Keith Calix

Vincent Chen

Holly Fetter

Imani Franklin

Mariah Halperin

Thomas Alan Hendee

Lina Hidalgo

Kabir Sawhney

Anna Schickele

The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University is pleased to announce the 2013 class of undergraduate senior honors students. 

Honors students will spend four quarters participating in research seminars to refine their proposed thesis topic, while working in consultation with a CDDRL faculty advisor to supervise their project. In September, the group will travel to Washington, D.C. for honors college where they will visit leading government and development organizations to witness policymaking in practice and consult with key decision-makers.

Please join CDDRL in congratulating the 2013 Senior Honors students and welcoming them to the Center.

Below are profiles of the nine honors students highlighting their academic interests, why they applied to CDDRL, and some fun facts.  

Keith Calix

Keith Calix

Major: International Relations

Hometown: Astoria, NY

Thesis topic: What is the relationship between the coloured experience and youth involvement in gangsterism in Cape Town, South Africa?

Why is this topic important to the field of democracy, development, and the rule of law? Schools are one of the principal generators, justifiers and vehicles of radicalized thoughts, actions and identities. The challenge in a post-apartheid South Africa continues to be whether and how the roles, rules, social character and functioning of schools can reform to challenge the retrograde aspects of such formation and stimulate new forms of acknowledgement, social practice and acceptance. Ultimately, I hope my research will provide insight about how education reform can be used as a tool to promote democracy and improve human rights conditions.

What attracted you to the CDDRL undergrad honors program? In many ways my personal and academic experiences have led me from a more general interest in education development to a more specific interest in post-apartheid education reform as a form of retrospective justice, the institutional, social and economic barriers to education reform, and understanding education reform as a means of promoting democracy and respect for human rights. Pursuing this in the work in the CDDRL community alongside talented and experienced faculty and students from a wide array of disciplines, interests, and experiences will ultimately enhance my understanding of development and one day, I can hopefully use these insights and experiences as a practitioner.

Future aspiration post-Stanford: Human rights lawyer/fieldwork in education development.

What are your summer research plans: During the summer I will be working on my thesis in Cape Town, South Africa.

Fun fact about yourself: I’ve recently appeared on Italian television for an interview, bungee jumped from the world’s highest commercial bridge, and rode an ostrich.

Vincent Chen

Vincent Chen

Major: Earth Systems & Economics

Hometown: Taipei, Taiwan

Thesis topic: How democratic and autocratic systems affect the formation and efficacy of their environmental policies.

Why is this topic important to the field of democracy, development, and the rule of law? As the importance of climate and energy issues continue to rise in the global political agenda, both developed and developing nations are in dire need to identify individually tailored policy routes for sustainable development. With a wide array of political systems across countries, my research aims to shed light on the difference of environmental policy creation between democratic and autocratic governments and hopefully provide real world applications for policy makers in charting the most appropriate development route. In particular, I hope to provide insights for developing democracies to leapfrog the environmental impacts associated with democratization and avoid mistakes mature democracies have committed in the past.

What attracted you to the CDDRL undergrad honors program? My studies in environmental science ultimately manifested the important role social sciences play in solving our environmental challenges. In the center of this challenge lies the tricky balance between development and environmental stewardship. The CDDRL program serves as a great opportunity for me to explore the complex relationship between these concepts.

Future aspiration post-Stanford: Although I am interested in opportunities that span public, private and social sectors, I will definitely be working on issues pertaining to our environment.

What are your summer research plans: I will be spending my summer in Washington, DC with the climate and energy team of the United Nations Foundation, as well as conducting interviews for my research back home in Taiwan.

Fun fact about yourself: Spent five weeks on a uninhabited island the size of four square miles in the middle of the Pacific Ocean during my sophomore summer. 

Holly Fetter

Holly Fetter

Major: Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (B.A.), Sociology (M.A.)

