Stanford University

Expulsions: Inequality's Fifth Circle

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In the last two decades there has been a sharp growth in the numbers of people that have been “expelled,” numbers far larger than the newly “incorporated” middle classes of countries such as India and China. I use the term “expulsion” to describe a diversity of conditions: the growing numbers of the abjectly poor, of the displaced in poor countries who are warehoused in formal and informal refugee camps, of the minoritized and persecuted in rich countries who are warehoused in prisons, of workers whose bodies are destroyed on the job and rendered useless at far too young an age, able-bodied surplus populations warehoused in ghettoes and slums. One major trend is the repositioning of what had been framed as sovereign territory, a complex conditions, into land for sale on the global market – land in Sub-Saharan Africa, in Central Asia and in Latin America to be bought by rich investors and rich governments to grow food, to access underground water tables, and to access minerals and metals. My argument is that these diverse and many other kindred developments amount to a logic of expulsion, signaling a deeper systemic transformation in advanced capitalism, one documented in bits and pieces but not quite narrated as an overarching dynamic that is taking us into a new phase of global capitalism. The paper is based on the author’s forthcoming book Expulsions.


Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and Co-Chair, The Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University (www.saskiasassen.com). Her recent books are Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press 2008), A Sociology of Globalization (W.W.Norton 2007), both translated into Spanish by Editorial Katz (Madrid y Buenos Aires), and the 4th fully updated edition of Cities in a World Economy (Sage 2012). Among older books is The Global City (Princeton University Press 1991/2001). Her books are translated into over 20 languages. She is the recipient of diverse awards and mentions, ranging from multiple doctor honoris causa to named lectures and being selected as one of the 100 Top Global Thinkers of 2011 by Foreign Policy Magazine.

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Sponsored by The Europe Center, the Abassi Program in Islamic Studies, and the Mediterranean Studies Forum

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Saskia Sassen Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and Co-Chair of the Committee on Global Thought Speaker Columbia University
David Palumbo-Liu Professor and Director of Comparative Literature and Director of the Asian American Studies Program Speaker Stanford University
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A Revolution for Whom?: Measuring Political Bias in Venezuelan Land Reform using Maisanta

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Michael Albertus, post-doctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law will present a paper that details the first analysis of a distributive program – a Venezuelan land reform initiative known as Misión Zamora – at the individual level using data on revealed voter preferences and the receipt of particularistic benefits. Using data from a list of millions of voters that signed petitions to recall President Chávez, Albertus will match information on all recent land grant applicants to petition signers to measure the effect of political preferences on the likelihood of applying for land, receiving land, and being effectively rejected. He will present evidence for both strategic core voter targeting and punishment of opposition voters, although both of these effects are modified by local political actors. The lack of a complete property registry and ambiguity in key provisions of the Land Law have enabled considerable administrative discretion in the application of the program.

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Michael Albertus

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CDDRL Visiting Scholar, Winter-Spring 2026
CDDRL Postdoctoral Fellow, 2011-2012
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Michael Albertus is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and the author of five books. His newest book, Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies, was published by Basic Books in January 2025. It tells the story of how land came to be power within human societies, how it shapes power, and how its allocation determines the major social ills that societies grapple with.

Albertus studied math, electrical engineering, and political science at the University of Michigan and earned degrees in all three in 2005. He then did a PhD in political science at Stanford University, completing in 2011. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Albertus joined the University of Chicago faculty in 2012 and has since been on sabbatical twice back at Stanford, including as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavior Sciences. In addition to his books, Albertus is also the author of over 30 peer-reviewed journal articles, including at flagship journals like the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and World Politics. He has taught courses to undergraduate, Masters, and PhD students on topics including inequality and redistribution, democracy and dictatorship, comparative politics, and political and economic development and policy in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula.

The defining features of Albertus' work are his engagement with big questions and puzzles and the ability to join big data and cutting-edge research methods with original, deep on-the-ground fieldwork everywhere from government offices to archives and farm fields. He has conducted fieldwork throughout the Americas, southern Europe, South Africa, and elsewhere. His books and articles have won numerous awards and shifted conventional understandings of democracy, authoritarianism, and the consequences of how humans occupy and relate to the land.

