Stanford University

Eighth Korea-U.S. West Coast Strategic Forum

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The eighth session of the Korea-U.S. West Coast Strategic Forum was held at Stanford University on June 1, 2012. Established in 2006 and now convening semiannually alternately in Stanford and Seoul, the Forum brings together a distinguished group of South Korean (Republic of Korea, or ROK) and American scholars, experts, and former military and
government officials to discuss North Korea, the U.S.-ROK alliance, and regional dynamics in Northeast Asia. Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center is co-organizer of the Forum in association with its partner, the Sejong Institute of Korea. The Forum operates as a closed workshop under the Chatham House Rule of individual confidentiality, allowing participants to engage in frank, in-depth discussion of current and emerging issues of importance and interest to both countries.

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Seventh Korea-U.S. West Coast Strategic Forum

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The Sejong Institute of Korea hosted the seventh session of the Korea-U.S. West Coast Strategic Forum at the Lotte Hotel in Seoul on December 13, 2011. Established in 2006 by Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC), the Forum brings together distinguished South Korean (Republic of Korea, or ROK) and American scholars, experts, and former military and civilian officials to discuss North Korea, the U.S.-ROK alliance, and regional dynamics in Northeast Asia.

Since the third session, the Sejong Institute has been Shorenstein APARC’s Korean counterpart in organizing and hosting the Forum. Meetings are held semi-annually, alternating between Stanford University and Seoul. Operating as a closed workshop under the Chatham House Rule of individual confidentiality, the Forum allows participants to engage in candid, in-depth discussion of current issues of vital national interest to both countries.

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PESD researchers assess natural gas in the U.S. and China

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PESD researchers commented in the new issue of the Stanford Energy Journal on what the “shale gas revolution” means for both the U.S. and China. Mark Thurber argues that environmentalists in the U.S. should advocate for both fugitive methane regulations and increased use of gas. Jonathan Strahl and Joseph Chang foresee that economic and regulatory barriers may delay a repeat in China of the North American shale “miracle.”
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CDDRL-CISAC Special Seminar: The Logic of Violence in Drug Wars: Cartel-State Conflict in Mexico, Brazil and Colombia

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Abstract:

Why have militarized crackdowns on drug cartels had wildly divergent outcomes, sometimes exacerbating cartel-state conflict, as in Mexico and, for decades, in Brazil, but sometimes reducing violence, as with Rio de Janeiro's new 'Pacification' (UPP) strategy?  CDDRL-CISAC Post Doctoral Fellow Benjamin Lessing will distinguish key logics of violence, focusing on violent corruption--cartels' use of coercive force in the negotiation of bribes. Through this channel, crackdowns can lead to increased fighting unless the intensity of state repression is made conditional on cartels' use of violence--a key difference between Mexico and Brazil.

Speaker Bio:

Benjamin Lessing is a recent Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a joint postdoctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center on International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), and will join the Political Science faculty at University of Chicago as assistant professor in 2013.

Lessing studies 'criminal conflict'—organized armed violence involving non-state actors who, unlike revolutionary insurgents, are not trying to topple the state. His doctoral dissertation examines armed conflict between drug trafficking organizations and the state in Colombia, Mexico and Brazil. Additionally, he has studied prison gangs’ pernicious effect on state authority, and the effect of paramilitary groups’ territorial control on electoral outcomes. 

Prior to his graduate work, he conducted field research on the licit and illicit small arms trade in Latin America and the Caribbean for international organizations like Amnesty International, Oxfam, and the Small Arms Survey, as well as Viva Rio, Brazil’s largest NGO, and was a Fulbright Student Grantee in Argentina and Uruguay.

 

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Benjamin Lessing Post-doctoral Fellow Speaker CDDRL and CISAC

Beatriz Magaloni

Dept. of Political Science
Encina Hall, Room 436
Stanford University,
Stanford, CA

(650) 724-5949
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations
Professor of Political Science
beatriz_magaloni_2024.jpg MA, PhD

Beatriz Magaloni Magaloni is the Graham Stuart Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science. Magaloni is also a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, where she holds affiliations with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She is also a Stanford’s King Center for Global Development faculty affiliate. Magaloni has taught at Stanford University for over two decades.

