International Relations

FSI researchers strive to understand how countries relate to one another, and what policies are needed to achieve global stability and prosperity. International relations experts focus on the challenging U.S.-Russian relationship, the alliance between the U.S. and Japan and the limitations of America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.

Foreign aid is also examined by scholars trying to understand whether money earmarked for health improvements reaches those who need it most. And FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center has published on the need for strong South Korean leadership in dealing with its northern neighbor.

FSI researchers also look at the citizens who drive international relations, studying the effects of migration and how borders shape people’s lives. Meanwhile FSI students are very much involved in this area, working with the United Nations in Ethiopia to rethink refugee communities.

Trade is also a key component of international relations, with FSI approaching the topic from a slew of angles and states. The economy of trade is rife for study, with an APARC event on the implications of more open trade policies in Japan, and FSI researchers making sense of who would benefit from a free trade zone between the European Union and the United States.

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February 21 marks the sixth anniversary of the end of Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution. Three months of largely peaceful protests concluded in a spasm of deadly violence. President Victor Yanukovych fled Kyiv and later Ukraine, prompting the Rada (Ukraine’s parliament) to appoint acting leaders pending early elections. 

Today, Ukraine has made progress toward meeting the aspirations that caused Ukrainians to fill the streets of Kyiv: to become a normal European democracy with a growing economy and reduced corruption. Unfortunately, the country finds itself entangled in an ongoing low-intensity war with Russia, with uncertain prospects for settlement.

 

Read the Rest at FSI Medium

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The United States must at some point depart from Afghanistan and bring this costly “forever war” to a conclusion. With over 2,400 U.S. servicemembers killed, many more wounded, and nearly a trillion dollars spent to date, America’s leaders are under an obligation to design and execute a plan that stops a decades-long hemorrhaging of American blood and treasure.

 

Read the Rest at War on the Rocks

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CISAC will be canceling all public events and seminars until at least April 5th due to the ongoing developments associated with COVID-19.

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With discussant: Brett McGurk
Payne Distinguished Lecturer at the Center for International Security and Cooperation

 

This event is co-sponsored with the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies

 

About this Event: Kim Ghattas's most recent book Black Wave  tells the story of the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, a conflict born from the 1979 Iranian revolution. Ghattas, a native of the region, explores the distortion and deployment of religion in a competition that went beyond geopolitics, where each side proceeded to strategically feed intolerance, suppress cultural expression and encourage sectarian violence from Egypt to Pakistan. 


About the Speaker: Kim Ghattas is an Emmy Award-winning journalist and writer who covered the Middle East for twenty years for the BBC and the Financial Times. She has also reported on the U.S State Department and American politics. She has been published in The Atlantic, the Washington Post, and Foreign Policy and is currently a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. Her first book, The Secretary, was a New York Times bestseller. Born and raised in Lebanon, she now lives in Beirut and Washington, D.C.

Kim Ghattas Non-resident Scholar Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
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CANCELLED

 

Moderator:  Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow, Center on Democracy, Development & the Rule of Law (CDDRL)

Comments: James Fishkin, Director of Stanford's Center for Deliberative Democracy

 

SPEAKER BIO:

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Zandanshatar Gombojav is a member of the State Great Hural (Parliament) of Mongolia and has been elected as the Chairman on February 1, 2019.

Over the years, he has held key roles within the Mongolian Government including Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade (2009-2012), State Minister and Chief of the Cabinet Office (2017-2019). He also served as the Deputy Minister for Agriculture (2003-2004) before being elected to Parliament for two consecutive terms. He is a member of Mongolian People's Party, the largest political force formerly known as the Mongolian Peoples’ Revolutionary Party and has served in its General Secretary’s position during 2012-2013. Before his appointment as Foreign Minister, during which he had many foreign policy accomplishments from renewing the country's foreign policy concept to adopting new trade agreements with several partners, he had over a decade long successful career in Mongolia's banking sector, working at the Agricultural Bank (Khan Bank 2003), and the Central Bank of Mongolia (2000).

After graduating from the State Institute of Finance in Russia (1992), he began his career as a Lecturer on Economics and Finance at Mongolia's Institute of Trade and Industry. He has published extensively on various banking issues and also on topics regarding the international relations process in refereed journals and different conference proceedings. He has been a strong supporter of the reform process, being actively involved in the organization of youth development.

Between 2014-2015 he was a visiting scholar at Stanford Univesity's Center on Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law, directed at the time by Prof. Larry Diamond. His research interest focused on issues related to the democratic and political development of Mongolia given its geostrategic situation. The research continued at Stanford’s Deliberative Democracy Center, directed by Prof. J.Fishkin, to a larger research project encompassing regional democratic and political development from Mongolia's unique perspective. As a strong advocate for democratic reform, Zandanshatar Gombajav was impressed by the Deliberative Democracy concept and its core application the deliberative polling as a sound tool to find common determination of political process including to change constitution. He has applied the concept of deliberative polling and pioneered to amend the Mongolian constitution which was successfully adopted by the State Great Hural on 14 November 2019.

Advisory on Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19)

In accordance with university guidelines, if you (or a spouse/housemate) have returned from travel to mainland China in the last 14 days, we ask that you DO NOT come to campus until 14 days have passed since your return date and you remain symptom-free. For more information and updates, please refer to the Stanford Environmental Health & Safety website: https://ehs.stanford.edu/news/novel-coronavirus-covid-19

 

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Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. For more than six years, he directed FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, where he now leads its Program on Arab Reform and Democracy and its Global Digital Policy Incubator. He is the founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy and also serves as senior consultant at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. His research focuses on democratic trends and conditions around the world and on policies and reforms to defend and advance democracy. His latest book, China's Influence and American Interests (Hoover Press, 2019), focuses on promoting constructive vigilance of China’s ambitions as a global economic and military superpower. He is now writing a textbook and preparing a massive open online course (MOOC) on democratic development. