On a rainy day last November, twelve fellows made their way up the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall, a true initiation to the town that’s often shrouded in fog. But the grey didn’t affect the day’s mood. Meeting with representatives from the Mayor’s Office, the fellows learned about California’s legislature through the unique lens of San Francisco, the only city statewide that is also designated as a county.

City Hall is just one of many site visits that the fellows attended during their time in the Corporate Affiliates Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, a cornerstone initiative that has brought professionals from Asia to Stanford since 1982.

“This year, our class was one of the most diverse ever, with fellows coming from Northeast to South Asia and representing a wide array of expertise from business to aerospace,” says Denise Masumoto, the manager of corporate relations at Shorenstein APARC. “We structured the program to support their interests and spur conversation with APARC scholars, and with those in the community beyond.”

The Corporate Affiliates Program provides yearlong fellowships for professionals from Asia who come to Stanford to learn about the United States, exchange ideas and participate in activities of mutual interest. The fellows keep a busy schedule: conducting a research project, auditing classes and attending site visits and seminars.

Now at the end of the academic year, the 2013–14 class has all but just departed. Before this, Shorenstein APARC spoke with three fellows about their experience: Tetsuo Ishiai from Tokyo, Japan; Tejas Mehta from Mumbai, India; and Wendy (Wei) Wang from Beijing, China. Highlighting moments and memories, the fellows struck conversations that underlined a few common themes.   

Thinking dynamically

At the heart of Silicon Valley, Stanford offers a unique base for fellows. As a hub for technology and venture capital, the area has an entrepreneurial buzz that grabs your attention, Ishiai says.

“To move toward open architecture, this entails movement to a more service-oriented structure,” he explains, and says that industry must ask the right questions. “What specialized services and facilities are required for this? What should be developed as the standard going forward?”Ishiai, who normally works at Mitsubishi Electric’s headquarters in Japan, has examined the shift in data management practices and its implications for business during his time at Shorenstein APARC, leveraging his experiences from over twenty years at the company.

When asked if he would share anything when he arrived back home, Ishiai says a message he will convey is the importance of creativity and determination.Ishiai says Silicon Valley offered an excellent environment to perform his research; he joined conferences at Stanford and visited many IT companies in the Bay Area. Ishiai also talked with industry executives through his courses at Stanford’s d.school.

“Exciting thinking and passion for starting new business ventures was very evident in Silicon Valley culture,” he says. “This type of support and ambition should be encouraged in Japanese corporate culture, especially among young employees, who can often be less recognized.”

Ishiai says he made many connections here, and looks forward to returning to Stanford in the future.

Finding partners

When asked to describe a favorite memory, Wang says that challenges have brought forth her richest experiences as a fellow. Speaking English on a daily basis and finding a stride in university life again were obstacles at first, she says, but when paired with the right people and resources, good things happened.

“I connected with a graduate student at CEAS, who I met with weekly to practice my language skills and share cultural observations,” she says. “We became close friends – I even hosted members of his family when they visited California.”Wang normally works in corporate banking at the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), an entity with an expanding scope of business overseas. To suit this trend, Wang says she sought to improve her English skills while in the United States. Masumoto encouraged her to seek out Stanford’s Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS), which offers advanced Chinese language instruction. There, Wang found a surplus of graduate students who were eager to help.

The theme of collaboration echoed in the courses she audited at the Graduate Business School, which allowed her to interface with top executives from JetBlue and Nike in a small group setting, and through dialogue with her research advisor, Jean C. Oi, a professor and director of the Stanford China Program at Shorenstein APARC. 

“Each time I met with Jean, she would offer up a slew of new questions,” Wang says. “She pushed me to really examine the details of my research – a different experience than I’m used to in China where expression is less direct, open.”

Comparative perspective

The global pharmaceutical industry sees extensive overlap between the government, business and academic sectors worldwide, but the variation across countries is what makes it so interesting, says Mehta, who has worked in medical marketing at Reliance Life Sciences for nearly a decade.

“A significant difference between India and the United States is the two country’s health care systems with respect to their insurance structures,” he says. “However, all stakeholders, whether in the United States or India or elsewhere, share the common objective of improving patient’s treatment outcomes and reducing overall cost of healthcare.”

