The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is pleased to introduce our 2013-14 pre and postdoctoral scholars. Selected from upwards of 100 applicants, these scholars will spend the year in residence at CDDRL to pursue their research, work closely with faculty and connect to an innovative learning community. Hailing from Yale University, New York University, Georgetown University and Stanford these scholars bring diverse backgrounds and expertise to enrich the ranks at CDDRL. Please read the Q&A's below to learn more about our new scholars, their research and what brought them to CDDRL. 

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Ana Bracic

Hometown: Slovenska Bistrica, Slovenia

Academic Institution: New York University

Discipline and expected date of graduation: PhD, May 2013

Research Interests: Human rights, Gender and Ethnic Discrimination, State Failure, International Organizations, and using Quantitative and Experimental Methods.

Dissertation Topic/Title: Essays on Human Rights

What attracted you to the CDDRL Pre/post-doctoral program? I am excited to become a post-doctoral fellow at the Center because my work closely fits the scholarly agenda of CDDRL. While human rights form the core of my dissertation, I touch on several other topics central to CDDRL—I evaluate the efficacy of a strong mechanism for promotion of democracy, I explore how much worse human rights abuses are in failed states, and I examine the conditions under which ground level NGO action can decrease discrimination against a vulnerable population. The faculty affiliated with the Center have a great deal of expertise in areas relevant to my research efforts - ranging from human rights and consolidation of democracy to field experiments - and I very much look forward to their guidance and advice.

What do you hope to accomplish during your year-long residency at the Center? My central aim is to complete the next phase of my research project on discrimination against the Roma in Central and Eastern Europe, while writing a book manuscript that stems from the same project. I hope to build relationships and potentially develop collaborations with members of the academic community at CDDRL and Stanford more generally.

Please state a fun fact about yourself! I used to compete in ballroom dancing.

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Adi Greif

Hometown: Stanford, CA

Academic Institution: Yale University

Discipline and expected date of graduation: Political Science, Spring 2014

Research Interests: International Relations, Middle East, Colonialism, Gender Politics, Islamic Law, Demography

Dissertation Topic/Title: "The Long-Term Impact of Colonization on Gender"

What attracted you to the CDDRL Pre/post-doctoral program? Improving gender equality is correlated with improved economic growth, democratization and rule of law. In addition to these research themes, CDDRL's focus on both scholarship and policy-relevance is important to me. I hope that understanding the processes leading to changes in gender equality over time will help us pursue better policies for advancing gender equality.

What do you hope to accomplish during your year-long residency at the Center? I hope to turn my thesis into multiple articles. I also intend to write a short monograph analyzing the relationship between opinions on gender, religion and political party affiliation in the Middle East through use of satellite data to proxy for religious piety.

Please state a fun fact about yourself! I live in the same housing complex that I lived in as a child.

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Alexander Lee

Hometown: Los Angeles, CA

Academic Institution: Stanford University

Discipline and expected date of graduation: PhD, Political Science, September 2013

Research Interests: Historical Political Economy, Development, Colonialism, South Asia, Identity Politics, Terrorism

Dissertation Topic/Title: "Diversity and Power: Caste in Colonial India"

What attracted you to the CDDRL Pre/post-doctoral program? Much of my work is on the historical origins of underdevelopment, and I'm interested in exploring contemporary policies that can alleviate these inequalities.

What do you hope to accomplish during your year-long residency at the Center? I hope to develop my dissertation into a book, particularly by adding material on the post-colonial period.

Please state a fun fact about yourself! I make a very good chana masala.

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Hesham Sallam

Hometown: Cairo, Egypt

Academic Institution: Georgetown University

Discipline and expected date of graduation: Political Science; 2013-2014

Research Interests: Democratization, Identity Politics and Distribution, Authoritarian Elections, Political Islam; Political Economy of Authoritarianism

Dissertation Topic/Title: “Indispensible Arbiters: Islamist Movements, Economic Liberalization, and Authoritarian Rule in the Arab World”

What attracted you to the CDDRL Pre/post-doctoral program? What I find most appealing about CDDRL is its demonstrated commitment to advancing innovative, rigorous research on questions pertaining to the challenges of democratization and other related topics that speak directly to my current work. It hosts a distinguished set of scholars whose work has been highly influential in informing and guiding my own research. As home to the Arab Reform and Democracy Program, CDDRL also offers a great opportunity for engaging with scholars and practitioners who share my strong interest in developing research agendas that could enhance understanding of the Arab uprisings, their origins and the dynamic political and social struggles they encompass.

