Stanford University

The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy

-

Glenn Kessler is a diplomatic correspondent for The Washington Post, a position he has held since May 2002. He reports on the formulation and implementation of U.S. foreign policy at the State Department, the White House, and other agencies.

He is also the author of the book, The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy, published in September, 2007, by St. Martin's Press.

Kessler, who is 48, joined the Post in January 1998 as national business editor. In that position, Kessler oversaw the reporting of a dozen reporters based in Washington and New York. Kessler switched from editing to reporting in February 2000, covering domestic economic policy and the Bush administration's push to pass a large tax cut, before moving to the national desk to become diplomatic correspondent.

Before joining the Post, Kessler spent nearly 11 years as a Washington correspondent and New York City-based reporter for Newsday. In Washington, Kessler served as White House correspondent, national political correspondent, and congressional correspondent. He led the newspaper's coverage of the 1996 election and the 1995 budget stalemate between Congress and the White House that resulted in two government shutdowns.

In New York, Kessler covered a variety of subjects for Newsday, including Wall Street (the insider trading scandals and 1987 stock market crash) and airline safety. Kessler's investigative articles on airline safety led to the indictments of airline executives and federal officials for fraud, prompted congressional hearings into safety issues, and led the federal government to impose new safety rules for DC-9 jets and begin regular inspections of foreign airlines.

Among other awards, Kessler has won the Page One Award of the Newspaper Guild (1989), the Atrium Award (1990), the investigative reporting award of the Society of the Silurians (1991) and the Premier Award of the Aviation/Space Writers Association (1992). He also was part of reporting teams that won a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of a deadly subway crash and a 1996 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the TWA Flight 800 crash.

Before joining Newsdayin February 1987, Kessler was editor of Investment Dealers Digest and, before that, managing editor of Corporate Financing Week and Wall Street Letter.

Kessler is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He received a Master's degree in international affairs from Columbia University in 1983 and a Bachelor's degree in European history from Brown University in 1981. He lives with his wife and three children in McLean, Va.

About The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy:

In his riveting glimpse into the life of one of the most powerful Secretaries of State in recent years, Washington Post diplomatic correspondent Glenn Kessler provides not only a revealing look at Condoleezza Rice but a rich portrait of the Bush administration's controversial foreign policy regime. From her grievous errors in judgment as national security advisor to her notable influence over the president as Secretary of State, Rice has not gone unnoticed during her rise to power. But, as an intensely private person, she has despite endless media attention remained a mystery. As the first critical examination of Rice's skills as policy-maker, politician and manager, this definitive biography explains not only her rise to power, but the pivotal role she has played in our nation's history.

Full of candor as well as honesty, The Confidante shows unseen moments in Rice's life and of her frequently divisive performance during one of the most tumultuous foreign-policy periods in U.S. history. Drawing on personal interviews with Rice, an intimacy afforded to Kessler as one of the few reporters granted the opportunity to travel with her, Kessler takes readers inside the secret meetings Rice has held with foreign leaders and even her private conversations with President Bush. With access to all of Rice's top aides and sources in many overseas governments, Kessler also provides dramatic new information about one of the most secretive administrations in U.S. history. He shows how Rice molded herself into the image of a globe-trotting diplomatic super star, negating memories of her past failures. He exposes new details about her secret role in Israel's withdrawal from Gaza, her maneuvers around government bureaucracy to strike a pivotal nuclear-energy deal with India, her persuasion of Bush to support a dramatic gesture to Iran, her failure to prevent the North Korean nuclear test, and her struggle to contain the devastating war between Israel and Lebanon. This brilliantly written book reveals not only her public and private humiliation of foreign officials but also how her charm and grace have been successful assets in repairing fractured relations overseas. Condoleezza Rice remains today and in the future one of the most alluring, controversial, and ultimately influential decision makers in the United States. With this captivating work, Kessler shows what traits could solidify her shot at greatness or what cracks in her hard veneer could send her career hurtling to ruin.

This event is co-sponsored by the John S. Knight Fellowships Program.

Download pdf

CISAC Conference Room

James Bettinger Director, the Knight Fellowships, Stanford University Speaker

Michael A. McFaul

Encina Hall
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

0
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies, Department of Political Science
Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
mcfaul_headshot_2025.jpg PhD

Michael McFaul is the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in Political Science, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, all at Stanford University. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1995 and served as FSI Director from 2015 to 2025. He is also an international affairs analyst for MSNOW.

McFaul served for five years in the Obama administration, first as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council at the White House (2009-2012), and then as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation (2012-2014).