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The Global Costs of American Ethanol

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World leaders are focused on agricultural supply data, insurance schemes and speculation as they try to quell volatility in global food markets. They should also turn their attention to perhaps the leading cause of price instability: U.S. ethanol policy.

Five years ago, few if any food or energy experts predicted that 40 percent of the U.S. corn crop in 2011 would be devoted to ethanol production. Nor did they imagine: that corn prices would reach all-time highs at $8 per bushel ($275 per metric ton); that July futures prices for corn in Chicago would exceed those for wheat; that the United States would be exporting ethanol to Brazil; or that an Iowa Senator would co-sponsor a bill to reduce corn-based subsidies just prior to the Iowa Caucuses for the 2012 primary season. What has caused these extraordinary circumstances? And what are the economic, political and food-security implications of a revolution in demand that has caught both economists and political leaders unaware?

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Brenna Powell

Encina Hall
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Visiting Scholar, 2011-12
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Brenna Marea Powell received her PhD in Government and Social Policy from Harvard in 2011. She is interested in comparative racial and ethnic politics, conflict and inequality. Her research includes security and policing in divided societies, as well as racial politics in Brazil and the United States. She has been a graduate fellow at Harvard's Wiener Center for Inequality and Social Policy, and Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation. Prior to her graduate study, she spent five years working with the Stanford
Center on International Conflict and Negotiation on grassroots dialogue and community-based mediation programs in Northern Ireland. Brenna speaks Portuguese and received her BA from Stanford in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.

At CDDRL, Brenna is working with the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy and Security supported by the Kofi Annan Foundation and International IDEA. She is also working on a book project about post-conflict policing in Northern Ireland.

Human Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Latin America

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The Program on Human Rights and the Center for Latin American Studies are pleased to host the Conference "Human Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Latin America".

Indigenous peoples around the world have often been dispossessed of their land, leading to ongoing conflict over control and usage of land and resources. Indigenous peoples in Latin America are no exception; they are among the most disadvantaged and vulnerable peoples in the region. Indigenous peoples in Latin America rank highest on underdevelopment indicators such as incarceration, illiteracy, unemployment, poverty and disease. They face discrimination in schools and are exploited in the workplace. Their sacred lands and artifacts are plundered from them. In many Latin American countries, indigenous peoples are not even permitted to study their own language.

The Stanford Spring conference “Human Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Latin America,” brings scholars from all disciplines to examine the common trends, actors, challenges and changes among indigenous populations in Latin America and the Caribbean.

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Alejandro Toledo President of Peru from 2001 to 2006 Keynote Speaker
Eliane Karp-Toledo Anthropologist, Economist and former First Lady of Peru (2001 to 2006) Keynote Speaker
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A Critique of Repressive Approaches to Combat Human Trafficking

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Alison Brysk is the Mellichamp Chair in Global Governance, Global and International Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She has authored or edited eight books on international human rights including the book From Human Trafficking to Human Rights. Professor Brysk has been a visiting scholar in Argentina, Ecuador, France, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands, South Africa, and Japan, and in 2007 held the Fulbright Distinguished Visiting Chair in Global Governance at Canada's Centre for International Governance Innovation.

 

Dr. Mohammed Mattar is the executive director of the Protection Project. He has worked in over 50 countries to promote state compliance with international human rights standards and has advised governments on drafting and implementing anti-trafficking legislation. He participated in drafting the United Nations model law on trafficking in persons and he authored the Inter-Parliamentarian Handbook on the appropriate responses to trafficking in persons. Dr. Mattar currently teaches courses on international and comparative law at Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins University (SAIS) and American University, and has authored numerous publications for law reviews and the United Nations on international human rights and Islamic law, trafficking in persons and reporting mechanisms.

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The Program on Human Rights welcomes new program manager

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The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law is pleased to announce that Nadejda Marques has joined the Program on Human Rights (PHR) to serve as the new program manager. In this capacity, Marques will coordinate a range of interdisciplinary initiatives and events, support new research projects, and spearhead PHR's outreach and fundraising efforts. Marques will work together with PHR Program Director and FSI Senior Fellow, Helen Stacy to support the conceptualization, design, and conduct of PHR's research initiatives, advancing the mission and visibility of PHR activities at Stanford University and beyond.