Hometown: Dallas, TX

Thesis topic: The influence of U.S. funding on the development of China's civil society

Why is this topic important to the field of democracy, development, and the rule of law? Organizations and individuals from the U.S. are eager to support democracy, development, and the rule of law in foreign countries. Through my research on the U.S. presence in China, I hope to understand how we can do this work more ethically and effectively. How can we avoid imposing our values and priorities onto a nation's bourgeoning civil society? How can we promote indigenous modes of fundraising and management training, thus avoiding any potential expressions of neo-imperialism?

What attracted you to the CDDRL undergrad honors program? I wanted a challenge, and I knew that writing an honors thesis in a foreign discipline would be a rewarding intellectual experience. The apparent support from faculty as well as the connections to experts on my topic were also enticing. And I'm looking forward to the big D.C. trip.

Future aspiration post-Stanford: I'd like to practice community lawyering in the U.S.

What are your summer research plans: I'll be in Beijing, China, interviewing folks at NGOs and grant-giving organizations, reading lots of books and articles, and eating good food.

Fun fact about yourself: I like to write and cause a ruckus, so I started a blog for Stanford activists called STATIC. You should check it out!

Imani Franklin

Imani Franklin

Major: International Relations

Hometown: Atlanta, GA

Thesis topic: How Western beauty standards impact the preference for lighter skin in the developing world, with case-studies of India, Nigeria, and Thailand

Why is this topic important to the field of democracy, development, and the rule of law? This question matters for global development, in part, because it is an issue of public health. Researchers have long associated high rates of eating disorders and other mental health issues among American women with their continuous exposure to Western media’s narrow image of beauty. Given the unprecedented globalization of this image of beauty throughout much of the developing world, are non-Western women experiencing similar psychological health problems? From findings on skin bleaching cream in Tanzania to the rise of bulimia in Fiji in the late 1990s, a growing body of research attributes harmful body-altering practices to increased exposure to American consumerist media. I want to assess whether this causal link stands under empirical scrutiny, and whether this relationship shifts in different regional contexts of the world.

What attracted you to the CDDRL undergrad honors program? I am drawn to CDDRL’s honors program because of the intimate scholarly community of peers and mentors it provides. I believe this program will empower me to think more critically and scientifically about how one social issue impacts another.

Future aspiration post-Stanford: In the future, I hope to work with international policy to improve human rights protections in the Middle East and North Africa.

What are your summer research plans: I am currently studying Arabic in Jordan and will conduct primary research for my honors thesis in Amman.

Fun fact about yourself: In my free time, I enjoy learning the dance moves from High School Musical movies and attempting to make peach cobbler from scratch.

Mariah Halperin

Mariah Halperin

Major: History

Hometown: San Francisco, CA

Thesis topic: The development of democracy in Turkey under the Justice and Development Party (AKP)

Why is this topic important to the field of democracy, development, and the rule of law? Turkey has taken a unique path to democracy, beginning with Ataturk, yet many scholars worldwide have presented Turkey as a model for the rest of the Islamic world. The AKP, the party in power for the last decade, has in many ways changed the path Turkey had been on previously. With these changes and the recent uprisings in the Middle East, my thesis will hopefully speak to the viability of other countries following Turkey's example. 

What attracted you to the CDDRL undergrad honors program? The CDDRL undergraduate honors program is an amazing opportunity to deepen my studies of a topic that interests me so much. Working with a small group of dedicated, like-minded students will be a great way get feedback to develop and strengthen my thesis. Additionally, the outstanding faculty (and staff!) of the CDDRL are so supportive and eager to help students pursue their interests in any way they can.

Future aspiration post-Stanford: Either diplomacy or journalism in Turkey and the Middle East.

What are your summer research plans: I will be in Turkey for over two months this summer, conducting interviews with a wide range of people who can lend their perspective on my topic.

Fun fact about yourself: I am an extreme San Francisco Giants baseball fan.