What do you hope to accomplish during your year-long residency at the Center? During my residency at the Center, I look forward to finishing my dissertation writing, along with a number of related research projects pertaining to the relationship between contentious politics and formal electoral competition in the aftermath of the Arab uprisings.

Please state a fun fact about yourself! I’m a dedicated bikram yogi and a strong believer that every great idea begins with a deep backward bend.

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Anna West

Hometown: Bay Area

Academic Institution: Stanford University

Discipline and expected date of graduation: Anthropology, June 2015

Research Interests: Critical ethnographic approaches to development and the state, the role of traditional authorities in post-colonial democracies, global health, citizenship, human rights, and discourses of participation and community in Southern Africa, particularly Malawi.

Dissertation Title: "Health Promotion, Citizenship, and Rural Governance in Malawi"

What attracted you to the CDDRL Pre/post-doctoral program?  I am drawn to CDDRL's focus on the complex intersections between development and governance, and to the Center's embrace of both theoretical and policy dimensions of scholarship on these themes. My dissertation research in Malawi examines how modular global health interventions engage local power structures, patronage systems and political cultures. In particular, I focus on traditional authorities' involvement in rural health promotion and examine the continuing salience of chiefly governance for local and national discourse on community participation, human rights and citizenship. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research to trace the salience of health promotion strategies for the formation and consolidation of ideas, values and processes of governance and democracy in Malawi. I look forward to stimulating conversations with faculty and visiting scholars through the Center's Programs on Poverty and Governance and Human Rights and the CDDRL-affiliated Center for Innovation in Global Health.

What do you hope to accomplish during your year-long residency at the Center? I will be returning from 18 months of fieldwork in Malawi this fall and am excited to join CDDRL's diverse community of scholars. I aim to complete a draft of my dissertation during my fellowship year. As a social and cultural anthropologist, I especially look forward to sharing my findings and seeking feedback from faculty mentors and fellows in other disciplines with shared interests in the quality of and contestations around democratic processes in post-colonial African states.

America may have legitimate competitive reasons to worry about the number of computer science and engineering graduates from elite Chinese and Indian universities – the figure dwarfs that of U.S. students with similar degrees.

But a new book by Stanford researchers and others says that the concern that these countries will develop their own centers of high-tech production and innovation and draw research, development and scholarship away from American shores is still premature.

The research, a multidisciplinary look at the growth of higher education in the world's four largest developing economies – Brazil, Russia, India and China (known collectively as the BRICs) – analyzes the quality of institutions, the quantity of people getting degrees and equal access to education.

The book, University Expansion in a Changing Global Economy: Triumph of the BRICS?, is published by Stanford University Press.

"In the past 20 years, university systems in these big countries have just exploded," said Martin Carnoy, a Stanford professor of education and one of the authors. Carnoy is also an affilate of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

"So the questions are why did it happen and what are the implications? And specifically, what are the implications for the U.S. if the market is flooded with new scientists and engineers? Are we going to be overwhelmed? What happens to their societies if all the energy is focused on elite institutions," Carnoy said.

The researchers approached their questions with the belief that societies, and governments, can be judged by the way they invest in and organize their public higher education systems.

For example, how well these countries create a labor force that is competitive in the information age depends on the quality of higher education. Whether people have equal chances to succeed relies on having colleges that are accessible to even the poorest students. And how effectively a country expands its university system may determine how successful it is at growing a robust economy and competing with the United States and Europe, the scholars argue.

"If you have economic growth and provide educational opportunities, you're perceived as a legitimate, successful government," Carnoy said. "So our theory was, if you can pull this off, if you can successfully expand your university systems, you are likely a pretty efficient government."

BRIC undergraduate education increased from about 19 million students in 2000 to more than 40 million students in 2010. The largest increase was in China, which went from less than 3 million to almost 12 million bachelor's degree students during that period, the study says.

