces in Iran are now asking of the world — the democracies of the world can give a needed boost to the forces of democratic change in Iran and earn the lasting gratitude of a movement that will eventually triumph.

Stanford President Emeritus Gerhard Casper, the Peter and Helen Bing Professor in Undergraduate Education, professor of law, and FSI Senior Fellow, and James J. Sheehan, the Dickason Professor in the Humanities and a professor of history (emeritus), have been awarded the Great Cross of the Order of Merit with Star (Grosses Bundesverdienstkreuz mit Stern), among the highest tributes paid to individuals for service to the Federal Republic of Germany. The award is offered for many types of service, including political, economic, social, intellectual, and philanthropic contributions. German President Horst Köhler personally presented the award to Casper and Sheehan in an award ceremony in Berlin on June 8, 2009.

While in Berlin, Casper also delivered the keynote address in commemoration of the 150^th anniversary of the death of Alexander von Humboldt, the German naturalist and explorer. Von Humboldt, the younger brother of the Prussian minister and philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt, traveled extensively in Latin America and published a series of widely read volumes over the ensuing 21 years. A later, five-volume work, Kosmos, attempted to unify the various branches of scientific knowledge. The title of Casper’s address (in translation) was “A Young Man from ‘Ultima Thule’ visits Jefferson: Alexander von Humboldt in Washington.” In medieval geographies, “Ultima Thule” may denote any distant place located beyond the “borders of the known world” and was Humboldt’s ironic way of referring to 19^th century Prussia.

The 2008-09 academic year was a busy time for the Southeast Asia Forum (SEAF).  A dozen on-campus lectures by Southeast Asianists from Australia, Germany, Malaysia, Thailand, and the United States ranged from country-specific topics such as labor resistance in Vietnam, political opposition in Malaysia, and the 2009 elections in Indonesia, to broader-brush treatments of Southeast Asian identities and modernities, regional repercussions of the global economic slowdown, and the wellsprings of “late democratization” across East Asia.

The lecture on “late democratization” was delivered to a capacity audience by the 2008-09 National University of Singapore-Stanford University Lee Kong Chian (LKC) Distinguished Fellow, Mark Thompson.  Mark is a political science professor in Germany at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.  He and another 08-09 SEAF speaker, Australian National University Prof. Ed Aspinall, jointly with State University of New York-Albany Prof. Meredith Weiss, will lead a 28-30 August 2009 workshop in Singapore under the auspices of the NUS-Stanford Initiative (NSI).  The workshop will review and analyze the record and prospects of student movements in Asia.  Attendees will include authors of chapters of a book-in-progress stemming from the research and writing on democratization done by Thompson during his fellowship at Stanford.

A second NSI awardee this past academic year was the 2008 NUS-Stanford LKC Distinguished Lecturer Joel Kahn, professor of anthropology emeritus at La Trobe University, Melbourne, who gave three talks at SEAF this year: 

• Science and Secularity: Rethinking Religous Reform
• Dynamics of Identity: Empires, States & Groups
• Comparing Modernities: Is Southeast Asia Unique?
   

His insightful interpretations of identity and modernity in Southeast Asia may be heard via the relevant audio icons at the links above.

Off-campus lectures involving SEAF included three panel discussions convened to launch Hard Choices: Security, Democracy, and Regionalism in Southeast Asia (introductory chapter and information on ordering the title are available), published by Stanford’s Shorenstein APARC and the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), Singapore, in 2008-09.  The book was edited by SEAF Director Donald K. Emmerson.  

Hosting these launches in their respective cities were ISEAS in Singapore, the Asia Society in New York, and Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C.  Panelists at these events included Ellen Frost (Peterson Institute for International Economics), Mike Green (Georgetown University School of Foreign Service), Alan Chong Chia Siong (NUS), and Joern Dosch (Leeds University).  

Another panelist was John Ciorciari, a Shorenstein Fellow at Shorenstein APARC in 2007-08 and a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution in 2008-09.  In 2009, despite the U.S. recession and a correspondingly competitive academic marketplace, he published several Southeast Asia-related pieces, completed and submitted to a university press the manuscript he had worked on at APARC, and won a tenure-track assistant professorship at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Policy starting in September 2009.  Congratulations, John! 

Apart from speaking at the launches of Hard Choices, Don Emmerson gave papers on Indonesian foreign policies and Asia Pacific regionalism in Jakarta and Manila, and discussed these and other topics at events in Chicago and Los Angeles among other venues.  At two conferences in Washington,D.C. on a proposed U.S.-Indonesian “comprehensive partnership,” he addressed what such a relationship could and should entail.  In Spring 2009 at Stanford, he served as faculty sponsor and lecturer in a student-initiated course on Thailand.  His interviewers during the year included the BBC, Radio Australia, The New York Times, and various Indonesian media.

SEAF organized its final on-campus event of the 2008-09 academic year in June 2009 — an invitation-only roundtable co-sponsored with the U.S.-ASEAN Business Council.  Nine scholars met with three current American ambassadors to Southeast Asian countries for off-the-record conversations on seven topics of mutual interest regarding the region and its relations with the United States.

None of the above could have happened without the talent, friendliness, and all-round indispensability of SEAF’s administrative associate, Lisa Lee.  Thank you, Lisa!