Thomas Alan Hendee

Thomas Alan Hendee

Major: Human Biology

Hometown: Sao Paulo, Brazil / Grand Rapids, Michigan

Thesis topic: I will be looking at the social determinants of health in Brazilian informal settlements and how they affect child health. 

Why is this topic important to the field of democracy, development, and the rule of law? By 2050, seventy-percent of the world will be living in cities, and the World Bank estimates that 32.7% of urban dwellers in developing regions will be living in slums. These informal urban settlements pose a significant problem for economic development, governance, and public health. 

What attracted you to the CDDRL undergrad honors program? This program will allow me to spend my last year engrossed in a topic of interest, and put my Brazilian heritage and Portuguese language skills to academic use by adding to the dialogue of a field that I hope to enter. I look forward to being surrounded by a group of peers from whom I can learn, and at the same time have the chance to be mentored by some of Stanford’s most renowned faculty.

Future aspiration post-Stanford: I am still debating if medical school is a part of my future; however, I am confident that I will be involved with some kind of internationally focused health work.

What are your summer research plans: I will be doing a tremendous amount of reading in order to get a better understanding of what has already been said; furthermore, I plan to perform as many Skype interviews as possible with involved individuals in Brazil.

Fun fact about yourself: In the summer of 2011, I spent one-week on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) participating in an ecotourism consulting job.

Lina Hidalgo

Lina Hidalgo

Major: Political Science

Hometown: Bogotá, Colombia

Thesis topic: What allowed citizen resistance to turn against the state in Egypt in 2011, but not in China.

Why is this topic important to the field of democracy, development, and the rule of law? I hope that my project will offer some hints as to why citizens faced with economic and social grievances fail to challenge - through their protests - the state structure that perpetrates those grievances. This can provide a lens through which to study other developing societies that fail to rise against oppression.

What attracted you to the CDDRL undergrad honors program? I have been able to see development challenges firsthand growing up and am honored to have the opportunity to learn from experts in the Center about the ideas and approaches taken to tackle these issues.

Future aspiration post-Stanford: I hope to learn more about development challenges globally by working in the Middle East or Asia, and eventually help implement better development policy worldwide through an international organizations, government work, or activism.

What are your summer research plans: I will be in China interviewing factory workers about their perceptions of inequality and speak with scholars about the broader issues I plan to address in my thesis. I will then travel to Egypt to interview political party leaders about how they saw long-standing grievances translated into the political sphere.

Fun fact about yourself: I've broken my two front teeth.

Kabir Sawhney

Kabir Sawhney

Major: Management Science and Engineering

Hometown: Morristown, NJ

Thesis topic: The effect of regime type on a country’s propensity to default on its sovereign debt obligations.

Why is this topic important to the field of democracy, development, and the rule of law? The link between a country’s regime type and its sovereign debt is crucial to further understanding the differences in the choices democracies and autocracies make in regards to their sovereign debt. Debt itself is important, because sovereign debt crises can have many negative consequences, including setting economic development back many years in some countries.

What attracted you to the CDDRL undergrad honors program? I took Professor Diamond and Professor Stoner-Weiss’ class in my sophomore year, and I really loved the course content and wanted to engage more with these topics. For my honors thesis, I really wanted to have an interdisciplinary experience, combining my interests in democracy and development with my academic focus in finance and financial markets, and the CDDRL program was a great place to do that.

Future aspiration post-Stanford: I’d like to work in financial markets; my long-term career goal is to one day run my own hedge fund with a mix of investment strategies.

What are your summer research plans: Since my thesis doesn’t require any field work, I’ll be working on refining my quantitative analysis and gathering relevant data from databases and other sources, to be able to carry out my analysis in earnest starting in fall quarter.

Fun fact about yourself: Cooking is one of my favorite hobbies! I like making all sorts of different kinds of foods, but my favorites have to be Thai, Indian and Chinese.

Anna Schickele

Anna Schickele

Major: Public Policy and Economics

Hometown: Davis, CA

Thesis topic: Determinants of farmer participation in agricultural development projects in rural Peru.