She leads the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (Povgov). Founded by Magaloni in 2010, Povgov is one of Stanford University’s leading impact-driven knowledge production laboratories in the social sciences. Under her leadership, Povgov has innovated and advanced a host of cutting-edge research agendas to reduce violence and poverty and promote peace, security, and human rights.

Magaloni’s work has contributed to the study of authoritarian politics, poverty alleviation, indigenous governance, and, more recently, violence, crime, security institutions, and human rights. Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006) is widely recognized as a seminal study in the field of comparative politics. It received the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations, as well as the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section. Her second book The Politics of Poverty Relief: Strategies of Vote Buying and Social Policies in Mexico (with Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estevez) (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores how politics shapes poverty alleviation.

Magaloni’s work was published in leading journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Criminology & Public Policy, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, Latin American Research Review, and others.

Magaloni received wide international acclaim for identifying innovative solutions for salient societal problems through impact-driven research. In 2023, she was named winner of the world-renowned Stockholm Prize in Criminology, considered an equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of criminology. The award recognized her extensive research on crime, policing, and human rights in Mexico and Brazil. Magaloni’s research production in this area was also recognized by the American Political Science Association, which named her recipient of the 2021 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review, the leading journal in the discipline.

She received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University and holds a law degree from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.

Director, Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab
Co-director, Democracy Action Lab
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Beatriz Magaloni Associate Professor of Political Science Commentator Stanford
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Canada’s new investment rules for oil sands target foreign NOCs

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PESD associate director Mark Thurber appeared on Canada’s Business News Network to discuss new government guidelines that promise greater scrutiny for future corporate takeovers in the oil sands by foreign national oil companies (NOCs). Thurber argued that Canada nevertheless remains comparatively attractive to NOCs working abroad relative to other oil provinces around the world.
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The Kims' Three Bodies: Dynastic Succession and its Antecedents in the DPRK

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North Korea has smuggled monarchy through the front door of its communist system. Korea's millennia-long history of kings and queens means that the people of the DPRK have only known monarchy or dictatorship (Japanese, 1910-45; the Kim family's, 1945--present); ordinary people frequently refer to their leader as "wang," or king. Unlike with Kim Jong Il (who resembled his mother, not his father), the regime has gone out of its way to identify Kim Jong Un with his grandfather--and the grandson, in turn, has adopted the characteristic public style of Kim Il Sung. Many American commentators mistakenly assume that when the leader dies, North Korea will be like the Soviet Union after Stalin, or China after Mao. In fact it has gone through two stable leadership transitions, in 1994 and 2011, and given Kim Jong Un's youth, there may not be another one for many years.

This event is co-sponsored by Center for East Asian Studies, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Department of History and Korean Studies Program

Please register at http://ceas.stanford.edu/events/event_detail.php?id=3147.

For questions and details, please contact Ms. Marna Romanoff at romanoff@stanford.edu

Building 200 - Room 307,
Main Quad

Bruce Cumings Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor in History and the College and Chair of the Department of History Speaker the University of Chicago
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South Korea to inaugurate first female president

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KSP associate director David Straub joined a panel organized by The Korea Society on February 28 to discuss the opportunities and challenges facing the new South Korean government of President Park Geun-hye.

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President-elect Park Geun-hye of South Korea spoke at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center in 2009.
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Export American natural gas? Not so fast, says Stanford economist

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With the advent of the "shale gas revolution," the United States has undergone a full-scale natural gas boom. Driven by fracking and horizontal drilling, the United States will likely overtake Russia as the world's largest producer of natural gas by 2015, according to the International Energy Agency.

Now, as estimates of available reserves continue to go up and prices drop to less than $3 per million BTU, talk is turning to exporting natural gas – potentially a serious moneymaker, with countries like Singapore facing per million BTU prices around $16.

