By now, those following the news on Syria have been saturated with analysis, data, information, and misinformation on developments there since 2011. Yet we observe an increasing gravitation to mutually exclusive narratives that adorn websites and publications on the situation in Syria: (a) the narrative of pure and consistent revolution versus that of (b) external conspiracy/designs on Syria. Both narratives carry grains of truth, but are encumbered by maximalist claims and fundamental blindspots that forfeit various potentials for enduring cease-fires and/or transitions, let alone mutual understanding. This talk will address these competing narratives in the context of international escalation marked by increasing US-Russian tension and continued multi-layered conflicts on the battlefield. It closes with addressing a framework for understanding and gauging potential prospects despite conflicting declarations by all parties involved.
CISAC's William J. Perry created a free, public 10-week course for people to learn more about the looming dangers of nuclear catastrophe. His new MOOC, developed with the support of Stanford’s Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning, offers a chance to take that message to a much larger audience.
“I believe that the likelihood of a nuclear catastrophe is greater today than it was during the cold war,” said Perry, who recently wrote a New York Times op-ed on why America should dismantle its ICBM missile systems.
Because the continued risk of nuclear catastrophe isn’t widely recognized, Perry believes, “our nuclear policies don’t reflect the danger. So I’ve set off on a mission to educate people on how serious the problem is. Only then can we develop the policies that are appropriate for the danger we face.”
The course offers participants the chance to ask questions and participate in discussions via an online forum, which Perry and his fellow experts will address during weekly video chats. Each week, Perry will be joined in conversation by top thinkers, including CISAC's Martha Crenshaw, David Holloway and Siegfried Hecker, Scott D. Sagan, and Philip Taubman. George Shultz, the former secretary of state, will also participate. Outside experts include Ploughshares Fund president Joseph Cirincione, nuclear negotiator James Goodby, former Russian Deputy Minister of Defense Andre Kokoshin, and Joseph Martz of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Learn more about "Living at the Nuclear Brink" in this story or watch a video. Register for the course here. It is now open for enrollment and begins Oct. 4.
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William J. Perry has created a new, free online course for people to learn about the risk of nuclear catastrophe.
The CISAC lecture series, "Security Matters," surveyed the most pressing security issues facing the world today. Topics include cybersecurity, nuclear proliferation, insurgency and intervention, terrorism, biosecurity, lessons learned from the Cold War and Cuban Missile Crisis – as well as the future of U.S. leadership in the world.
The lectures come almost entirely from the 2014 winter term of International Security (PS114S), co-taught by intelligence expert and CISAC Co-Director Amy Zegart and terrorism authority Martha Crenshaw co-taught the Security Matters class in 2015. (Zegart recently co-wrote a journal paper on why the U.S. might adjust its national security approach in light of a changing international order.)
“This series is the first in what we hope will be a continuing experiment of new modes and methods to enhance our education mission,” said Zegart. “We have two goals in mind: The first is to expand CISAC's reach in educating the world about international security issues. The second is to innovate inside our Stanford classrooms.”
A computer workstation bears the National Security Agency logo inside the Threat Operations Center inside the Washington suburb of Fort Meade, Maryland, intelligence gathering operation in 2006. The Security Matters class lectures examined the many facets of U.S. and global security.
Martin Hellman is not your average cryptography pioneer.
Hellman, who is known for his invention of public key cryptography (along with Whitfield Duffie and Ralph Merkle), has a life’s journey to share in story form, one that weaves together the most complex global flashpoints of our age with the deeply personal of any age. He and his wife’s new book, A New Map for Relationships: Creating True Love at Home and Peace on the Planet, spans far and wide, covering nuclear risks in North Korea, Iran, and America’s Middle Eastern wars.
But that is not all. He and his wife Dorothie Hellman open up about their marital struggles to show how they eventually reached a point of harmony and true love for each other. As Martin Hellman sees it, conflict in the international and interpersonal arenas has much in common.