Mehta analyzed challenges for pharmaceutical businesses through his courses at the Graduate Business School, such as “Leading Strategic Change in the Health Care Industry.” The course is structured to examine the environment for incumbent health care players like companies and hospitals, but also to look at the dynamics for entrepreneurial start-ups. A prime opportunity, given the budding initiatives for innovative treatment and health information services in Silicon Valley. A comparative perspective is necessary to learn from and question how things are done both at home and abroad. Mehta says being at Stanford, an institution with a strong foundation in medicine, greatly informed his research. His focus on theranostics, an emerging field of customizable testing and treatment for patients, was enhanced through dialogue on- and off-campus.

The classroom experience, coupled with visits to a variety of businesses in the Bay Area, gave Mehta a fuller view of the intricate market for U.S. medicine, and its relations with government and the private insurance system.

Looking back, he says it is hard to single out a few memories because there are many, but one that would top his list is visiting City Hall.

Research by CISAC's Joseph Felter shows that insurgents try to derail government-delivered aid programs in poor areas because they fear successful programs will boost the government's credibility. Preventive measures include providing greater security around aid projects and limiting advance knowledge about them.

A research paper, published in the American Economic Review, involved an analysis of a large community-driven development program in the Philippines. In 2012, the World Bank supported more than 400 of these projects in 94 countries with about $30 billion in aid.

Conventional wisdom assumes that development aid is a tool to help reduce civil conflict. But some aid projects may actually exacerbate the violence, the research showed.

In an interview, Joseph Felter, a senior research scholar at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, said, "A 'winning hearts-and-minds' strategy for disbursing development aid may lead to an increase in insurgent attacks in the world's poorest areas. The study's takeaway is not to stop aid delivery, but to appreciate and plan for the possibility of unintended consequences."

Felter co-wrote the article, "Aid Under Fire: Development Projects and Civil Conflict," along with Benjamin Crost of the University of Colorado-Denver and Patrick Johnston of the RAND Corporation. Their research relied on conflict data from the Philippines military from between 2002 and 2006 that allowed them to precisely estimate how the implementation of aid affected violence levels in ongoing insurgencies against the government.

Spotlight on the Philippines

These issues are particularly important in poor and conflict-ridden countries like the Philippines, Felter said. The Philippines is home to some of the most protracted insurgencies in the world. Islamic separatist groups struggle for an independent Muslim state; a communist group continues to wage a classic Maoist revolutionary war; and the extremist Abu Sayyaf Group conducts kidnappings and terrorist attacks.

The aid program Felter and his colleagues studied was the Kapit-Bisig Laban sa Kahirapan Comprehensive Integrated Delivery of Social Service – or KALAHI-CIDSS – the largest of its kind in the Philippines. Through it, poor communities receive projects to address their most pressing needs. According to Felter, this typically involved funding for projects like roads, schools, health clinics and other infrastructure.

"This is government funding for projects that citizens in these areas have expressly asked for," Felter said.

The researchers noted that community-driven development projects, also known as "CDD" projects, are popular because evidence suggests they enhance social cohesion among citizens. But sometimes they draw the wrong kind of attention from anti-government groups, as the research illustrated.

Felter and his colleagues found an increase of 110-185 percent in insurgent attacks in communities where aid projects commenced, the authors wrote. If this effect is extrapolated across all of the Philippines' municipalities, the authors estimate that the program resulted in between 550 and 930 additional casualties during three years.

"Taken together, this detailed evidence sheds new light on the mechanisms that link aid and conflict, which may eventually help design more effective aid interventions that alleviate poverty without exacerbating conflict," they wrote.

When the insurgent groups destroy such a project, it has the effect of weakening the perception that the government can actually deliver on community projects, the scholars wrote. For example, the communist rebels in the Philippines have issued public statements denouncing the KALAHI-CIDSS program as "counterrevolutionary and anti-development." If a successful aid program shifts the balance of power in favor of the government, it reduces insurgents' bargaining power and their political leverage.

As a result, insurgents tended to engage in conflict in the earlier stages of a project in order to keep it from succeeding, according to the research. In fact, conflict increased when municipalities were in the early or "social preparation" stages of publicizing an aid program, Felter and his colleagues wrote.