As a Stanford economics professor and director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at the university's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Frank Wolak understands the urge to export.

"But there's a significant risk here that I don't think people are necessarily factoring in," he said.

As he explained in a recent policy brief for the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, investing in natural gas export facilities "is a bet against what U.S. firms excel in – developing and commercializing new technologies and products."

Ghost facilities

Along the coasts of Texas and Louisiana, the early 2000s saw the construction of a number of liquefied natural gas (LNG) receiving terminals, intended to meet a predicted increase in natural gas imports.

"Those facilities are now sitting vacant," Wolak said, "because the price of natural gas in the United States has fallen so much." Many are converting themselves into export facilities.

He thinks moving immediately to export runs the risk of repeating this scenario in reverse. It takes time to site, permit, construct and bring an LNG export facility online. In the meantime, American entrepreneurs will be looking to apply technologies like fracking and horizontal drilling elsewhere.

"It's hard to see why this technology can't be exported to the rest of the world," said Wolak.

If that happens, a U.S. export facility could be finished only to find a few new shale gas revolutions in other parts of the globe overturning its intended markets.

Cooking with gas

What does Wolak recommend the United States do with its embarrassment of domestic natural gas riches? Use it at home.

There is no major technological barrier to using natural gas in the transportation sector – our heaviest user of oil. Vehicles that burn compressed natural gas (CNG) are already in common use, particularly in Asia and South America.

Wolak noted that the use of compressed natural gas makes the most sense in a vehicle fleet that drives a well-defined circuit, such as urban buses or taxis. Vehicles that use the denser liquid natural gas are better suited for heavy-duty use, such as regional long-haul truckers. The compressed natural gas refueling infrastructure could expand once these routes were established.

Home filling stations for personal vehicles are another option – household compressors that work with existing home natural gas connections are, in fact, already on the market. The devices are currently priced out of the range of most consumers, but these home filling stations could become a viable option as natural gas becomes a more popular fuel choice.

Wolak also noted that natural gas is currently replacing coal in the production of electricity, a trend that is likely to continue given current conditions in the global coal market and natural gas's relative environmental benefits. Natural gas generation facilities, he pointed out, produce only a third to a half of the greenhouse gas emissions per megawatt hour as coal-fired facilities, and are now cheaper per BTU.

"All I need is heat energy," Wolak said. "Whatever source of energy is cheapest is ultimately what I'm going to use."

Max McClure is a writer for the Stanford News Service.

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How to Engage Iran: Abe Sofaer in conversation with Allen Weiner on Diplomacy and the Iranian Nuclear Crisis

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About the Speakers: Abraham Sofaer was appointed the first George P. Shultz Distinguished Scholar and Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution in 1994. Sofaer's work focuses on the power over war within the US government and on issues related to international law, terrorism, diplomacy, and national security. His most recent books are The Best Defense?: Legitimacy and Preventive Force and Taking On Iran: Strength, Diplomacy and the Iranian Threat. From 1985 to 1990, he served as a legal adviser to the US Department of State. He received the Distinguished Service Award in 1989, the highest state department award given to a non–civil servant.

Allen Weiner is senior lecturer in law and co-director of the Stanford Program in International Law at Stanford Law School. He is also the co-director of the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation. For more than a decade, he practiced international law in the U.S. Department of State, serving as an attorney-adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser and as legal counselor at the U.S. Embassy in The Hague. Weiner is the author of "The Torture Memos and Accountability" in the American Society of International Law Insight and co-author of International Law. Other publications include "Law, Just War, and the International Fight Against Terrorism: Is It War?" in Intervention, Terrorism, and Torture: Contemporary Challenges to Just War Theory.

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Abraham Sofaer George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy and National Security Affairs, Hoover Institution, Stanford Speaker
Allen Weiner Senior Lecturer in Law; Co-Director, Stanford Program in International Law; Co-Director, Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation; CDDRL and CISAC Affiliated Faculty Member; Europe Center Research Affiliate Host
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