McFaul has authored ten books and edited several others, including, most recently, Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder, as well as From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia, (a New York Times bestseller) Advancing Democracy Abroad: Why We Should, How We Can; and Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin.

He is a recipient of numerous awards, including an honorary PhD from Montana State University; the Order for Merits to Lithuania from President Gitanas Nausea of Lithuania; Order of Merit of Third Degree from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, and the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford University. In 2015, he was the Distinguished Mingde Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Center at Peking University.

McFaul was born and raised in Montana. He received his B.A. in International Relations and Slavic Languages and his M.A. in Soviet and East European Studies from Stanford University in 1986. As a Rhodes Scholar, he completed his D. Phil. in International Relations at Oxford University in 1991. 

International Working Group on Russian Sanctions

The International Working Group on Russian Sanctions aims to provide expertise and experience to governments and companies around the world by assisting with the formulation of sanctions proposals that will increase the cost to Russia of invading Ukraine, and support democratic Ukraine in the defense of its territorial integrity and national sovereignty.
Read more

Global Populisms

A new project examining the global surge in populist movements and what it means for established democratic rules and institutions.
Read More
CV
Hide publication sections
Off
Date Label
Michael A. McFaul Director, CDDRL; Acting Director, FSI; Stanford Professor of Political Science; Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution Moderator
Glenn Kessler Diplomatic Correspondent, The Washington Post Speaker
Seminars

How to manage our oil addiction

Authors
David G. Victor
News Type
Commentary
Date
Paragraphs

The Brazilian government is declaring victory in its decades-long struggle to become self-sufficient in the supply of oil. The milestone is cause for celebration in a country that has long paid a high price for imported energy.

The Brazilian government is declaring victory in its decades-long struggle to become self-sufficient in the supply of oil. The milestone is cause for celebration in a country that has long paid a high price for imported energy.

It will also reverberate here in the United States where policy-makers, too, are trying to wean the nation from costly imports, jittery markets and the foreign spigot. But we must learn the right lessons. Brazil's success came not from treating oil as an addiction but by producing even more of the stuff and by becoming even more dependent on world markets

Here in the United States, most attention to Brazil's fuel supply has focused on the country's aggressive program to replace oil with ethanol that is made by fermenting homegrown sugar. American newspapers are filled with stories about Brazil's famous "flex fuel" vehicles that make it easy to switch between ethanol and conventional gasoline.

Guided partly by Brazil's apparent success, American policy-makers are crafting new mandates for ethanol, and flex fuel vehicles are now taking shape. We have the impression that ethanol is king.

In reality, ethanol is a minor player in Brazilian energy supply. It accounts for less than one-tenth of all the country's energy liquids.

The real source of Brazil's self-sufficiency is the country's extraordinary success in producing more oil. After the 1970s oil shocks, when Brazil's fuel import bill soared, the government pushed Petrobras, the state-controlled oil company, to look asunder for new energy sources.

Petrobras delivered, especially at home, where the firm pioneered the technologies that make it possible to extract oil locked in sediments under the seabed in extremely deep water. In the middle 1970s Brazil struggled to produce just 180,000 barrels of oil per day while importing four times that amount. Today it produces about 2 million and is self-sufficient. Indeed, the current milestone of self-sufficiency arrives with the inauguration of Brazil's newest deep water platform, the "P50." When P50 reaches its full output later this year, that one platform will deliver more liquid to Brazil than the country's entire ethanol program.

Brazil's self-sufficiency offers three lessons for U.S. energy policy:

-First is that ethanol, with current technology, will do little to sever our dependence on imported energy. Today's approach involves growing a crop - sugar in Brazil, corn in the United States - and then fermenting the fruits to yield fuel. Sugar plants in Brazil's climate are a lot more efficient at converting sunlight to biomass than is corn in the Midwest, but U.S. policy nonetheless favors corn (and imposes tariffs on imported sugar) because the program is really a scheme to deliver heartland votes rather than a commercially viable fuel.

Yet, even with Brazil's favorable climate and sugar's inviting biology, ethanol is already reaching the limit. That's because the land and other resources devoted to ethanol can be put to other uses such as growing food and cash crops.

Indeed, today the Brazilian government is actually reducing the share of ethanol that must be blended into gasoline because sugar growers prefer to make even more money by selling their product as sugar on the world market rather than fermenting it into alcohol.

New technologies - notably "cellulosic biomass"- could breathe fresh life into ethanol and replace still more oil. Cellulosic biomass is intriguing because it cuts costs by allowing the entire plant - the cellulose in the stalks, as well as the prized grain or sugar - to be fermented into fuel.