Why is this topic important to the field of democracy, development, and the rule of law? If non-governmental organizations are to implement successful development projects, they must figure out how to effectively engage would-be participants.

What attracted you to the CDDRL undergrad honors program? I'm attracted to the academic community. Though writing a thesis is a solitary activity, I hope the other students and I will support each other and form friendships as we go through the process together.

Future aspiration post-Stanford: I'd like to find a way to perfect my Spanish, improve my French, and maybe learn Arabic.

What are your summer research plans: I'll be in Peru at the end of August. If all goes well, I plan to make a second trip in December.

Fun fact about yourself: I've eaten alpaca, camel, guinea pig, and snails. 

Commentary on Hans Binswanger-Mkhize's symposium on "India 1960-2010: Structural change, the rural non-farm sector and the prospects for agriculture". The symposium is part of a 2-year, 12-lecture series on Global Food Policy and Food Security.

Commentary on Hans Binswanger-Mkhize's symposium on "India 1960-2010: Structural change, the rural non-farm sector and the prospects for agriculture". The symposium is part of a 2-year, 12-lecture series on Global Food Policy and Food Security.

Preparing a meal in some of the world’s poorest rural areas can turn an ordinary activity into a deadly chore. Animal dung and crop scraps often fuel the indoor fires used for cooking. And before any food fills a hungry belly, thick black smoke fills a family’s lungs.

Pneumonia and other acute respiratory infections kill about 1 million people a year in low-income countries, making them the top cause of death in the developing world and the greatest threat to children’s lives. Makeshift stoves belch much of the polluted air leading to those illnesses. About 75 percent of South Asians and nearly half the world’s population use open-fire stoves inside their homes.

“The smoke is asphyxiating,” said Grant Miller, an associate professor of medicine at Stanford working on ways to get people to buy – and use – cleaner, safer stoves. “It burns your eyes and you can’t stop coughing.”

Governments and humanitarian organizations have urged people to trade their traditional stoves for safer models, many of which have chimneys that funnel smoke out of a home. But the switch from dangerous stoves has been slow to come, even though most people using them know they’re harmful.

Miller and his colleagues are studying what’s behind the reluctance and what can be done about it. They suspect much of the problem rests with the widespread approach to clean cookstove conversion, which focuses on educating people about the appliances’ health hazards and offering new models at a low cost.

Their most recent findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, boil down to this: Clean and modern cookstoves don’t have features people want. And until they’re redesigned, people are unlikely to bother with them.

“People don’t think of cookstoves as health technologies,” said Miller, an associate professor of medicine and a Stanford Health Policy faculty member at the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Miller is the senior author of the PNAS paper, which published online June 11.

“They don’t think respiratory illness is the biggest health problem that they have,” he said. “And when you ask them what they want from a stove, they talk about saving time and having better fuel efficiency. They’re not talking about smoke emissions.”

In the first of two studies, Miller – joined by Yale researchers and Lynn Hildemann, a Stanford engineering professor affiliated with the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment – surveyed about 2,500 women who cook for their families in rural Bangladesh. 

Nearly all of the women use traditional stoves, and 94 percent of them said they know the smoke from their stoves can make them sick. But 76 percent said the smoke is less harmful than polluted water, and 66 percent said it wasn’t as dangerous as rotten food.

“People know their cookstoves are bad, but they don’t think cookstoves are the most important problem they face,” Miller said. “They’d rather spend their money fixing those things and getting their kids into a good school than buying a new cookstove.”

When asked what features are most important in a stove, the women talked about things that could save fuel costs, cooking time and the hassle that goes into collecting fuel.

“A very small percent said reducing pollution was important,” Miller said.

The researchers then tried to assess more directly how Bangladeshis value new stoves. They offered 2,200 customers across 42 rural villages the opportunity to buy one of two models – one boasted improved fuel efficiency; the other had a chimney to reduce exposure to indoor smoke.