Prospect:  2009-2010

As of June 2009, SEAF anticipated hosting, directly or indirectly, these scholars of Southeast Asia during academic year 2008-09:

• Sudarno Sumarto is the director of the SMERU Research Institute, Jakarta.  He will be at Stanford for the full academic year as the 2009-10 Shorenstein APARC-Asia Foundation Visiting Fellow. While on campus, Sudarno will do research and write on the political economy of development in Indonesia.  He is likely to focus within that field on the economic consequences of violent conflict, policy lessons to be drawn from the record of cash-transfer welfare programs, and whether and how such aid has affected its recipients’ voting behavior. 
• James Hoesterey will spend academic year 2009-10 at APARC as the year’s Shorenstein Fellow.  He will revise for publication his University of Wisconsin-Madison doctoral dissertation in anthropology on “Sufis and Self-help Gurus:  Postcolonial Psychology, Religious Authority, and Muslim Subjectivity in Indonesia.” Jim researched this topic in Indonesia over two years of fieldwork focused on the outlook and activities of a popular, charismatic, media-savvy Muslim preacher, Abdullah Gymnastiar.  Jim’s aim is to understand and interpret how a new generation of Muslim preachers and trainers in Indonesia has found a marketable niche and acquired personal and religious authority by combining piety with practical advice. 
• Thitinan Pongsudhirak is an associate professor in international relations at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, where he also heads the Institute of Security and International Studies.  He will be at Stanford in Spring 2010, one of four visiting experts from overseas in a new joint effort by the Stanford Humanities Center and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies to bring “high-profile international scholars into the intellectual life of Stanford.” 

Together with SEAF, the Center for East Asian Studies and the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law will co-host Thitinan during his stay.  While at Stanford he will lecture and write on Thai politics and foreign policy, among other possible topics.  His op ed in the 18 April 2009 New York Times, “Why Thais Are Angry,” may be accessed at the New York Times.

Christian von Luebke, a 2008-09 Shorenstein Fellow, will remain at Stanford in 2009-2010 as a visiting scholar on a German Science Foundation fellowship.

He will enlarge, for publication, the focus of his doctoral dissertation, on the political economy of subnational policy reform in Indonesia, to encompass the Philippines and China as well.  To that end, he did preparatory fieldwork in Manila in Summer 2009.

SEAF is happy to congratulate all four of these 2009-2010 scholars for winning these intensely competitive awards!  

In addition to sponsoring the lectures these scholars are expected to give, SEAF will host a full roster of occasional speakers from the United States and other countries in AY 2009-2010.  These speakers will analyze and assess, for example, the (in)efficacy of ex-Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s welfare programs in Thailand, the role of intra-military tensions in propelling Asian transitions from authoritarian to democratic rule, and aspects of Japan’s occupation of Southeast Asia during World War II that need reconsideration.

As for the 2009-10 iteration of the NUS-Stanford Initiative and its fellowship and lectureship awards, as of June 2009 this prospect was on hold pending clarification of NSI’s financial base, which has been affected by the global economic downturn.  Whatever the status of NSI in 2009-10, SEAF’s speakers, whether resident on campus or invited for one-time talks, should make up in quality for the modest shortfall in quantity—not filling one slot for a visitor—that the possible absence of an NSI-funded scholar would imply.

Controversy:  “Islamism” and Its Discontents

SEAF expects to learn in 2009-10 of the publication of one or more books written wholly or partly at Stanford under its auspices.  One of these titles is Islamism: Contested Perspectives on Political Islam.  It is set to appear by November 2009 and can be ordered now from Stanford University Press at http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=11926.  

In this volume, SEAF’s director debates a friend and colleague, Middle Eastern and Islamic studies expert and Hofstra University anthropologist Dan Varisco.  They disagree over the meaning of the term “Islamism” and the (un)desirability of its use in discourse about Muslims and their faith.  Of particular sensitivity in this context is the (mis)use of “Islamism” to describe or interpret instances of violence that have been or may be committed by Muslims in the name of Islam.  A dozen other experts on Islam, mostly Muslims, contribute shorter comments on “Islamism” and on the positions taken by Emmerson and Varisco.  If one early reviewer turns out to be right, “this lively work will be a great help for anyone concerned with current debates between Islamic nations and the West.” 

At Stanford in February 2009, Don Emmerson conveyed his and Dan Varisco’s views to a standing-room-only lecture and discussion hosted by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies entitled “Debating Islamism: Pro, Semi-pro, Con, and Why Bother?” (audio recording available).  One listener later commented anonymously on the talk.  Also relevant, in the context of larger questions regarding how best to convey Muslims’ lives and religion to non-Muslims, is Jonathan Gelbart's article "Who Speaks For Islam? Not John Esposito".

Don does not know the authors of these posts; ran across their comments by chance while cyber-surfing; and does not necessarily endorse their views, let alone views to be found in the sources to which these comments may be electronically linked.  But the blog and the article do contribute to a debate whose importance was illustrated at the very end of Stanford’s 2008-09 academic year by Barack Obama’s own treatment of Islam and Muslims in the unprecedented speech that he gave at Cairo University on 4 June 2009.  After he spoke, in conversation with an Indonesian journalist, Obama promised to visit—actually, to revisit—Jakarta on his next trip to Asia.  That stop is most likely to take place before or after he attends the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in nearby Singapore in November 2009.  Viewers interested in a commentary can also read Don's Obama's Trifecta: So Far, So Good.