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Francis Fukuyama in Foreign Policy Magazine: Samuel Huntington's Legacy

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Francis Fukuyama
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This article by Francis Fukuyama is based on a 2008 piece on the website of the American Interest and the preface to the 2006 edition of Political Order in Changing Societies.

(excerpt) This argument is still very much with us. In the wake of America's flawed nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, many people have suggested the need for sequencing in development, putting state-building ahead of efforts to democratize and expand political participation.

Political Order in Changing Societies was one of Huntington's earlier works, and one that established his stature as a political scientist, but it was far from his last major contribution to comparative politics. His work on democratic transition also became a point of reference in the period after the end of the Cold War. Ironically, this stream of writing began with a 1984 article in Political Science Quarterly titled "Will More Countries Become Democratic?" Surveying the situation following the Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American democratic transitions of the 1970s and early 1980s, Huntington made the case that the world was not likely to see more shifts from authoritarianism in the near future given inauspicious structural and international conditions. This was written, of course, a mere five years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. He shifted gears quickly after the collapse of communism, however, and wrote The Third Wave, a book that gave the name to the entire period.

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War Games: Childhood, Militarization, and the Future of a Pacifist Japan

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Winter Quarter Japan Seminar Series

In March 2000, the release of Sony's new PlayStation2 hit a snag. The Japanese government classified the game console as a "general purpose product related to conventional weapons" on the grounds that it was powerful enough to be used as an actual missile guidance system. Accordingly, the government applied export controls on PlayStation2 requiring that distributors obtain a special license. Illustrating the coinage of such terms as "military-industrial-entertainment complex," the incident marked one of numerous collusions between military and commercial uses of video games in Japan and elsewhere.

It is against this backdrop that Frühstück traces the rules and conventions of war games from the fields of rural Japan in the nineteenth century to cyberspace in the twenty-first century. Her examination of the varying configurations of militarism and infantilism, the production of "child soldiers," and the competing roles of state agencies and entertainment industries suggest that war has been leaving its mark on the social body, and on children in particular, not only in the form of injury or death. Rather, through military institutions, pedagogy, technology, popular culture, and other intermediaries, war continues to have general effects on Japanese society and the global order as a whole.

Sabine Frühstück is a professor of modern Japanese cultural studies and chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Employing historical and sociocultural methodologies, Frühstück's research focuses on militarization and war, gender and sexuality, and Japan in a global context from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Her book Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army (2007) was translated into Japanese as Fuan na heishitachi: Nippon Jieitai Kenkyû (2008). She is also the author of Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (2003) and Die Politik der Sexualwissenschaft, 1908-1941 (1997), and co-editor of the volumes The Culture of Japan as Seen through Its Leisure (1998), Neue Geschichten der Sexualität in Zentraleuropa und Ostasien (1999), and Recreating Japanese Men (in press, 2011). Committed to engaging the humanities and the social sciences, she has written essays in English, Japanese and German that have been published in the Journal of Japanese Studies, the Journal of Asian Studies, the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, American Ethnologist, Jinbun Gakuho, and Zeitschrift für angewandte Sozialforschung, among other scholarly journals.

Since joining the faculty at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Frühstück has been serving as the executive board director of the UC-wide Pacific Rim Research Program and as a member of the editorial boards of the University of California Press and the Journal of Japanese Studies. She also has been a member of the American Advisory Committee for Japanese Studies of the Japan Foundation, the executive board of the German Association for Social Science Research on Japan, and the Board of Trustees of the Society for Japanese Studies. At UCSB, she has dry appointments with the departments of history, anthropology, and feminist studies, and the Cold War Center.

Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room

Sabine Fruhstuck Professor of Modern Japanese Cultural Studies and Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies Speaker University of California, Santa Barbara
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Shorenstein APARC Winter Quarter Japan Seminar Series

Single-mothers in Japan: Living Arrangements and Well-Being

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Winter Quarter Japan Seminar Series

The prevalence of single-mother families in Japan has increased markedly as a result of rising divorce rates. Unlike in the U.S, where the well-being of single mothers and their children is a central research and policy focus, we know very little about single-mother families in Japan. The most widely-discussed characteristic of these families is their economic deprivation. Over half of Japanese single mothers live in poverty despite the fact that nearly all are employed. In the context of limited public income transfers and low earnings, intergenerational coresidence is a potentially important source of support that may buffer the impact of single-parenthood for the nearly one-in-three single mothers who live with their parents.

In this talk, Professor Raymo will present results from the first two studies to examine the role of living arrangements in moderating relationships between single parenthood and well-being in Japan. In the first study, he uses data from a survey of single mothers to examine differences in the self-rated health and subjective economic well-being of those living with parents and those living alone. In the second study, he uses data from two rounds of a nationally-representative survey to compare time spent with children in single-mother families and two-parent families, paying attention to the ways in which the presence of coresident grandparents may moderate relationships between family structure and parent-child interactions. In both studies, I find that single mothers living alone are characterized by relatively poor outcomes, net of theoretically relevant controls. In the second study, he also finds that single mothers living with parents are no different than their married counterparts in terms of the time spent playing with, instructing, and eating dinner with children. He discusses the potential implications of these findings for inequality and the reproduction of disadvantage in Japan.