Advocates for this technology, including President Bush in his State of the Union address, have wrongly confused the sexy promise of this new-fangled approach to making ethanol with the practical realities of fuel markets. Schemes to produce cellulosic biomass, today, work only under special circumstances and nobody has delivered the fuel at the industrial scale that would be required for the technology to become commercially viable.

-Second, we should learn that, for now, the greatest force to loosen the world's oil markets lies with oil itself. We can use oil more efficiently, as would occur with a gasoline tax or wise fuel economy standards. But we can also find ways to produce more of the stuff - as Brazil did with Petrobras.

The problem for U.S. policy-makers is that the richest veins for new production lie mainly outside the United States and beyond our direct control.

Indeed, the Brazilian government made Petrobras more efficient by putting the firm partly beyond its control as well. When the government sold part of the company on international stock exchanges, it accepted Western accounting procedures and other strictures that have given Petrobras the autonomy and accountability to its shareholders that, in turn, helped make it an efficient company.

We have a stake in seeing other countries do the same - from Algeria to Mexico to Iran and even Russia. But we must remember that Brazil did this on its own, in response to internal pressures for reform, with little leverage from foreign governments.

-Third, we should learn from Brazil not to confuse the goal of greater self-sufficiency with the illusion of independence. Even as Brazil has become self-sufficient it has also, ironically, become more dependent on world markets. That's because the Brazilian government has wisely relaxed price controls so that the prices of fuels within the country are set to the world market. Thus Brazilians see real world prices when they fill up at the pump, and the decisions about which cars to buy and how much to drive reflect real costs and benefits of the fuel they consume. That is why, even as the country becomes self-sufficient, Brazilians are working ever harder to be more frugal with oil - because the price at the pump is high and rising.

Dependence on oil is a liability that must be managed. But it is not an addiction.

Efficiency, sober policies toward modest alternatives such as ethanol, and more production - all tools of the manager, not the addict - are required. Brazil helps show the way, but only if we learn the right lessons.

All News button
1

The Neo-Taliban and Iran

-

Amin Tarzi is the inaugural Director of Middle East Studies at the Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia. Previously Dr. Tarzi was with RFE/RL's Regional Analysis team focusing on Afghanistan and Pakistan. While working at RFE/RL, Dr. Tarzi also taught courses in political Islam, cultural intelligence, terrorist organizations and similar topics at the Washington-based Center for Advanced Defense Studies. Prior to joining RFE/RL, Dr. Tarzi worked as Senior Research Associate for the Middle East at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies where his primary research emphasis was Iran and its missile and nuclear developments and policies. At the Monterey Institute, Dr. Tarzi also taught a graduate seminar on Middle East security policies and threat perceptions. His work experience includes the post of Political Advisor to the Saudi Arabian Mission at the United Nations where attended the informal "Friends of Afghanistan" group which included Iran, Pakistan, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia and United States. The informal group later gave way to the formal Six-Plus-Two structure. He has also held the position of Researcher/Analyst on Iranian affairs at the Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research in Abu Dhabi. For a year in 1992, after the fall of the communist regime in Kabul, Dr. Tarzi served as a diplomat at the Afghan Mission to the UN.

Tarzi earned his Ph.D. and M.A. degrees from the Department of Middle East Studies at New York University. Tarzi's dissertation, entitled The Judicial State: Evolution and Centralization of the Courts in Afghanistan, 1883-1896 is under consideration for publication by Harvard Law School's Islamic Legal Studies Program. Dr. Tarzi and Professor Robert D. Crews of Stanford University have co-edited a volume entitled Taliban and the Crisis in Afghanistan, to be released in February 2008 by Harvard University Press.

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Amin Tarzi Director of Middle East Studies Speaker Marine Corps University.
Seminars

Freedom's Unsteady March: Democracy Promotion in the Middle East After President Bush

-

TAMARA COFMAN WITTES directs the Middle East Democracy and Development (MEDD) Project at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, a regional policy center at The Brookings Institution. The MEDD Project conducts research into political and economic reform in the region and US efforts to promote democracy there. It also hosts visiting fellows from the Middle East.

Before joining the Saban Center in December 2003, Dr. Wittes served as Middle East specialist at the US Institute of Peace and previously as director of programs at the Middle East Institute in Washington. She has also taught courses in International Relations and Security Studies at Georgetown University. Dr. Wittes was one of the first recipients of the Rabin-Peres Peace Award, established by President Bill Clinton in 1997.