At the market prices of $5.80 for an efficient stove and $10.90 for the chimney stove, less than a third of customers ordered either model. And when the stoves were delivered a few weeks after the orders were taken, a very small number of families actually went through with the purchase of either model.  Large randomized discounts increased customer interest in fuel-efficient stoves, but did little to raise purchase rates of chimney stoves.

“A big implication is that the health education and social marketing approaches aren’t going to work,” Miller said. “You need to get inside the heads of the users and figure out what they really want and value – even if unrelated to smoke and health – and then give it to them.”

The lead author of the PNAS paper was Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, an economist at Yale. It was co-authored by Yale researchers Puneet Dwivedi and Robert Bailis. Their work was supported by the Freeman Spogli Institute’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment, and the International Growth Centre.

Despite accelerating economic growth in India over the last thirty years, India’s structural transformation remains stunted, said economist Hans Binswanger-Mkhize at a May 10 FSE symposium on global food policy and food security. Unlike China, urban migration and labor absorption have been slower than expected, especially in the typically labor-intensive manufacturing sector. Formal sector jobs are few and declining as a share of employment, and agricultural employment (and growth) remains low.

The rural non-farm sector has been left to pick up the slack, and has emerged as the largest source of new jobs in the Indian economy. This will likely remain so over the next few decades given that two-thirds of India’s growing population is projected to live in rural areas. Add to the equation the need to increase crop yields by 50 percent under changing climate conditions and it becomes apparent that improving rural incomes and supporting agricultural growth is essential to decreasing poverty and unemployment in India now and in the future.

“The importance of India's rural non-farm sector shows us that structural transformation does not follow a recipe,” said commentator Marianne Banziger, a senior scientist at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Mexico.

While non-farm jobs offer significantly higher wages than farm labor, most jobs are informal and/or insecure (i.e., no health benefits, unemployment insurance or pensions). These jobs go mostly to men 18-26 years old who have some education, while the illiterate and women struggle to transition into this sector. Retail trade and transport, construction, and services (internet and phone booths, maintenance and repair of motor vehicles, and hotels and restaurants) are growing especially fast, partly due to urban-rural spillovers, but manufacturing is still only 20 percent of non-farm jobs.

“For rural households, non-farm employment is not distress employment, but a profitable diversification strategy,” said Binswanger-Mkhize. “At the same time, it has selectively absorbed young males into wage employment, decreased the number of farmers, and increasingly concentrated women in agriculture, contributing to a progressive feminization of agriculture.” 

As a result, farms on average have declined in both land and household size, and have moved toward the production of higher-valued goods and a modern model of part-time farming. This transformation concerned Banziger.

“Will the urban and land-less poor be held hostage by part-time farmers?” she asked.

Banziger projects in the next 20 years food and energy price inflation will likely exceed the income growth of the urban poor. Food price increases will push net consumers, who spend a third of their income on food staples, back into poverty.

“For food prices to remain constant, farmers yield gains will have to increase by 50 percent on essentially the same land area, with less water, nutrients, energy, labor and as climate changes,” said Banziger. "The more we delay investments, the steeper the challenge.”

Fortunately, small farmers are now better equipped to respond to these challenges, but are still limited by scale. Precision irrigation and fertilization technology coupled with remote sensing and cell phone technology enable better yield predictions that affect nutrient application. Better farm-level nutrient management increases farmer income and nutrient use efficiency.

For an optimistic Indian future to be realized government policy must support ways in which households increase their incomes, said Binswanger-Mkhize. A positive outcome for rural areas depends on continued urban spillovers, and on better agriculture and rural development policies, institutions, and programs.

Productivity growth needs to be sustained at very high levels. This requires more responsive, accountable, and better-financed research systems, more diversification of agriculture, and larger, better financed, and more accountable agricultural extension system. India currently employs one-seventh the number of extension workers as China.