Jim Raymo is Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he is also an affiliate of the Center for Demography and Ecology, the Center for Demography of Health and Aging, and the Center for East Asian Studies. Raymo's research focuses primarily on evaluating patterns and potential consequences of demographic changes associated with rapid population aging in Japan. He has published widely on key features of recent family change in Japan, including delayed marriage, extended coresidence with parents, and increases in premarital cohabitation, shotgun marriages, and divorce. In two other lines of research, he has examined relationships between work, family characteristics, and health outcomes at older ages in Japan and patterns of retirement and well-being at older ages in the U.S. He is currently involved in the early stages of a project that will examine family change and inequality in Japan in cross-national comparative perspective. His research has been published in top U.S. journals such as American Sociological Review, Demography, and Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences as well as in Japanese journals.

Raymo teaches classes on Family and Household Demography, Demographic Techniques, and Research Methods. He is currently the Associate Director of Training at the Center for Demography and Ecology and the faculty director of the Sociology Department's Concentration in Analysis and Research. He also serves on the editorial boards of Demography and Journal of Marriage and Family. Raymo received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan after completing his M.A. in Economics at Osaka City University in Japan.

Department of Sociology
Main Quad, Building 120
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James Raymo Professor of Sociology Speaker University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Shorenstein APARC Winter Quarter Japan Seminar Series

Blogs and Bullets: Social Media and the Struggle for Political Change

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Moderator: Sheldon Himefarb, United States Institute of Peace

From WikFileaks revelations to claims of "Twitter revolutions," the role of new media in shaping global political action is one of the most discussed but least understood phenomena confronting scholars, policymakers, advocates, and the private sector. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made "digital democracy" a cornerstone of U.S. diplomacy; grassroots organizations like Ushahidi are crowdsourcing everything from protest to disaster relief; and corporations like Cisco and Google are increasingly making news for their role in international development and commerce.

Everyone seems to agree new and social media matter. Less clear is how, when, and why.

In a continuing effort to find answers to these questions, George Washington University, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the Liberation Technology Program of Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law present a panel to discuss the latest approaches to understanding the role of new media in fostering peace, conflict, and political change. The panel will consider research work in progress, stories from the front lines of diplomacy 2.0, and private sector approaches to facilitating new social media.

Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center

Marc Lynch Speaker George Washington University
Clay Shirky Speaker New York University
Olivia Ma News Manager Speaker YouTube

Larry Diamond

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

(650) 724-6448 (650) 723-1928
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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
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Thomas Fingar analyzes China and the global system

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Despite all of the rhetoric, it is clear from the numbers that China's ascendency has not been at the expense of the United States.

-Thomas Fingar

China unquestionably occupies a significant place in the world's U.S.-led economic and political system. Will it continue to participate in the system that it has benefited from and contributed to, adapting its policies and practices in order to do so? Or, will it attempt to overturn the current system at some point in an effort to gain global dominance? Thomas Fingar, the Oksenberg/Rohlen Distinguished Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, will address these core questions in a new research project, arguing that the situation is neither so polarized, nor so simplistic. Former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Fingar takes an empirical approach to his research, examining whether there have been recurring patterns to China's involvement in the global order; what drives, shapes, and constrains Chinese initiatives; and how others have responded to Chinese actions.

Fingar asserts that there have been patterns to China's participation in international economics and politics over the past 30 years, including a pendular quality to the U.S.-China relationship. According to him, relations between the two countries were largely instrumental during the Cold War era when the United States was at odds with the Soviet Union and China was undergoing a period of self strengthening. U.S.-China relations cooled following the Tiananmen Square incident, the timing of which coincided roughly with the fall of the Soviet Union. Trust between the two countries deteriorated as China displayed its more authoritarian side, and the United States responded with sanctions that did not significantly impede China's economic growth, but did change the relationship in ways that still shape perceptions of one another.

Economics are now the primary focal point of discussions about U.S.-China relations, with a negative light frequently cast on China. "Despite all of the rhetoric, it is clear from the numbers that China's ascendency has not been at the expense of the United States," states Fingar. Trade with China, in fact, creates jobs in the United States, but trade-related jobs are dispersed and therefore not clearly visible. "They are not concentrated in a place where a factory closed, often for reasons that that have nothing to do with China," says Fingar, "but the pain and the political impact is local. I would predict that when our economy turns around, the pendulum will swing further back in a less-worried, less-critical direction."

While China has a legal system and has adopted many international standards, Fingar asserts that "it is still not a society governed by law," and that it in fact does not always measure up to global or even to its own standards. He cites China's record of undesirable practices and issues, such as currency manipulation, government corruption, and intellectual property violation, which complicate and confuse understanding of its involvement in the global system.