Dr. Wittes's forthcoming book is Freedom's Unsteady March: America's Role in Building Arab Democracy (Brookings Press). She is also editor of How Israelis and Palestinians Negotiate: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Oslo Peace Process (USIP, 2005). Her recent work includes "What Price Freedom? Assessing the Bush Administration's Freedom Agenda," and "Back to Balancing in the Middle East," co-authored with Martin Indyk. Her analyses of US democracy promotion, Arab politics, the Middle East peace process, and other policy topics have been published in the Washington Post, Policy Review, Political Science Quarterly, the American Interest, the Weekly Standard, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, among others. Dr. Wittes holds a B.A. in Judaic and Near Eastern Studies from Oberlin College; her M.A. and Ph.D. in Government are from Georgetown University. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Tamara Wittes Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Studies, Saban Center for Middle East Policy Speaker Brookings Institution
Seminars

The Spirit of Democracy

-

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a professor of political science, and sociology by courtesy, and coordinator of the Democracy Program at CDDRL. He is a specialist on democratic development and regime change and on U.S. foreign policy affecting democracy abroad. His research examines comparative trends in the quality and stability of democracy in developing countries and post-communist states, and public opinion in new democracies. As a core member of the scientific team of the East Asia Barometer, he is investigating attitudes and values toward democracy in eight East Asian political systems. His research and policy analysis also address the relationship between democracy, governance and development in poor countries, particularly in Africa. In the past two years he has served as consultant to the U.S. Agency for International Development and was a contributing author of its report, "Foreign Aid in the National Interest." He is also co-director of the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy, and founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.

During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. He is now lecturing and writing about the challenges of post-conflict state-building in Iraq and other countries. He also recently served with a group of Europeans and Americans who produced a report on "Transatlantic Strategy for Democracy and Human Development in the Broader Middle East," published by the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

Diamond has written extensively on the factors that facilitate and obstruct democracy in developing countries and on problems of democracy, development, and corruption, particularly in Africa. He is the author of Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation, Promoting Democracy in the 1990s, and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria. His recent edited books include Islam and Democracy in the Middle East (with Marc F. Plattner and Daniel Brumberg), Political Parties and Democracy (with Richard Gunther), The Global Resurgence of Democracy and The Global Divergence of Democracies (both with Marc F. Plattner), Consolidating Democracy in Korea (with Byung-Kook Kim), and Institutional Reform and Democratic Consolidation in Korea (with Doh Shin). Among his other 20 edited books are the series Democracy in Developing Countries (with Juan Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset); The Self-Restraining State: Power and Accountability in New Democracies (with Andreas Schedler and Marc F. Plattner); and Democratization in Africa and Democracy in East Asia (both with Marc F. Plattner).

Diamond has lectured in more than 20 countries on problems of democratic development. He taught sociology at Vanderbilt University from 1980 to 1985 before joining Stanford and the Hoover Institution. He was a visiting scholar at the Academia Sinica (Taiwan, 1997-98) and a Fulbright Visiting Lecturer at Bayero University (Kano, Nigeria, 1982-83). He received all of his degrees from Stanford University, including a BA in 1974, an MA in 1978, and a PhD in sociology in 1980.

Richard and Rhoda Goldman Conference Room

Larry Diamond

CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C147
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 724-6448 (650) 723-1928
0
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
diamond_encina_hall.png 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.

Download full-resolution headshot; photo credit: Rod Searcey.

Former Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Faculty Chair, Jan Koum Israel Studies Program
Hide publication sections
Off
Date Label
Larry Diamond Senior Fellow Speaker Hoover Institution and CDDRL
Seminars

The role of the US in global tobacco control

-
Less than 5% of the world's smokers live in the USA; nevertheless America plays a vital role in reducing the global tobacco epidemic. This is particularly important because the US, along with the United Kingdom, Japan and now China, is home to the global tobacco industry. Also, as markets have declined in the west, these transnational companies have looked towards developing countries for their future expansion and profits, with tactics including denial of the health evidence, pervasive promotion, and political and commercial pressures on governments in developing countries.

 

Along with other western countries, American governmental and non-governmental organisations, academic institutions and foundations, have offered assistance and expertise on a global scale, for example, the establishment of a science base, training, serving on international committees, funding world and regional conferences, and grants. The US-based international media have played an important role. The US has offered leadership in areas such as tobacco economics; some aspects of legislation like smoke-free areas in restaurants and bars; litigation; smoke-free movies; and publicising tobacco industry documents exposing information on industry tactics around the globe.

However, and importantly, the USA has not yet ratified the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), now ratified by 149 countries.

Worldwide, systems are slowly being put into place that will eventually reduce the tobacco epidemic -- data are being collected, legislation and price policies implemented, and health education and cessation programmes introduced. Examples will be given of countries which have now implemented stronger tobacco control policies and programmes than those found in the USA.

