The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University is pleased to announce its new class of %fellowship1%. This year’s fellows – 26 outstanding civic, political, and economic leaders from 23 countries in transition – have been selected from more than 800 applications. They will be on the Stanford campus for three weeks, from July 28 to August 15, 2008.

Since its inception, the Summer Fellows Program has created a network of more than 90 emerging leaders from 30 transitioning countries including Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, China, Russia, Nigeria, Kenya, and Rwanda. Draper Hills Summer Fellows are former prime ministers and presidential advisors, senators and attorneys general, journalists and civic activists, academics and members of the international development community. They are united in their dedication to improving or establishing democratic governance, economic growth, and the rule of law in their countries.

The three-week program is led by an interdisciplinary (and all-volunteer) team of leading Stanford University faculty associated with the center. Class sessions, however, are not only led by CDDRL-affiliated faculty and researchers but also by the fellows themselves, who focus discussions on the concrete challenges they face in their ongoing development work. In this way, fellows have the opportunity to learn from one another’s rich experiences in the field of international political and economic development.

One of the selected fellows, an opposition politician from Singapore, was prevented from leaving her home country shortly before the program began.

The Environmental Ethics Working Group has embarked on two distinct and experimental approaches to environmental ethical research. One approach explores the normative dimensions of quantitative environmental research. The other approach seeks either to integrate scientific data into normative arguments or to examine the real world quantitative implications of such arguments. The combination of quantitative and normative work is an exciting new interdisciplinary adventure.

Last quarter's environmental ethics working group kicked off with Marilyn Cornelius (1st year PhD student in the Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources -- IPER) presenting a paper on global identity and climate justice. Last quarter's presentations were made by graduate students and post-docs in Education, Public Policy, Global Justice, Ethics and Society, Philosophy, and IPER on topics including national savings and sustainability, national obligations to prevent catastrophic climate change, how moral and political values affect research, the security impacts of climate change, who should bear the costs of Indian energy policy changes and what drinking water standards are appropriate for rural areas.

The group meets once a week to discuss a member's research and is funded through Woods Institute Environmental Venture Project and the Program on Global Justice Program. Debra Satz, Joshua Cohen and Kenneth J. Arrow serve as faculty advisors. Aside from eventually publishing the papers, the group is organizing a workshop for Winter 2009.

Five visiting scholars with expertise on Southeast Asia will spend varying portions of the academic year 2008-09 in residence at Stanford. Shorenstein APARC and the Southeast Asia Forum will host four of them: three were selected under the Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Initiative on Southeast Asia. and one is a recipient of a 2008-09 Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellowship. A fifth scholar will be on campus as a National Fellow of the Hoover Institution.

The five are John Ciorciari, Joel S. Kahn, Mark Thompson, Angie Ngoc Tran, and Christian von Luebke.

John Ciorciari spent the 2007-08 academic year at Stanford as a Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow at Shorenstein APARC. He finished a book that examines how Southeast Asian states have "hedged" their relations with the United States and China.

Dr. Ciorciari will spend upcoming academic year at Stanford as a Hoover Institution National Fellow. In that capacity he plans to expand his research to include the international relations of India.

Joel S. Kahn is a professor of anthropology (emeritus) in the School of Social Sciences at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia. He will be at Stanford for the first half of October 2008 as the 2008 Lee Kong Chian National University of Singapore-Stanford University Distinguished Lecturer.

While at Stanford Professor Kahn will give three public lectures. Their tentative titles are: "A Southeast Asian Modernity?"; "Empires, States, and Political Identities in (Pen)insular Southeast Asia"; and "Religion, Reform, Science, and Secularity." Details including dates, times, and venues will be posted as they become known.

Mark Thompson is a professor of political science at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. He will be in residence at Stanford in Winter and Spring 2009 as the 2009 Lee Kong Chian National University of Singapore-Stanford University Distinguished Fellow.

While at Stanford, Prof. Thompson will pursue a book project on "Late Democratization in Pacific Asia." The book will question the claim that democratization in Pacific Asia (including Southeast Asia) has been driven by economic growth and offer an alternative perspective. He will present the results of his project in a public lecture in the spring of 2009. Date, time, venue, and other details will be posted when known.