“You can’t separate nuclear war from conventional war and conventional war from personal war,” he said in an interview. Hellman is a professor emeritus of electrical engineering and faculty affiliate at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.
Just as he and Dorothie (self-acknowledged polar opposites) often butted heads during the first 10 or 15 years of marriage, nations too navigate dangerously outmoded “maps” to protect their national security and interests. Yet these “maps” are soon outdated, whether on the global stage or in the home. Hellman said, however, that differences of opinion, which revolve around fights to prove who is “right,” could instead be transformed into opportunities to learn from one another – and to expand peace in the world.
“You have to believe in the seemingly impossible gifts of unconditional love and greater peace in the world, and then dedicate yourself to discovering how to achieve them,” he said.
Cultivating inner, outer peace
He said that society only truly changes based on individual changes, so he calls for action in how people live their everyday lives. When countries fail to respect each other – and ignore the influence of history on those countries – then conflict is more likely, and it is similar to a person disrespecting another.
“You will see an immediate payoff as your relationships flower,” he wrote in the book. “The small impact that each of us can have on changing the world does not feel concrete enough to most people, but seeing progress in your personal relationships is very concrete.”
That dedication to unconditional love, he said, is the way that individuals can become models for what is needed globally.
And the time is now, he suggests, for such change if our living generations are to leave a more peaceful world for those who follow us. From Afghanistan to Cuba, Russia, Iraq to North Korea and beyond, the countries of the world need a journey of healing and reconciliation, as he writes in the book.
Today, the stakes could not be higher, Hellman noted. Long-running strategies like nuclear deterrence are risky and illogical – over time, given probability theory and the chances of mistake or malice, they won’t work.
“The United States thinks it’s a superpower, but how can we be when Russia or China could destroy us in less than a hour?” he said. “How is that being a superpower?”
As William J. Perry, the former U.S. Secretary of Defense and Stanford professor emeritus at CISAC, said on behalf of the Hellmans’ book, “The struggle for interpersonal dominance can lead to the end of a marriage, but the struggle for geopolitical dominance can lead to the end of civilization.”
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A man adjusts a spotlight above the stage before world leaders' family picture during the Nuclear Security Summit in The Hague March 25, 2014. In his new book, CISAC's Martin Hellman writes that when nations and people get together to talk and learn from one another, peace can be the result.
The 12th annual Draper Hills Summer Fellows Programgathered 25 democracy leaders from around the developing world for a three-week training program on democracy, good governance, and the rule of law reform. Selected from a large pool of applicants, the fellows have diverse backgrounds across sectors and geographies, working in civil society, public service, social enterprise, media and technology.
Fellows were instructed by an all-star roster of Stanford scholars and policy experts, including former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; FSI Director and former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul; CDDRL Mosbacher Director Francis Fukuyama and Larry Diamond, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Fellows also met industry leaders such as Eric Schmidt of Google, democracy leaders such as Carl Gershman of the National Endowment for Democracy and others. During the program, they shared their personal stories about the struggle in their home countries, but also stories of their fight for justice, equality, and democracy, stories of optimism and endurance.
You can find some of their talks below and for more videos visit our YouTube channel.
Kasha Nabagesera (Uganda)
The founding member of Uganda's LGBTI Movement
"I am the only founding member of Uganda's LGBTI movement who is still based in the country"
Kasha Nabagesera is the executive director of Kuchu Times Media Group, the first LGBTI media platform in Africa. She is known as the “founding mother” of the LGBTI movement in Uganda - where homosexuality is illegal - advocating for equal rights and the eradication of all forms of discrimination based on sexual orientation. Listen to her story about big losses and big wins, everyday dangers and hope.
Rafael Marques de Morais (Angola)
Investigative reporter, MakaAngola
"Why the government is after you when you are sleeping so much?"
Rafael Marques de Morais is an award-winning journalist and human rights activist in Angola, working to investigate corruption and abuse of power by the country’s ruling family. He founded Makaangola, a watchdog website dedicated to exposing corruption and human rights abuses in Angola. Find out why his son thinks that his father is harmless for the government.