Financing elite schools

The study found that BRIC countries are pouring money into their elite colleges in an effort to create world-class institutions and have their graduates compete with the United States and Europe.

Researchers say the elite colleges are much better for the focused investment, and the engineers and computer scientists are graduating with similar competency and training as those from developed countries.

But the mass institutions are receiving fewer resources, the study says, and that's where most of the students go. In 2009, 2.1 million of the 2.5 million total bachelor's graduates in China matriculated from mass institutions, not elite ones. In India, it was 2.2 million of 2.3 million.

This widening funding gap between top schools and mass institutions has broad implications, the scholars argue. The gap has the potential to slow economic growth domestically, deepen income inequality and create less social mobility.

Students who go to the mass institutions aren't getting high quality, competitive educational experiences, the study says, and many of the students also get stuck with big bills as funding assistance is directed toward the elite universities.

"What happens, then, is they are doing a good job of educating students at the elite levels, but they are not doing a good job of educating students at the non-elite levels who are also fundamental for the economy," said Prashant Loyalka, a research fellow at FSI and one of the study's authors.

In absolute terms, the sheer numbers of students graduating from elite institutions in computer science and engineering majors in these countries is also high. In China, for example, the total number of computer science and engineering graduates from elite universities is more than the total number of such graduates from the United States.

But sustaining and building innovation hubs requires more than the elite, the researchers said. The engine of these new economies is the rest of the population – those that attend mass institutions.

"In the United States, we have relied on competent second-tier engineers. They are the guts of our system. We need good students in all fields in these second-tier universities because the top-tier universities just don't produce that many graduates. They simply don't," Carnoy said.

He warned that this redistribution of funds away from second-tier institutions is a concern in the United States as well. "To an extent the BRICs have to do it, because they don't have enough resources to go around. But do we have to do it? The answer is probably no. It certainly should be no," Carnoy said.

The research is one of the first empirical and comparative looks at the higher education systems across these countries, and relied on in-country interviews, surveys, data analysis and classroom observation.

Report card

Overall, the researchers found that significant challenges remain as these countries march toward creating universities that can rank alongside those in the United States and Europe.

China, the scholars said, is doing pretty well, but Russia and Brazil are question marks.

"Russia has provided the vast majority of its people with a high level of education, but it has lagged in terms of putting money into research," Loyalka said. "Brazil has a high-level of graduate education and research at its top-tier public institutions, and these institutions are receiving a lot of support. However, the vast majority of students attend private institutions, which are, on average, of dubious quality."

India, Loyalka noted, was surprising. Despite its very good technical universities, he said, "you have a small proportion of Indians going to those, and the mass institutions are of really poor quality."

"The higher education system in India does not appear to be well organized," Loyalka said.

Among other recommendations, the researchers said India should increase its graduate education and, along with Russia, increase spending on research.

The project began in 2007 as an interdisciplinary venture supported by FSI, and incorporated scholars in economics and international comparative education at Stanford Graduate School of Education, FSI and universities in Moscow and Beijing.

Several articles focusing on different aspects of the review also have been published over the past year. The most recent, which appears in the July/August issue of the journal Change, highlights the research on quality and quantity of graduates in engineering and computer science from the four countries.

Besides Carnoy and Loyalka, the scholars involved in the project include Maria Dobryakova, a research associate and the director for portals at the Center for Monitoring Quality Education at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow; Rafiq Dossani, a senior economist at RAND Corp. and former senior research scholar at Stanford's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute; Isak Froumin, a mathematician and director of the Institute for Educational Studies at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow; Katherine Kuhns, who received her PhD in the International and Comparative Education Program at Stanford Graduate School of Education; Jandhyala B. G. Tilak, a professor at the National University of Educational Planning and Administration in New Delhi, India; and Rong Wang, director and professor of the China Institute for Educational Finance Research at Peking University.

Brooke Donald is the social sciences writer at the Stanford News Service.

The counterinsurgency plan in Afghanistan hinged on the assumption that the U.S. military could protect the population, that foreign aid could make the Afghan government more accountable, and that the Karzai administration shared U.S. goals. In an article published by Foreign Affairs, Karl Eikenberry – the William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at CISAC – explains why all three assumptions were "spectacularly incorrect."