Angie Ngoc Trần is a professor in the Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Global Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB). She will be in residence at Stanford for the second half of November 2008 as the 2008 Lee Kong Chian National University of Singapore-Stanford University Distinguished Fellow.

In a public lecture on November 17, 2008 (Mobilized Workers vs. Morphing Capital: Challenging Global Supply Chains in Vietnam), Professor Tran will present the results of her study of labor-capital relations in Vietnam and how the different national origins of investors and owners affect workers' conditions, consciousness, and activism. Details including time and venue will be posted as they become known.

Christian von Luebke was a research fellow in Tokyo at Waseda University's Institute for Global Political Economy in 2007-08 following receipt of his 2007 PhD in public policy and governance at the Australian National University. He will be at Stanford for the 2008-09 academic year as a Walter H. Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow.

During his residence Dr. von Luebke will pursue a research and writing project on "Good Governance in Transition: Explaining Local Policy Variations in Indonesia, China, and the Philippines." He will give a public lecture on the results of his project in winter or spring 2009. The date, time, venue, and other details will be posted when known.

In 2007 Shorenstein APARC and The Asia Foundation chose Dennis Arroyo to be the first Shorenstein APARC/Asia Foundation Visiting Fellow.  Arroyo spent the 2007-08 academic year researching and completing a monograph on "The Political Economy of Successful Reform:  Asian Stratagems."  An edited abstract follows:

Major economic reforms are often politically difficult, causing pain to voters and provoking unrest.  They may be opposed by politicians with short time horizons. They may collide with the established ideology and an entrenched ruling party.  They may be resisted by bureaucrats and by vested interests.  Obstacles to major economic reform can be daunting in democratic and autocratic polities alike.
 
And yet, somehow, past leaders of today's Asian dragons did implement vital economic reforms. "The Political Economy of Successful Reform:  Asian Stratagems" recounts the political maneuvers used by Asian leaders of economic reform in these countries at these pivotal times:  Thailand under General Prem Tinsulanonda; Vietnam during Doi Moi (or Renovation); Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew; China under Deng Xiaoping; India in the 1990s; and South Korea under Park Chung Hee.

The paper classifies these maneuvers as responses to the main political barriers to reform and develops a "playbook" of tactics for economic reformers.  To overcome ideological obstacles, for example, the reformers packaged and presented reforms as ways of strengthening the party in power. Reformers proceeded gradually.  Initially they sought win-win compromises. They blessed pro-market violations as pilot projects. They even created new provinces in order to dilute the anti-reform vote.

The full text of Arroyo's monograph has been published by the Stanford Center for International Development in its working paper series.

Arroyo came to Stanford well qualified to study economic reform techniques.  In 2005 he was named director for national planning and policy at the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) of the Philippines.  His duties included building public support for the economic reforms championed by NEDA.  He has consulted for the World Bank, the United Nations, and the survey research firm Social Weather Stations, and has written widely on socioeconomic topics.  His critique of the Philippine development plan won a mass media award for "best analysis."  He has degrees in economics from the University of the Philippines.

In May 2008 Arroyo presented his findings in a SEAF lecture entitled "The Foxy Art of Herding Dragons: How Sly Asian Leaders Pulled off Politically Difficult Economic Reforms."

As oil prices surge through $140/barrel at the time of writing, surely one can at least count on the invisible hand of the market to drive further exploration and production and ultimately bring more supplies on line, right? Or perhaps, more ominously, high oil prices presage a darker future of shortage and conflict as global oil fields pass their geological “peak”? In fact, both positions miss a crucial point about the dynamics of the world oil market — that it is increasingly animated by the counterintuitive behavior of the state-owned oil and gas giants that now control the vast majority of the world’s hydrocarbon resources.