Belabbes Benkredda (Algeria)
The founder of Munathara Initiative
"Debate is the central part of the democratic equation."
Belabbes Benkredda is an award-winning social innovator and the founder of the Munathara Initiative, the Arab world’s largest online and television debate forum highlighting voices of youth, women, and marginalized communities. Operating in 11 Arab countries, Munathara’s monthly prime-time TV debates are the only civil society-run, independent political talk program on Arabic television. Munathara Initiative organized over 650 workshops with more than 10 thousand participants from 12 countries. They have around 90 thousand of registered users. More importantly, Munathara Initiative provided safe public space for young women to voice their opinions and mark their presence in public, traditionally dominated by the middle-aged men.
Sex differences in mortality vary over time and place as a function of social, health, and medical circumstances. The magnitude of these variations, and their response to large socioeconomic changes, suggest that biological differences cannot fully account for sex differences in survival. Drawing on a wide swath of mortality data across countries and over time, we develop a set of empiric observations with which any theory about excess male mortality and its correlates will have to contend. We show that as societies develop, M/F survival first declines and then increases, a “sex difference in mortality transition” embedded within the demographic and epidemiologic transitions. After the onset of this transition, cross-sectional variation in excess male mortality exhibits a consistent pattern of greater female resilience to mortality under socio-economic adversity. The causal mechanisms underlying these associations merit further research.
This event has reached capacity. Please join us to watch the live-stream at this link.
The symposium will focus on the key questions that impact health through the year 2020. How could the 2016 election affect health care in the U.S.? How will payment reform affect health systems, physicians and patients? Are the insurance exchanges viable? What challenges pose the biggest threat to global health? Experts from Stanford and beyond address these topics and more as they discuss the future of health policy.
Lloyd Minor, Dean, Stanford University School of Medicine
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Minor, MD, is a scientist, surgeon and academic leader. He is the Carl and Elizabeth Naumann Dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine, a position he has held since December 2012. Minor leads more than 1,500 faculty and 1,000 students at the oldest medical school in the West and has made precision health — the prevention of disease before it strikes — a hallmark of research, education and patient care at Stanford Medicine.
Bob Kocher,a partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Venrock
Bob Kocher
Kocher, MD, is a partner at Venrock who focuses on healthcare IT and services investments and is a consulting professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. He served in the Obama Administration as special assistant to the president for health care and economic policy and was one of the key shapers of the Affordable Care Act.
David Entwistle, President and CEO, Stanford Health Care
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Entwistle joined Stanford Health Care as its President and CEO in July, bringing extensive executive experience at leading academic medical centers. Most recently he served as CEO of the University of Utah Hospitals & Clinics, the only academic medical center in the Intermountain West region. While serving at UUHC, Entwistle received the Modern Healthcare “Up and Comers Award,” for significant contributions in health-care administration, management or policy.
Chris Dawes, President and CEO, Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital
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Christopher G. Dawes became President and Chief Executive Officer of Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford in 1997 after five years of service as Chief Operating Officer. Under his guidance, the hospital, research center and regional medical network has been ranked as one of the best in the nation, as an industry leader in patient safety and innovation in providing a full complement of services for children and expectant mothers.
Panelists:
Marcella Alsan, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Stanford University
Marcella Alsan’s research focuses on the relationship between health and socioeconomic disparities with a focus on infectious disease. Another vein of research focuses on the microfoundations of antibiotic overuse and resistance. She received a BA degree in cognitive neuroscience from Harvard University, a master’s degree in international public health from Harvard School of Public Health, a medical degree from Loyola University, and a PhD in economics from Harvard University. She is board-certified in both internal medicine and infectious disease. She trained at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, completing the Hiatt Global Health Equity Residency Fellowship in internal medicine. She combined her PhD with an Infectious Disease Fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital. She currently is an infectious disease specialist at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Palo Alto.