Download pdf

Anthropology
Building 50, Room 51A
(Inner Quad, next to the Memorial Church)

Judith Mackay Professor Speaker FRCP (Edin), FRCP (Lon)
Lectures

Russia After Putin

-

Lilia Shevtsova co-chairs the Russian Domestic Politics and Political Institutions Project, dividing her time between the Carnegie offices in Washington, D.C. and Moscow.

Before joining the Endowment, she was deputy director of the Moscow Institute of International Economic and Political Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and director of the Center of Political Studies in Moscow. She has been a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley and at Cornell University, and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Ms. Shevtsova is a member of the Council of the Russian Political Science Association; serves on the editorial boards of American Interest, Journal of Democracy, Pro et Contra and Demokratizatsiya.

Lilia Shevtsova is also professor of political science at the Moscow State Institute of International Affairs of the MFA of Russia; leading researcher at The Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatam House, Great Britain); member of the Executive Board of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (Great Britain); member of the Advisory Board of the Women in International Security organization; associate with the Eurasia Program of the Social Science Research Council; member of the Board of the Institute for Human Sciences at Boston University.

Download PDF

CISAC Conference Room

Lilia Shevtsova Researcher Speaker Carnegie Center Moscow
Seminars

Huda Ahmed

not in residence

0
Visiting Scholar (Iraq) 2007-2008

Huda Ahmed is an Iraqi journalist. She had a joint fellowship for the 2007-2008 academic year at CISAC and CDDRL. In 2006-2007 she held the Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship, sponsored by the International Women's Media Foundation, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 

Ahmed's interests include international relations, ethnic politics and peace, democracy and religion of the West versus the East, and human rights reporting. She is interested in exploring current issues in Iraq related to politics, the status of democracy conflicts, violence, and the impact of war on Iraq.

Prior to her studies in the United States, Ahmed was a reporter for McClatchy Newspapers (formerly Knight Ridder Newspapers) in Baghdad. Beginning in July 2004, she assisted in coverage and translation for a wide range of breaking news and feature stories including the bloody siege of Najaf, Iraq's historic elections, and corruption in the new Iraqi security forces.

She was recognized by Knight Ridder's Washington bureau for extraordinary bravery in covering combat during the siege of Najaf in Southern Iraq.

Ahmed served as a reporter and translator for The Washington Post in Baghdad, where she assisted in covering the search for weapons of mass destruction, looting after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, the secret massacre of students during Hussein's reign, and the abuse of women in the Islamic world among other stories.

Her journalism career began in 1992 when she served as a translator for The Daily Baghdad Observer and Al Jumhurriya Daily, in Baghdad. Earlier in her career, she worked as a translator and a high school teacher in U.A.E, Tunisia, and Libya.

Ahmed, along with 5 other Iraqi journalists from McClatchy's Baghdad bureau, received the Courage in Journalism Award for 2007 from the International Women's Media Foundation.

CISAC's George Bunn outlines steps to eliminate nuclear weapons

News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs
CISAC's George Bunn and colleague John Rhinelander, in a policy brief issued by the World Security Institute and the Lawyers Alliance for World Security, outline steps the United States would need to take in order to lead an international effort to rid the world of nuclear weapons. Following on recent proposals to revive the vision presented in an unprecedented dialogue between President Ronald Reagan and Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev at the October 1986 Reykjavik Summit, Bunn and Rhinelander, two former arms control negotiators, discuss how to realize the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons.
Hero Image
1295 small Reykjavik Revisited
All News button
1

Hicham Ben Abdallah

CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

0
Consulting Professor
Ben_Abdallah.jpg MA

Hicham Ben Abdallah received his B.A. in Politics in 1985 from Princeton University, and his M.A. in Political Science from Stanford in 1997. His interest is in the politics of the transition from authoritarianism to democracy.

He has lectured in numerous universities and think tanks in North America and Europe. His work for the advancement of peace and conflict resolution has brought him to Kosovo as a special Assistant to Bernard Kouchner, and to Nigeria and Palestine as an election observer with the Carter Center. He has published in journals such Le Monde,  Le Monde Diplomatique,Pouvoirs, Le Debat, The Journal of Democracy, The New York Times, El Pais, and El Quds.

In 2010 he has founded the Moulay Hicham Foundation which conducts social science research on the MENA region. He is also an entrepreneur with interests in agriculture, real estate, and renewable energies. His company, Al Tayyar Energy, has a number of clean energy projects in Asia and Europe. 

Subscribe to North America