The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) seeks undergraduate applications for up to four research internships in Guatemala and two in Mexico that will include work abroad during summer quarter 2014. The internship program will support a multidisciplinary team of Stanford undergraduates to carry out field research projects that address chronic global underdevelopment. Working with an established research program in Guatemala and Mexico and supervised by Professors Beatriz Magaloni and Paul Wise, the undergraduate research team will spend approximately two weeks on location and four to six weeks planning and completing projects in the U.S. Travel, accommodations, insurance and incidentals will be fully funded.

Join us for an info session to find out more about the programs, ask questions, and chat with the faculty and past participants.

For specific information on the two programs and how to apply, please visit the following fellowship links:

• Guatemala
• Mexico

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Abstract:

Scholars of state development have paid insufficient attention to the question of regionalism; too often modeling state-building as the extension of the authority of a 'center' over peripheral territories, and too often linking regionalism to cultural or ethnic heterogeneity. A purely spatial account of the challenges to central control shows that even in the absence of cultural fractionalization, the presence of economically powerful and politically salient regions undermines political development. Three analytically distinct mechanisms - divergent public good preferences, economic self-sufficiency, and institutional design - underlie this relationship. I explore these issues through a region-wide analysis of Latin America, and case studies of the United States, Ecuador, Colombia, and early modern Poland.

Speaker Bio:

Hillel David Soifer earned his PhD in the Government Department at Harvard, and is currently Assistant Professor of Political Science at Temple University. His research has been centered in Latin America, with a focus on political development and state capacity, and has been published in journals including Latin American Research Review and Comparative Political Studies. He is currently completing a book on the long-term divergence in state capacity in Latin America which contrasts the cases of Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru.

Abstract
According to international human rights law, countries have to provide palliative care and pain treatment medications as part of their core obligations under the right to health. The failure to take reasonable steps to ensure that people who suffer pain have access to adequate pain treatment may also result in the violation of the obligation to protect against cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. The lecture will discuss Human Rights Watch’s research on this issue in India, Ukraine, Senegal, Kenya, and Mexico; our national and international advocacy efforts; and how we evaluate the impact of our work.

Joe Amon, PhD MSPH, is the Director of the Health and Human Rights Division at Human Rights Watch. Since joining Human Rights Watch in 2005, Joe has worked on a wide range of issues including access to medicines; discrimination, arbitrary detention and torture in health settings; censorship and the denial of health information; and the role of civil society in the response to infectious disease outbreaks and environmental health threats. Between January 2009 and June 2013 he oversaw Human Rights Watch's work on disability rights. He is an associate in the department of epidemiology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University and a lecturer in public and international affairs at Princeton University. In 2012 he was a distinguished visiting lecturer at the Paris School of International Affairs of SciencesPo.            

Abstract:

This paper estimates the effect that successful cocaine interdiction policies in Colombia have had on violence in Mexico. We propose a simple model of the war on drugs that captures the essence of our identification strategy: aggregate supply shocks affect the size of illegal drug markets, which then increases or decreases violence. We estimate the effect of the interaction of cocaine seizures in Colombia with simple geographic features of Mexican municipalities. Our results indicate that aggregate supply shocks originated in drug seizures in Colombia affect homicides in Mexico. The effects are especially large for violence generated by clashes between drug cartels. Our estimates also show that government crackdowns on drug cartels might not be the only explanation behind the rise of illegal drug trafficking and violence observed in the last six years in Mexico: successful interdiction policies implemented in Colombia since 2006 have also played a major role in the worsening of the Mexican situationduring Calderon's sexennium.

Speaker Bio:

Daniel Mejia is Associate Professor in the Department of Economics and Director of the Research Center on Drugs and Security (CESED) at Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia, where he has taught since 2006. He received a BA and MA in Economics from Universidad de los Andes and a MA and PhD in economics from Brown University. Prior to joining Universidad de los Andes he worked as a researcher at the Central Bank of Colombia and Fedesarrollo. Daniel he has been actively involved in a research agenda whose main objective is to provide an independent, economic evaluation of anti-drug policies implemented under Plan Colombia. His academic work has been published at the Journal of Development Economics, the European Journal of Political Economy, Economics of Governance and Economia: Journal of the Latin America Economic Association. In 2008 he was awarded Fedesarrollos´s German Botero de los Ríos prize for economic research. Also, in 2008, 2010 and 2012 he was awarded with research grants from the Open Society Institute for the study of anti-drug policies in Colombia. Daniel, together with Alejandro Gaviria, recently published the book “Políticas antidroga en Colombia: éxitos, fracasos y extravíos” (Anti-drug policies in Colombia: successes, failures and lost opportunities) at Universidad de los Andes, in Bogota. Between 2011 and 2012, Daniel was a member of the Advisory Commission on Criminal Policy and more recently he is the Chair of the Colombian Government´s Advisory Commission on Drugs Policy.

Javier Sicilia is a poet, essayist, novelist, and journalist from Mexico. He contributes to various print media such as the Mexico City daily La Jornada and Proceso magazine. After his son was killed by drug traffickers in 2011, Sicilia founded an anti-violence called Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity. The group has campaigned against the spreading criminal and state violence in Mexico through massive street mobilizations, caravans and marches. Because of this movement, Sicilia was named as one of Time Magazine's Protestors of the Year for 2011. For his writing, he was awarded the Aguascalientes National Award of Poetry in 2009.

The lecture will be followed by a reception.