Laurence Baker, Chair of Health Research and Policy, Stanford University
Laurence Baker is an economist interested in the organization and economic performance of the U.S. health-care system, and his research has investigated a range of topics including financial incentives in health care, competition in health-care markets, health insurance and managed care and health-care technology adoption. Baker is a past recipient of the ASHE medal from ASHEcon and the Alice Hersch Award from AcademyHealth. He received his BA from Calvin College, and his MA and PhD in economics from Princeton University.
Eran Bendavid, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Stanford University
Eran Bendavid is an infectious diseases physician. His research interests involve understanding the relationship between policies and health outcomes in developing countries. He explores how decisions about foreign assistance for health are made, and how those decisions affect the health of those whom assistance aims to serve. Dr. Bendavid is also a disease modeler, and uses that skill to explore issues of resource allocation in low and middle-income countries with cost-effectiveness analyses. His recent research projects include an impact evaluation of the US assistance program for HIV in Africa, and an exploration of the association between drug prices, aid and health outcomes in countries heavily affected by HIV.
Jay Bhattacharya, Professor of Medicine, Stanford University
Jay Bhattacharya’s research focuses on the constraints that vulnerable populations face in making decisions that affect their health status, as well as the effects of government policies and programs designed to benefit vulnerable populations. He has published empirical economics and health services research on the elderly, adolescents, HIV/AIDS and managed care. Most recently, he has researched the regulation of the viatical-settlements market (a secondary life-insurance market that often targets HIV patients) and summer/winter differences in nutritional outcomes for low-income American families. He is also working on a project examining the labor-market conditions that help determine why some U.S. employers do not provide health insurance.
M. Kate Bundorf, Associate Professor of Medicine, Stanford University
M. Kate Bundorf is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She received her M.B.A. and M.P.H. degrees from The University of California at Berkeley and her Ph.D. from The Wharton School. She was a Fulbright Lecturer and Visiting Professor at Fudan School of Public Health in Shanghai, China in 2009 and 2010. Her research, which focuses on health insurance markets, has been published in leading economics and health policy journals and has received funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She received the 13th Annual Health Care Research Award from The National Institute for Health Care Management in 2007.
David Chan, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Stanford University
David Chan is a physician and economist whose research focuses on productivity in US health care. His research draws on insights from labor and organizational economics. He is particularly interested in studying what drives physician behavior, how this explains differences in productivity in health care delivery, and what the implications are for the design of health care. He is the recipient of the 2014 NIH Director’s High-Risk, High-Reward Early Independence Award to study the optimal balance of information in health information technology for patient care. David Chan is also an investigator at the Department of Veterans Affairs and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Kathryn M. McDonald, Executive Director of the Center for Health Policy and the Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research, Stanford University
Kathryn McDonald, MM, is the Executive Director of the Center for Health Policy (CHP) and Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research (PCOR) and a senior scholar at the Centers. She is also Associate Director of the Stanford-UCSF Evidence-based Practice Center (under RAND). Her work focuses on measures and interventions to achieve evidence-based patient-centered healthcare quality and patient safety. Mrs. McDonald has served as a project director and principal investigator on a number of research projects at the Stanford School of Medicine, including the development and ongoing enhancement of the Quality and Patient Safety Indicators for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. She has authored numerous peer reviewed articles and government reports, including several with wide enough followership to merit recent updates: Care Coordination Measures Atlas, Closing the Quality Gap, and Patient Safety Practices.
Michelle Mello, Professor of Law and of Health Research and Policy, Stanford University
Michelle Mello is Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and Professor of Health Research and Policy at Stanford University School of Medicine. She conducts empirical research into issues at the intersection of law, ethics, and health policy. She is the author of more than 150 articles and book chapters on the medical malpractice system, medical errors and patient safety, public health law, research ethics, the obesity epidemic, pharmaceuticals, and other topics. From 2000 to 2014, Dr. Mello was a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, where she directed the School’s Program in Law and Public Health. In 2013-14 she completed a Lab Fellowship at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. Dr. Mello teaches courses in torts and public health law. She holds a J.D. from the Yale Law School, a Ph.D. in Health Policy and Administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an M.Phil. from Oxford University, where she was a Marshall Scholar, and a B.A. from Stanford University. In 2013, she was elected to the National Academy of Medicine (formerly known as the Institute of Medicine).