Marques joins the PHR from Boston where she worked as research coordinator for the Cost of Inaction Project at the François-Bagnoud Xavier Center for Health and Human Rights based at the Harvard School of Public Health. Working for the Cost of Inaction Project, Marques was responsible for researching and analyzing the cost of inaction of public programs and actions that help reduce the impact of HIV/AIDS on children in Angola.

"Nadejda Marques' training as an economist, her 15 years of work in human rights, including her work in the field in Angola and in founding the Brazilian human rights NGO Justiça Global bring valuable experience and expertise to the Program on Human Rights at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law," said PHR director Helen Stacy. "Even more importantly, Nadejda's commitment to bottom-up human rights reform means that she is acutely aware of human rights practice as a multi-faceted and inter-disciplinary activity. I am thrilled to welcome Nadejda to the Program on Human Rights as a thought partner to expand the reach and scope of our programming."

Marques holds degrees in economics (UNA, Brazil) and international finance (FGV, Brazil). She has worked as a special correspondent for the Washington Post in Latin America, and has taught languages and Latin American culture at Harvard, Bentley College, and the University of Massachusetts in Boston. For the past decade, Marques has worked in the field of human rights, most notably with Human Rights Watch in Brazil and Angola. Marques is fluent in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. She serves as a consultant and board member for leading human rights NGOs in Brazil and Angola.

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Collecting, Protecting, and Analyzing Human Rights Data

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Abstract 
There will be a discussion of two different examples of liberation technology, one used to collect and protect human rights data, and the other used to analyze it. Martus is a software program that encrypts and remotely backs up data, designed for and used widely by human rights monitors and advocates to protect witness reports and other sensitive human rights data. the focus will be on the security design of Martus and how we addressed the inevitable tradeoffs with usability, as well as the reasons for and consequences of our choice to make Martus free and open source. The legitimacy of human rights advocates is based on their claim to speak truth about a human rights situation, but our ability to know the truth of what is happening on the ground is often severely limited. Founding conclusions on anecdotes or observable events alone can misinterpret both trends over time and the relative distribution of violence with respect to regions, ethnicity or perpetrators. Through the careful application of rigorous statistical methods, the limitations of incomplete data can sometimes be overcome, enabling scientifically-based claims about the total extent and patterns of human rights violations. Also discussed will be how this kind of analysis is enabled by technology, including computational statistical methods, and tools like R and version control to make the analysis auditable and replicable.

Jeff Klingner is a computer scientist with the Human Rights Data Analysis Group at Benetech, where he codes and runs data analysis addressing a variety of human rights questions, including command responsibility of high-level officials in Chad and Guatemala, and mortality estimation in several countries, including India, Sierra Leone, and Guatemala. His technical focus is on data deduplication, machine learning, data visualization, and analysis auditability and replicability. He earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University.

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Fourth Wave or False Start? Democracy After the Arab Spring

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The decades-long political winter in the Arab world seemed to be thawing early this year as mass protests toppled Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and it appeared that one Arab dictatorship after another might fall during the so-called Arab Spring. Analogies were quickly conjured to the collapse of dictatorships in Europe and Latin America in the 1970s; Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines in the 1980s; and Eastern Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s—the transformative “third wave” of global democratization. Many scholars and activists reasonably imagined that a “fourth wave” had begun.  At this momentous inflection point, which may well define the future shape of the Arab world, the United States has never faced a more urgent set of opportunities and challenges there. Diamond will discuss the prospects for democratic development that exist alongside the very real risks of Islamist ascension, political chaos, and humanitarian disaster, and suggest principles and long-term strategic thinking the U.S. might employ to increase its legitimacy in the region.

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, where he also directs the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Diamond is co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and a senior consultant to the National Endowment for Democracy. Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad and as an advisor to the Iraq Study Group.  Diamond, author of the Spirit of Democracy and several other works on democratic development, has also edited or co-edited some 36 books on democracy. A renowned teacher and mentor, Diamond, who teaches courses on comparative democratic development and post-conflict democracy building, was named “Teacher of the Year” by the Associated Students of Stanford University and received the prestigious Dinkelspiel Award for Distinctive Contributions to Undergraduate Education in 2007.

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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.

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Former Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Faculty Chair, Jan Koum Israel Studies Program
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