“On average national oil companies (NOCs) extract resources at a far lower rate than international oil companies (IOCs), leaving about 700 billion barrels of oil effectively ‘dead’ to the world market.”So-called “national oil companies,” or NOCs, own about 80 percent of the world’s proven reserves of oil, a percentage that has been on the rise as the persistent high price environment encourages countries to assert even tighter control over the rent streams flowing from their resources. NOCs are curious and variegated beasts, and, contrary to the popular imagination, some are highly capable both technically and organizationally. Brazil’s Petrobras is an acknowledged world leader in deepwater drilling, while Norway’s StatoilHydro is highly regarded for its competence and transparent business practices. Saudi Arabia’s national champion, SaudiAramco, is secretive to the outside world but generally considered to be a well-run, technically capable organization. At the other end of the continuum, government infighting and micromanagement hobble Mexico’s Pemex and Kuwait’s KPC. Once-independent PDVSA in Venezuela has been remade by President Hugo Chávez into a government puppet that spends liberally on social programs but consistently undershoots its production targets. And indeed some national oil companies are hardly oil companies at all — Nigeria’s NNPC, for example, is mostly a rent-seeking bureaucracy.

What NOCs do share in common as distinct from the familiar international oil companies (IOCs) is being answerable to a host government, which inevitably brings with it some focus on objectives other than simple profit maximization. Typically, an NOC arises originally from the desire of resource-rich governments (“principals”) to gain more effective control over resource extractors (“agents”) by creating an oil champion owned by the state. Prior to NOC formation, governments are frequently (and often justifiably) wary of exploitation by the foreign oil operators providing hydrocarbon extraction services. Lacking a deep understanding of the costs of production, states are simply unable to be sure they are taxing their agents appropriately. In addition to enhancing control over the hydrocarbon sector and the revenue it brings, states may hope for other benefits from the NOC: cheap energy to fuel a growing economy, employment and development of local industry to support the hydrocarbon sector, or even foreign policy leverage derived from control of key resources.

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A detailed study of NOC performance and strategy at the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at FSI suggests a useful way of thinking about the effects of NOC resource domination on world oil and gas markets. Price versus quantity supply curves from classical economics assume that increased price will spur efforts to expand supply. Unfortunately, the counterintuitive reality for NOCs is that, when it comes to expanding supply in the current high-price environment, most either 1) can but don’t want to or 2) want to but can’t. The end result is what one could call a “backward-bending” supply curve — additional price increases do little or nothing to boost supply.

“The world has plentiful hydrocarbons in the ground, but that’s where many of them are going to stay due to the unique organizational and political dynamics of the NOCs.”In the “can but don’t want to” category are resourcerich governments that have decided they cannot assimilate any more money. Already, their investments are running into political resistance around the globe — witness Dubai’s failed attempt to purchase U.S. port management contracts, CNOOC’s failed bid for Unocal, or the increasing calls for curbs on the activities of sovereign wealth funds. Nations may decide they have enough cash and are better off leaving resources in the ground where they safely await monetization at a later date.

In the “want to but can’t” camp are countries and their NOCs that are simply unable to provide the stable political and regulatory climate to support additional build-out of expensive production and transport infrastructure. This situation is particularly common for natural gas, where long investor time horizons are needed to bankroll the multibilliondollar capital costs of pipelines or liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals.

Meanwhile, international oil companies are left on the sidelines salivating helplessly over the vast reserves in NOC hands. Venezuela’s Orinoco region could yield hundreds of billions of barrels of heavy crude, but the government and a nowpliant PDVSA invite favored countries and their NOCs to explore rather than selecting the operators most capable of extracting the challenging but plentiful resource. Technical expertise and massive investment are required to fully develop vast Russian gas fields including Kovykta, Shtokman, and Yamal, but IOCs already burned by nationalizations and shifting rules in these and other Russian ventures are unlikely to be in a position to supply enough of either. In the face of dwindling resources they can tap, IOCs will need to diversify their business models, perhaps tackling technologically challenging options like oil sands or liquids from coal in conjunction with the carbon storage techniques that could make these palatable from a climate change perspective. Ironically, the only “easy” oil for IOCs has become oil that is geologically and technologically difficult.