Grant Miller, Associate Professor of Medicine, Stanford University
Grant Miller is Director of the Stanford Center for International Development, an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine, a Core Faculty Member at the Center for Health Policy/Primary Care and Outcomes Research, a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). His primary interests are health economics, development economics, and economic demography. As a health and development economist based at the Stanford Medical School, Dr. Miller’s overarching focus is research and teaching aimed at developing more effective health improvement strategies for developing countries. His agenda addresses three major interrelated themes. (1) First, what are the major causes of population health improvement around the world and over time? (2) Second, what are the behavioral underpinnings of the major determinants of population health improvement? (3) Third, how can programs and policies use these behavioral insights to improve population health more effectively?
Douglas K. Owens, Director of the Center for Health Policy and the Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research, Stanford University
Douglas K. Owens, MD, MS, is the Henry J. Kaiser, Jr., Professor at Stanford University, where he is a professor of medicine. He is director of the Center for Health Policy in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and director of the Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research (PCOR) in the Department of Medicine. He is a general internist and associate director of the Center for Innovation to Implementation at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System. A past member of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, he has helped lead the development of national U.S. guidelines on screening for HIV, hepatitis C, hepatitis B, lung cancer, colorectal cancer, breast cancer, and use of aspirin and statins to prevent cardiovascular disease.
Maria Polyakova, Assistant Professor of Health Research and Policy, Stanford University
Maria Polyakova, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Health Research and Policy at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Her research investigates questions surrounding the role of government in the design and financing of health insurance systems. She is especially interested in the relationships between public policies and individuals’ decision-making in health care and health insurance, as well as in the risk protection and re-distributive aspects of health insurance systems. She received a BA degree in Economics and Mathematics from Yale University and a PhD in Economics from MIT.
David M. Studdert, Professor of Medicine and of Law, Stanford University
David M. Studdert is a leading expert in the fields of health law and empirical legal research. His scholarship explores how the legal system influences the health and well-being of populations. A prolific scholar, he has authored more than 150 articles and book chapters, and his work appears frequently in leading international medical, law and health policy publications. Professor Studdert has received the Alice S. Hersh New Investigator Award from AcademyHealth, the leading organization for health services and health policy research in the United States. He was awarded a Federation Fellowship (2006) and a Laureate Fellowship (2011) by the Australian Research Council. He holds a law degree from University of Melbourne and a doctoral degree in health policy and public health from the Harvard School of Public Health.
What will happen when a new US president is sworn in? Michael McFaul, former US ambassador to Russia and director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, leads a panel of faculty experts to discuss the imminent foreign policy challenges that the next president must face.
CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C147
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
(650) 724-6448
(650) 723-1928
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ldiamond@stanford.edu
Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and Sociology
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MA, PhD
Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.
Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad. A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has edited or coedited more than fifty books, including China’s Influence and American Interests(2019, with Orville Schell), Silicon Triangle: The United States, China, Taiwan the Global Semiconductor Security (2023, with James O. Ellis Jr. and Orville Schell), and The Troubling State of India’s Democracy(2024, with Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha Mistree).
During 2002–03, Diamond served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other organizations dealing with governance and development. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq.
Among Diamond’s other edited books are Democracy in Decline?; Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab World; Will China Democratize?; and Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, all edited with Marc F. Plattner; and Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran, with Abbas Milani. With Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, he edited the series, Democracy in Developing Countries, which helped to shape a new generation of comparative study of democratic development.
615 Crothers Way,
Encina Commons, Room 128A
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305
(650) 721-4052
0
Research Fellow, Hoover Institution
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PhD
Abbas Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University and a visiting professor in the department of political science. In addition, Dr. Milani is a research fellow and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution.