Fingar does not believe that the U.S.-China relationship will ever return to the "honeymoon" era of the Cold War, but he says, "The swings of the pendulum and the perturbations in the relationship are less intense and of shorter duration; that is the pattern." Quoting Anne-Marie Slaughter, director of policy planning at the U.S. Department of State, Fingar suggests that the best vision for the global order is "a world in which there are more partnerships and fewer alliances." He cautions against disregarding important, long-time alliances, such as the U.S.-Korea relationship. He notes, however, the crucial fact that alliances assume that there is an adversary, which can marginalize and threaten regional neighbors, such as China, or put allies in the uncomfortable position of having to choose between siding with a neighbor or a distant ally. "We must find a way so that no one has to choose," says Fingar.

On January 6, Fingar outlined the primary points of his new research project at a public lecture co-sponsored by the Stanford China Program and the Center for East Asian Studies, part of the China in the World series. He will also lead Stanford students through an examination of related key issues and questions in "China on the World Stage" (IPS 246), a course that he is teaching during the current winter quarter.

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President Hu Jintao of China waits in a hallway before the start of a bilateral meeting with President Barack Obama, during the Nuclear Security Summit at the Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., April 12, 2010. | Official White House photo by Lawrence Jackson
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Taboo or Not Taboo: Experimental Evidence on Nuclear Weapons Use and Restraint

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Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Benjamin Valentino Associate Professor of Government Speaker Dartmouth College

Scott D. Sagan

CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, E202
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

(650) 725-2715 (650) 723-0089
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The Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science
The Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education  
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
rsd25_073_1160a_1.jpg PhD

Scott D. Sagan is the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, the Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, and a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, where he previously served as the social science co-director. He is the Inaugural Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellow for Nuclear Ethics and Security at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs (2026-2027). Sagan also serves as co-chair of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Committee on International Security Studies. Before joining the Stanford faculty, he was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University and served as special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon.

Sagan is the author of Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton University Press, 1989); The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton University Press, 1993); and, with co-author Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate (W.W. Norton, 2012). He is the co-editor of Insider Threats (Cornell University Press, 2017) with Matthew Bunn; and co-editor of The Fragile Balance of Terror (Cornell University Press, 2022) with Vipin Narang. Sagan was also the guest editor of a two-volume special issue of Daedalus: Ethics, Technology, and War (Fall 2016) and The Changing Rules of War (Winter 2017).

Recent publications include “Creeds and Contestation: How US Nuclear and Legal Doctrine Influence Each Other,” with Janina Dill, in a special issue of Security Studies (December 2025); “Kettles of Hawks: Public Opinion on the Nuclear Taboo and Noncombatant Immunity in the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Israel”, with Janina Dill and Benjamin A. Valentino in Security Studies (February 2022); “The Rule of Law and the Role of Strategy in U.S. Nuclear Doctrine” with Allen S. Weiner in International Security (Spring 2021); “Does the Noncombatant Immunity Norm Have Stopping Power?” with Benjamin A. Valentino in International Security (Fall 2020); and “Just War and Unjust Soldiers: American Public Opinion on the Moral Equality of Combatants” and “On Reciprocity, Revenge, and Replication: A Rejoinder to Walzer, McMahan, and Keohane” with Benjamin A. Valentino in Ethics & International Affairs (Winter 2019).

In 2022, Sagan was awarded Thérèse Delpech Memorial Award from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace at their International Nuclear Policy Conference. In 2017, he received the International Studies Association’s Susan Strange Award which recognizes the scholar whose “singular intellect, assertiveness, and insight most challenge conventional wisdom and intellectual and organizational complacency" in the international studies community. Sagan was also the recipient of the National Academy of Sciences William and Katherine Estes Award in 2015, for his work addressing the risks of nuclear weapons and the causes of nuclear proliferation. The award, which is granted triennially, recognizes “research in any field of cognitive or behavioral science that advances understanding of issues relating to the risk of nuclear war.” In 2013, Sagan received the International Studies Association's International Security Studies Section Distinguished Scholar Award. He has also won four teaching awards: Stanford’s 1998-99 Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching; Stanford's 1996 Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching; the International Studies Association’s 2008 Innovative Teaching Award; and the Monterey Institute for International Studies’ Nonproliferation Education Award in 2009.     

Former co-director, Center for International Security and Cooperation
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Scott D. Sagan Co-Director, CISAC; Professor of Political Science, Stanford University Speaker
Anne Harrington de Santana Postdoctoral Fellow, CISAC Commentator
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Fourth Korea-U.S. West Coast Strategic Forum

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The fourth session of the Korea-U.S. West Coast Strategic Forum, held at Stanford University on June 18, 2010, convened former senior South Korean and American West Coast-based policymakers, scholars, and regional and functional experts 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 organized the Forum in association with its Korean partner, The Sejong Institute, of Seongnam, Korea. The Forum operates as a closed workshop under Chatham House Rule of confidentiality, allowing participants to engage in frank and in-depth exchanges on important and sensitive current issues. Meeting in the aftermath of the March 26 sinking of the South Korean naval ship Cheonan, Forum participants focused on developments in North Korea, how the U.S.-ROK alliance should respond to North Korean challenges, and the role of China vis-à-vis the Korean Peninsula and the Northeast Asia region.

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