While oil price is dependent on many factors (including global economic health) and is impossible to forecast with certainty, one can confidently predict continued tight supply of oil and gas, especially given global demand that will be propped up indefinitely by rising consumption in China and India. The world has plentiful hydrocarbons in the ground, but that’s where many of them are going to stay due to the unique organizational and political dynamics of the NOCs. Leverage over the market is weak; measures to reduce demand for oil and gas (though politically unpopular) or to spur development of alternative fuels and associated infrastructure (though slow to develop at scale) may be all that we have.

Prominent conflicts such as the India-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir and the conflict on the Korean Peninsula highlight the need for peaceful solutions to violent territorial disputes. Although the effectiveness of negotiated legal solutions to such conflicts is often questioned, a new Stanford study suggests that treaties that resolve territorial conflicts “work”— in the sense that they are associated with a large reduction in the probability of subsequent conflict.

The study by Kenneth A. Schultz, associate professor of political science, and Jennifer Jones, research fellow at the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation (SCICN), examined 141 pairs of states (dyads) that experienced at least one militarized territorial conflict between 1816 and 2001. Two-thirds (94) of these dyads made at least one legal commitment to resolve the territorial conflict. Two-thirds of those treaties “worked”; they were never followed by militarized conflict over the territory addressed in the agreement. A multiple regression analysis revealed that a legally binding agreement on territory is associated with a roughly 70 percent reduction in the probability of a subsequent militarized conflict.

Realist accounts of international relations predict that such treaties would work in preventing violence insofar as they allocate disputed territory in accordance with the prevailing balance of power between the affected states. Schultz and Jones’s study reveals that this “distributional” factor alone does not account for the reduced likelihood of subsequent militarized conflict. Some other variables must be at play in creating the “treaty effect."

The study accordingly examined whether the existence of a territorial treaty could itself constrain states from resorting to force to revise the agreement. In this view, the treaty effect stems from the unwillingness of the states involved to incur the costs — such as external sanctions or domestic outrage — that would stem from breaking a previously agreed-upon arrangement. Although tests indirectly support this hypothesis, the more frequent violation of simple nonaggression pacts suggests that treaties are not major constraints on state behavior. More research is necessary to determine exactly what types of salient constraints treaties place on states.

A third explanation for the treaty effect considers the domestic political costs of surrendering a state’s legal claim to territory allocated to the other party under a treaty when the claim itself is valuable, e.g., the claim to ownership over a whole piece of territory, as in Kashmir, or the claim to territory based on religious rights, as in Israel. In this view, a state would be reluctant to sign a treaty when the value of the claim to the disputed territory is particularly high. Treaties, then, serve as screening mechanisms — only those states that place a relatively low value on a claim to disputed territory will sign treaties. In this view, the treaty effect arises because states enter into treaties only when they do not want to keep fighting over disputed territory, rather than because of the inherent constraints of the treaty itself.

Although the results of the study are consistent with the view that territorial treaties work because they serve as screening mechanisms, the evidence remains unclear. There is no direct evidence that states employ a claimsbased rationale when declining to sign a treaty. Schultz and Jones are, however, working on creative ways to observe the role of this rationale for the treaty effect and expect future results to be more specific.

The Forum on Contemporary Europe (FCE) is sponsoring long-term research on questions of European integration. This year FCE has conducted a series of seminars and international conferences to bring European authors and policy leaders together with forum researchers and Stanford centers to investigate the challenges of social integration. The series has combined the study of European Union (EU) policy toward its newest members, East-West and trans-Atlantic relations, crime and social conflict, and European models of universal citizenship. The directors of the forum plan multiple publications. Here is a preview of the forthcoming anthology on Ethnicity in Today’s Europe (Stanford University Press) edited and with an introduction by FCE Assistant Director Roland Hsu.

In periods of EU expansion and economic contraction, European leaders have been pressed to define the basis for membership and for accommodating the free movement of citizens. With the lowering of internal borders, member nations have asked whether a European passport is sufficient to integrate mobile populations into local communities. Addressing the European Parliament on the eve of the 1994 vote on the European Constitution, Vaclav Havel, then president of the Czech Republic, defined national membership in terms of a particular tradition of civic values:

The European Union is based on a large set of values, with roots in antiquity and in Christianity, which over 2,000 years evolved into what we recognize today as the foundations of modern democracy, the rule of law and civil society. This set of values has its own clear moral foundation and its obvious metaphysical roots, whether modern man admits it or not.