Sometimes rebel groups divert aid to fund their own operations – aid shipments are often stolen or "taxed" by these groups, according to the paper.

The Next Step

What can be done to prevent attacks?

"Greater security around the aid projects and limiting advance knowledge of the particular projects are good measures to start with," Felter said.

He noted that governments and aid organizations need to be discreet in how they identify aid projects and their locations, and how they disburse the aid itself. More research on this issue needs to be done, Felter said.

"One lesson is not to give insurgents too long a lead time to plan attacks," he said.

Unfortunately, as the researchers noted, poverty and violence are often linked: "The estimated one-and-a-half billion people living in conflict-affected countries are substantially more likely to be undernourished, less likely to have access to clean water and education, and face higher rates of childhood mortality."

Continued progress – in the form of international aid – is urged toward eradicating poverty. "To help achieve this, governments and multilateral donor organizations are increasingly directing development aid to conflict-affected countries worldwide," Felter and his co-authors pointed out.

Felter, also a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, retired from the U.S. Army as a colonel in 2012 following a career as a Special Forces and foreign area officer. He has conducted foreign internal defense and security assistance missions across East and Southeast Asia and has participated in combat deployments to Panama, Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2010-11, he commanded the International Security and Assistance Force Counter Insurgency Advisory and Assistance Team in Afghanistan.

"I saw this dynamic (insurgent attacks on aid projects) firsthand in Afghanistan and Iraq. This research paper confirms it," Felter said.

He devoted much of his Stanford doctoral dissertation and his work at CISAC and Hoover to build what he hopes will be the largest and most detailed micro-conflict database – the Empirical Studies of Conflict – ever assembled.

Felter said there is only so much that the military can do to win over people in areas ravaged by war and conflict.

"The military can 'lease' hearts and minds by creating a safe environment for aid projects," he said, "but ultimately it's up to the government to win them over."

Over 215 million Muslims live in the Asia-Pacific region, but despite their number and proximity to record growth and opportunity in greater Asia, their experience has been one of persistent, widespread socioeconomic and political decline. 

A new book, Modes of Engagement: Muslim Minorities in Asia, published by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) and distributed through The Brookings Institution, offers leading research on this topic and places it in a geographic perspective. Edited by Rafiq Dossani, a senior researcher at the RAND Corporation and Professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School of Public Policy, the book paves new paths to understanding the paradox of Muslim minorities in Asia. 

Dossani was at Stanford University for nearly fifteen years as a senior research scholar at Shorenstein APARC and as the executive director of the South Asia Initiative, studying the plight of Muslims and higher education in India, among other topics. The book is a result of a seminar series with the book’s contributors.

“Since the 1970s, especially in China, Asia’s growth rate has been unprecedented within Asia’s own history,” Dossani says. Mainstream Asia has seen a rise in job opportunities and income levels, and as a result, an individual ability to accumulate wealth and commit resources to long-term investments, such as education and innovation activities.

However, not all people have found benefit from this modern, economic transformation. Most notably, Muslims have seen a severe decline in their social and political space, as well as a narrowing of their identity.

Analysts find this surprising because history reflects a narrative that says Muslims should have profited along with the rest. “It wasn’t expected that Muslims would lose out in the countries in which they were minorities,” he says.

The volume investigates this puzzle through three case studies: the Philippines, India, and China. In each country, Muslims are at least 5 percent of the population, the largest number being in India. Dossani weaves together common threads that define the Muslim minority experience. Similarities include the impact of state-led ethnic nationalism and forced assimilation. He also writes that Muslims have been unable to use protest to secure any significant, long-term gains.

Given this dire reality, what prospects lie ahead for Muslim minorities? In conversation, Dossani suggests a few policy priorities gathered from the case studies featured in the volume.

Democracy is not the answer

Democracy, a form of governance that is often championed for its equal civic participation, has not facilitated a level playing field for Muslims when theory dictates it should.

“Democracy is not the answer to handling these problems,” says Dossani, emphasizing, “it is a most inadequate answer.”

This situation is evident in the case of India where Muslims have probably done the worst, compared to the Philippines, which also shares a legacy of colonial rule and transition to democracy.