Prior to coming to Stanford, Milani was a professor of history and political science and chair of the department at Notre Dame de Namur University and a research fellow at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Milani was an assistant professor in the faculty of law and political science at Tehran University and a member of the board of directors of Tehran University's Center for International Studies from 1979 to 1987. He was a research fellow at the Iranian Center for Social Research from 1977 to 1978 and an assistant professor at the National University of Iran from 1975 to 1977.
Dr. Milani is the author of Eminent Persians: Men and Women Who Made Modern Iran, 1941-1979, (Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY, 2 volumes, November, 2008); King of Shadows: Essays on Iran's Encounter with Modernity, Persian text published in the U.S. (Ketab Corp., Spring 2005); Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Persian Modernity in Iran, (Mage 2004); The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution (Mage, 2000); Modernity and Its Foes in Iran (Gardon Press, 1998); Tales of Two Cities: A Persian Memoir (Mage 1996); On Democracy and Socialism, a collection of articles coauthored with Faramarz Tabrizi (Pars Press, 1987); and Malraux and the Tragic Vision (Agah Press, 1982). Milani has also translated numerous books and articles into Persian and English.
Milani received his BA in political science and economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970 and his PhD in political science from the University of Hawaii in 1974.
Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies
CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, E216
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
(650) 725-9754
(650) 723-0089
0
zegart@stanford.edu
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
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PhD
Dr. Amy Zegart is the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. The author of five books, she specializes in U.S. intelligence, emerging technologies, and national security. At Hoover, she leads the Technology Policy Accelerator and the Oster National Security Affairs Fellows Program. She also is an associate director and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI; a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute; and professor of political science by courtesy, teaching 100 students each year about how emerging technologies are transforming espionage.
Her award-winning research includes the leading academic study of intelligence failures before 9/11: Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11 (Princeton, 2007) and the bestseller Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence (Princeton, 2022), which was nominated by Princeton University Press for the Pulitzer Prize. She also coauthored Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity, with Condoleezza Rice (Twelve, 2018). Her op-eds and essays have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Politico, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.
Zegart has advised senior officials about intelligence and foreign policy for more than two decades. She served on the National Security Council staff and as a presidential campaign foreign policy advisor and has testified before numerous congressional committees. Before her academic career, she spent several years as a McKinsey & Company consultant.
Zegart received an AB in East Asian studies from Harvard and an MA and a PhD in political science from Stanford. She serves on the boards of the Council on Foreign Relations, Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, and the American Funds/Capital Group.
Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is proud to announce our four incoming fellows who will be joining us in the 2016-2017 academic year to develop their research, engage with faculty and tap into our diverse scholarly community.
The pre- and postdoctoral program will provide fellows the time to focus on research and data analysis as they work to finalize and publish their dissertation research, while connecting with resident faculty and research staff at CDDRL.
Fellows will present their research during our weekly research seminar series and an array of scholarly events and conferences.
Topics of the incoming cohort include electoral fraud in Russia, how the elite class impacts state power in China, the role of emotions in support for democracy in Zimbabwe, and market institutions in Nigeria.
Discipline and expected date of graduation:Sociology, April 2017
Research Interests: authoritarianism, state capacity, social policy, civil society, trust, Russia and post-communist countries
Dissertation Title: The State that Betrays the Trust: Infrastructural State Power, Public Sector Organizations, and Authoritarian Resilience in Putin's Russia
What attracted you to the CDDRL Pre/post-doctoral program? I study the connection between state capacity and political regimes - the topic that is at the core of many research initiatives at CDDRL. Learning more about this work and receiving feedback for my dissertation will enrich and sharpen my analysis, while helping me to place it into a comparative context. I am looking forward to discussing my work with the faculty who study the post-Soviet region. I also will explore policy implications of my work with the help of policy experts at CDDRL.
What do you hope to accomplish during your nine-month residency at the CDDRL? Besides finishing writing my dissertation, I will workshop three working papers to prepare them for publication. The first one argues that Putin's regime used the school system to administer a large-scale electoral fraud in 2012 presidential elections; the second one shows how the networks of social organizations were used by subnational autocrats to strengthen the regime; and the third one will look at the factors that make the abuse of such organizations more difficult in some regions. In addition to these papers I will continue developing my post-graduation research project exploring the relationship between social trust and distrust, institutions, political competition, and democratization.