Havel’s claim for the continuing efficacy of Greco- Roman and Christian values can be read as a prescription for founding policy and even sociability. In today’s multicultural Europe his definition has been repeated, but also challenged, in debates over the most effective response to increasing heterogeneity and social conflict. For those who endorse or reject Havel’s binding moral roots, this new anthology reveals surprising positions.

The scale of change since Havel’s 1994 speech challenges confidence in European traditions for new Europe. During 1995–2005, EU immigration grew at more than double the annual rate of the previous decade. European immigrant employment statistics are difficult to aggregate but show a steep downward trend. EU Eurostat figures show the Muslim community is the fastest growing resident minority.

The violence in recent years also presses us to revise theory and practice. In the east: How will Balkan communities resume relations after massacres and ethnic cleansing? Does EU recognition of Kosovo validate claims for Flanders independence and Basque ethnic heritage? Can Roma immigrants look to Italian governments to enforce ethnic safeguards? In the west, the widespread riots in France in 2005 and 2007 by urban youths of mainly North and West African descent against military police have ruptured public security and social cohesion. France’s official response was aimed more to excise rather than reintegrate the protesters. In 2005, then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy announced “zero tolerance” for those he termed racaille (scum). The descriptor was effectively deployed to shape public opinion and the ministry declared a national state of emergency, invoking a law dating from the 1954–1962 War of Algerian independence, applied previously only against ethnic uprisings in French Algeria and New Caledonia, for searches, detainments, house arrests, and press censorship without court warrant.

Based on the ministry’s own records, the violence did not catch the government by complete surprise. Researchers, including Alec Hargreaves in Ethnicity in Today’s Europe, have revealed a study conducted in 2004 by the French interior ministry that documented more than 2 million citizens living in districts of social alienation, racial discrimination, and poor community policing. The ministry’s document admits that youth unemployment in what journalists referred to as quartiers chauds (neighborhoods boiling over) surpassed 50 percent. Constitutionally barred from conducting ethnic surveys, the report nevertheless acknowledges what most already understood: that the majority of the unemployed and disenfranchised youth were French-born whose parents or grandparents were of African descent.

Post-war era immigration, from the 1950s European reconstruction through the 1960s and 1970s decolonization, is best defined as post-colonial migration. European governments created neighborhoods for immigrants who moved from periphery to metropole. The new residents’ education, language, and collective memory were shaped by colonial administrations, and that background was roughly familiar to the host communities. Since 1990, however, based on projections in this anthology, we have entered a period, for lack of a better name, of post-post-colonial diaspora.

The peoples immigrating to Europe are increasingly coming from lands without characteristic European colonial heritage. While few countries of origin have no instance of European intervention, the new arrivals are adding rapidly growing numbers of émigrés of global diasporas from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria, and Israel, as well as the Indonesian archipelago and sub- Saharan and East Africa. This most recent demographic trend takes Europe, and the larger trans-Atlantic west, into an era not well served by existing models.

In this anthology, nine prominent authors substantiate this shift. The essays create an unusual and productive dialogue between social scientist modeling and humanist cultural studies to confront assumptions about immigrant origin, European identity, and policies of tolerance. Bassam Tibi (International Relations, University of Gottingen/Cornell) criticizes European multiculturalism, which, he argues, inadvertently enables European Islamist fundamentalism. Tibi’s essay challenges his fellow Muslim immigrants to embrace traditional European civic values (which he dates neither from antiquity nor the Christian era, but rather from the French Revolution) as the foundation not for multiculturalism, but for a cultural pluralism that fosters social integration. The result, in his terms, would replace Islamist fundamentalism with a Euro-Islam capable of Euro-integration. Kadar Konuk (German Studies, University of Michigan) sets Tibi’s insight on European- Muslim ethnicity into the history of European-Turkish relations. Readers questioning Turkey’s EU candidacy will find that the two essays shift the common critique of Turkish policy toward a more pressing question of Europe’s social capacity to integrate prospective Turkish-EU citizens.