Muslims in India, who have attempted to elevate their interests on the national stage, are stopped by coalition politics. Larger interests of the group can subsume their own, encroached upon further by caste issues, language barriers and other dividing factors. China’s Hui have found a significantly better experience than the Uyghurs, who were separated from mainland China early on and excluded from opportunities afforded there (the Uyghurs reside in a northwest region, Xinjiang). In the case of India, Muslims make up only ten to fifteen percent of the population in almost every state, thus their voice fails to find leverage in the political sphere, and effectively lose out.

Furthermore, democracy is not a panacea when states are vulnerable.

“When you have very weak and fragile states, where intuitions are subject to capture easily, democracy doesn’t work,” Dossani explains. Muslim minorities are unable to gain clout because the majorities, and elites attempting to fill a power vacuum, crowd them out.

Thus, collective interest and concerted efforts on the part of governmental and non-governmental organizations – a larger nexus of individuals working toward common goals – are essential to create momentum and staying power behind Muslim issues.

“You need civil society where it explicitly deals with the issues of minority populations and tries to convince the national government and state governments that improving the lots of minorities should be a national project with commitment to their improvement,” he says.

Development as a way forward

Some national projects were developed to openly address Muslim issues, but this led other internal ethnic and religious groups to ask, “Why are you appeasing the Muslims?”

Especially since 9/11, governments have increasingly come under pressure. Stigmas that narrow Muslim identity into “extremists” and “terrorists” are more progressively shared, making it near impossible for governments to explicitly offer a helping hand to Muslims without domestic backlash. 

But even with the odds against them, Muslim minorities still have a way forward.

In the three countries studied, Muslims have found traces of success, and in other Asian nations such as Sri Lanka and Nepal, there has been considerable accommodation of Muslims. Across all circumstances, “Muslims have done best in countries where the state has focused on education for all,” Dossani says.

Instead of providing ethnic-based aid, governments should focus on resource availability as a main qualifier for assistance. State-sponsored education and health care initiatives that capture the poorest populations help Muslims who inherently fall into this category. 

“Any wise government would say ‘look we want to connect education to development and focus on the poorest, no matter who they are.’ If they do that, Muslims will automatically get their fair share,” he says. The Philippines has already recognized this reality, and begun to implement development projects that naturally include Muslims.

Regime change can also motivate Muslim accommodation, either directly or indirectly, as is likely in the case of India.

Newly appointed Prime Minister Narendra Modi, although said to have an anti-Islamic stance in the past with the Bharatiya Janata Party, may in fact create policies that favor Muslims because it fits in with a grander vision of national growth. 

Referring to Prime Minister Modi, Dossani says, “It’s not clear that he cares about Muslims, but in some ways, he cares about development.

“At some point, any development-conscious person will realize that no country can progress if 15 percent of the country hangs behind.”

Diaspora matters

The swell of migration in the globalized era has made the formation of diaspora communities, dispersed populations outside of country of origin, a common phenomenon. Muslim minorities are a large part of this movement, seeking opportunity and using their ethnic or religious connections to establish a new life elsewhere.

Muslims of Asian origin are located beyond Asia – in the Middle East, North Africa and Southern Europe, among other areas. But despite being removed from their native soil, an allegiance and interest in the homeland typically remains.

“Diaspora exists in a very big way,” Dossani explains. Their influence should not be underestimated, both financially and politically. The Muslim diaspora provides an important channel of support that helps struggling Muslim populations.

Remittances from relatives overseas can bring in substantial transfers of money and support to populations that may not otherwise have enough resources, or be supported by the government. For several years now, one of the single largest inflows of money into the Philippines has been from these outside sources. India’s Muslim diaspora has a strong diasporan foundation with codified institutions set-up to organize relations. China’s experience is less documented, Dossani says, although he conjectures that some diasporan support exists, whether formally or informally.

Diaspora organizations, often led and supported by expatriates, appear to be growing worldwide, and can play a crucial role in the formation of Muslims’ global identity and network of support. Neighboring countries with Muslim majorities, such as Malaysia and Indonesia, have also offered themselves as diplomatic partners in resolving conflicts over Muslims’ conditions, given their own long histories of addressing them internally.