Fun fact: I have spent 25 years of my life in Siberia, and I can tell you: Chicago winters are worse!
Research interests: political economy of development, private governance, market institutions, Sub-Saharan Africa, survey methods
Dissertation Title: The Politics of Order in Informal Markets: Evidence from Lagos
What attracted you to the CDDRL post-doctoral program? I was attracted to CDDRL largely for its community of scholars. Affiliated faculty work on the political economy of development and medieval and modern market institutions, topics that are tied to my own interests.
What do you hope to accomplish during your nine-month residency at the CDDRL? I plan to prepare a book manuscript based on my dissertation, a project that explains variation in the provision of pro-trade institutions in private market organizations through the study of physical marketplaces in Nigeria. In addition, I will continue to remotely manage an on-going project in Nigeria (with Meredith Startz) investigating whether reputation alleviates contracting frictions. I also plan to work on submitting to journals a few working papers, including one on the politics of non-compliance with polio vaccination in Nigeria (with Jonathan Phillips and Leah Rosenzweig).
Fun fact: Contrary to popular belief, not all cheese is vegetarian. I have a website to help people determine if a cheese is vegetarian or not: IsThisCheeseVegetarian.com.
Academic Institution: University of California, Berkeley
Discipline & Graduation Date: Political Science, Summer 2016
Research Interests: Governance, rule of law, state building, authoritarian politics, Chinese politics
Dissertation Title: The Social Origins of State Power: Democratic Institutions and Local Elites in China
What attracted you to CDDRL? The Center has a fantastic community of scholars and practitioners who work on the areas that I'm interested in, including governance and the rule of law. I'm excited to learn from the CDDRL community and participate in the Center's events. The fellowship also provides me with valuable time to finish my book manuscript before I start teaching.
What do you hope to accomplish during your nine-month residency at the CDDRL? While at CDDRL, I plan to prepare my book manuscript and to work on some related projects on local elites and state power in China and elsewhere.
Fun fact: I grew up on an organic farm in Vermont.
Discipline & Graduation Date: Political Science (Comparative Politics, Methods), May 2016 (defense), Oct 2016 (degree conferral)
Research Interests: political violence, political economy of development, autocratic persistence, democratization, protest, electoral violence
Dissertation Title: The Psychology of Repression and Dissent in Autocracy
What attracted you to the CDDRL post-doctoral program? As a graduate of the CISAC honors program when I was an undergraduate at Stanford, I have seen first-hand how intellectually stimulating, collaborative, and plugged into policy CDDRL is. While at the center I will be revising my dissertation work on the political psychology of participation in pro-democracy movements in Zimbabwe for submission as a book manuscript, and moving forward new projects that similarly seek to understand how different forms of violence by non-state actors affects citizens' preferences and decision-making. Because of its deep bench of experts on autocracy, narco-trafficking, and insurgency, CDDRL will add enormous value to these projects.
What do you hope to accomplish during your nine-month residency at the CDDRL? During my fellowship year, my primary goal is to revise my research on Zimbabwe into a book manuscript. I defended my dissertation as three stand-alone articles, including two experiments showing that emotions influence whether opposition supporters in Zimbabwe express their pro-democracy preferences and a descriptive paper showing that repression has a larger effect on the behavior of the poor. To prepare the book manuscript during my fellowship, I will bring in additional quantitative and qualitative descriptive evidence and tie the three papers together into a cohesive argument about how opposition supporters make decisions about participation in protest, why emotions have such a large effect on these decisions, and how this affects variation across individuals and the strategic choices of autocrats and activists.
Fun fact: During my fieldwork I took an overnight train from Victoria Falls to a southern city in Zimbabwe and hitch-hiked into a national park. It got a little nerve-wracking when night started to fall, but ended with an invitation to a barbecue!
Bob Kocher