Contributions by Alec Hargreaves (French Studies, Florida State), Rogers Brubaker (Sociology, UCLA), and Saskia Sassen (Sociology, Columbia) — all leading authors on European political culture and social theory — rethink Western European responses to minority integration. Articles by Carole Fink (History, Ohio State), Leslie Adelson (German Studies, Cornell), and Salvador Cardús Ros (Sociology, Autonomous University of Barcelona) reveal cultural expressions that are often overlooked in studies of European minority identity. The final article by Pavle Levi (Art and Art History, Stanford University) focuses on the case of post-ethnic war Balkans, to test the ability of mass media and film to influence the creation of cross-border inclusive cultures.

Ethnicity in Today’s Europe was developed from the fall 2007 conference on the topic sponsored by FCE and the Stanford Humanities Center.

To sign up for upcoming FCE programming, and for an alert from the Stanford University Press when this anthology and works on this topic are released, plese visit the Stanford University Press website.

Since the first gulf war, most authoritarian regimes In the Arab world have been able to maintain structures of governance that have endured since the post-World War II process of decolonization. We have not seen the emergence of agents of change capable of mounting effective political challenges. Regimes that often seemed to be losing international and domestic credibility have been able to remake themselves in ways that worked to maintain power and control.

The new movements and agents of change that did appear have not had the hoped-for transformative results, and regimes were able to accommodate most new challenges. Over the last 20 years in the region and the world — in the socioeconomic, political, ideological, and international dimensions — the results have ended up disappointing expectations. Neo-liberal economic policies did not transform the economies of the region in a way that led to new solutions to social problems. New middle classes did not achieve the political independence necessary to overcome old structures of patronage and transform regimes. The middle class, rather, became disengaged from local politics, and many social groups came to look for hope outside the national context. Furthermore, different social classes, as well as secular and Islamic elements, had divergent perspectives regarding democracy. Secular groups seek a rights-based order, based on modern political principles, while Islamist voices want a doctrines-based political order founded on traditional scriptural precepts. These divergences make a unified, forceful challenge to authoritarianism more difficult.

In fact, regimes have been able to adapt to different demands and manipulate the tensions among different social actors, to reconfigure the apparatus of authoritarianism. Regimes learned to pose as protectors of moderation against extremism and to adopt limited reforms, which absorbed and deflected demands for democratization. In this way, regimes have constructed simulacra of civil society and upgraded the accoutrements of authoritarianism.

Meanwhile, behind the historical mythologies of nationalism and unity, currents of social and ideological tension remain and are now embedded in an international context of fear and crisis. After 2001, many regimes feared that the Bush Administration’s proclaimed fervor for democracy promotion would upend the implicit 60-year old pact of stability between the states in our region and the West. The Arab public and later the regimes were quick to interpret the fervor for democracy as a cover for the neocon agenda of military intervention. Local regimes quickly learned to read the subtext of the mixed messages from the West. A facade of democracy would suffice, as long as there was cooperation in the “war on terror.”

From Iraq to Pakistan, then, the international context of violence and intervention poses new challenges to democratization. The distortions introduced by the war on terror, including the internationalization of l’état sécuritaire (heightened security state) and the parallel internationalization of jihadi militancy, have provided more excuses for authoritarian regimes and have reinforced the most retrograde aspects of governance.

Finally, there is no perfect mechanism of accommodation or cooptation. Social and political tensions persist. Change remains possible, most likely from lateral as opposed to frontal actions and from surprising new actors like the jurists in Egypt and Pakistan and new theologians throughout the Islamic world. Because the language of democratization itself has now been largely discredited in Arab public opinion, seen as a hypocritical cover for an agenda of preemptive military attack, opportunistic regime change, and foreign interference in general, we must reestablish new fundamentals for a discourse of change. In this new context, for any kind of democratization to occur, it is crucial that we “re-indigenize” the message of progressive change in the countries of the regions. We must create a renewed sense of shared purpose that includes the nation and Islam but is not confined by them and that speaks to people’s local concerns while it connects them to wider projects of peace and democracy in the region and the world.