"Rapid policy and institutional change will be required to overcome poor performance of many government programs," said Binswanger-Mkhize. "Current subsidies to fertilizer, electricity, water, and support to crop prices are already large, but are an inefficient means to transfer income to farmers."

Direct payments may be a more efficient way of supporting income growth. This is beginning to happen with fertilizers, but should be extended to electricity and food subsidies, said Binswanger-Mkhize.

“Maybe the people who have been disadvantaged in the past are the core for future change. With appropriate support, smallholder farmers can become the engines for agricultural productivity growth and transform India's growing economy,” concluded Banziger. 

At a ceremony at the Harvard Faculty Club on May 23, 2012, the Centennial Medal — the highest honor awarded by Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences — was given to Karl Eikenberry, the Payne Distinguished Lecturer at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.

The Centennial Medal is awarded each year to a select group of Harvard University’s most accomplished alumni. Centennial Medalists are Graduate School alumni who have made fundamental and lasting contributions to knowledge, to their disciplines, to their colleagues, and to the world at large. The medal was first awarded in June 1989, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

At the award ceremony, the Graduate School’s interim dean, Richard J. Tarrant, read a testimonial to Eikenberry’s accomplishments and leadership. Following is a slightly condensed version of that testimonial. 

The Soldier-Statesman: Karl Eikenberry, AM ’81, regional studies–East Asia

Karl Eikenberry, who served as US ambassador to Afghanistan from 2009 to 2011, is the “very model of a modern soldier-statesman,” says Graham Allison, the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, with a nod to Gilbert and Sullivan.

Eikenberry, a graduate of the US Military Academy at West Point, is now the Payne Distinguished Lecturer at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford. He had a 35-year career in the Army, retiring as lieutenant general in 2009 when President Obama tapped him to lead the diplomatic mission in Afghanistan.

His involvement with that country has been long and deep. Prior to becoming ambassador, he was deputy chairman of the NATO Military Committee in Brussels, where he was heavily involved in the mission in Afghanistan, and regularly traveled there. From 2005 to 2007, he guided military efforts on the ground as commander of US-led coalition forces, and earlier, he served as US security coordinator and chief of the Office of Military Cooperation in Kabul, where he aided efforts to establish and strengthen the Afghan army and police force. “Karl was given extremely difficult assignments in Afghanistan,” says his Harvard mentor Ezra Vogel, the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences, Emeritus. “He has, under trying circumstances, provided assistance to the Afghan government and Afghan people and leadership to Americans in Afghanistan.”

Over the course of his career, Eikenberry served in key strategy, policy, and political-military positions, including as director of strategic planning and policy for the U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii, as defense attaché at the United States Embassy in Beijing, and as the Defense Department’s senior country director for China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mongolia.

In addition to his master’s degree from Harvard, Eikenberry was a National Security Fellow at the Kennedy School. He earned a second master’s in political science from Stanford, and he has an advanced degree in Chinese history from Nanjing University in China. His wide curiosity and astute grasp of the history and culture of the Far East, the Middle East, and international politics are revealed in his numerous articles on military training and tactics, history, and Asia-Pacific security issues. When he was appointed ambassador, Admiral Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that it was “Karl’s experience as a soldier-scholar” that would prove crucial to fostering the kind of strong civil-military relationship required to enable good governance to take root and hold. Mullen added, “He knows the enemy, he knows our allies, and he knows himself.”

Since leaving Afghanistan, Eikenberry has written and spoken about the ethical dilemmas of war, political use and misuse of military deployment, and the need for military accountability. He has also become a leading voice in a conversation about the relationship between the economy and our national security.

“Integrity, service, honor, commitment, decency, intelligence. Karl Eikenberry embodies what it means to be an American patriot,” says Stephen Krasner, the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations at Stanford. Indeed, Eikenberry’s service and achievements have earned him the highest military and diplomatic honors, including the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the Defense Superior Service Medal, the Legion of Merit, and the Bronze Star.