CISAC's Sig Hecker talks to one of India's most respected newspapers, The Hindu, about why he admires India's nuclear energy program. India's world-class nuclear researchers can still learn many lessons from the Fukushima nuclear crisis, particularly in fostering a culture of safety. The world's largest democracy must demonstrate to its citizens that nuclear power is safe and sustainable in order to pursue its ambitious energy program.

In May, the general elections in Pakistan returned two-time former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his party - the Pakistan Muslim League - to office. Sharif faced off against Imran Khan, a former Cricket star turned politician whose promises of reform resonated amongst younger voters.

Despite a heightened state of election-related violence and insecurity, voter turnout stood at an historic high of 55 percent.

While Pakistan’s elections and smooth democratic transition have been deemed a success, reports by some observers cited irregularities, vote rigging and intimidation.

Kamal Siddiqi, a 2012 Draper Hills Summer Fellow alumni, covered the elections as editor of The Express Tribune, a national English language daily newspaper published from Peshawar, Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad.

In the interview that follows, Siddiqi comments on this historic election and what it means for Pakistan's democratic future.

Were you surprised by the outcome of the Pakistani elections?

No, I was not surprised with the fact that Nawaz Sharif's party won a thumping majority. This had been predicted by most of us given that the three other major parties - the Pakistan People's Party, the Awami National Party and the Muttahida Qaumi Movement - were not campaigning because of terrorist attacks on their rallies.

I was surprised, however, at the fact that Imran Khan's party - Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) - did so well in Karachi and in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the northwestern province of Pakistan.

Why do you think Nawaz Sharif was re-elected to a third term as prime minister as opposed to Imran Khan or Ameen Faheem? 

There was a genuine desire for change, especially in Pakistan's most populous province - Punjab. People were fed up with power outages, rising crime and stories of government corruption. Since Punjab is Sharif's home province and it has 50 percent of the seats of parliament, that change was inevitable.

Imran Khan seemed to be a darling of the international media, was it the same for the Pakistani media?

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Kamal Siddiqi during the 2012 Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program at Stanford University. Photo Credit: Rod Searcey

He may have been a darling for the Western media but for the local media Imran Khan and his supporters were a headache. They are new to the electoral process and yet they are the least tolerant. In our experience, Imran Khan gave a statement - which we published - and the next thing we knew, we were being accused of yellow journalism. They have a lot to learn.

What was it like to cover the election for The Express Tribune?

This time around, the elections were very violent and I told my reporters - especially those in Peshawar - not to take any risks. At the same time we enjoyed reporting on the election, especially by using social media. We got a lot of feedback and stories from public sources who sent us clips from their phones and tweeted about their experiences. A lot of the information was instant and in areas where there were problems, like the late opening of polling stations, we were inundated with people calling and texting. It was clearly much more transparent than previous polls.

What contributed to the high voter turnout?

One of the achievements of Imran Khan's party was that it motivated the youth. Also, this was the second general election without any interruption. This also helped people to get involved in the process.

What issues were most important for the average Pakistani voter when they went to the polls?

The law and order situation and crime were issues that many leaders talked about as was good governance and the fight against corruption. Power outages and the state of the economy also featured in the debates. Finally, the drone strikes by the U.S. helped some parties garner votes especially in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

How do you think the violence surrounding the elections has affected Pakistan's political climate, if at all?

The violence gave an edge to the right of center parties like Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League party and Imran Khan's Tehreek-e-Insafparty whose rallies were not attacked. The three main left of center parties - the ruling Pakistan People's Party and its coalition allies - were affected by the consistent attacks and bomb blasts at their rallies and their election offices. This became one factor in their poor showing at the polls.

How does this election impact the future of democracy in Pakistan, if at all?

The manner in which an independent election commission conducted the elections, how the polls were held, how power was transferred and how all parties accepted the results have been very encouraging. People by and large have accepted democracy as the best way to move ahead and by turning up in large numbers they rejected the call by extremists like the Taliban to reject this form of government.

On August 16 the Karachi office of Siddiqi's "The Express Tribune" was attacked by gunmen who fired shots injuring two staff members. You can read more here to learn about the incident and how the media are often trapped in the line of fire.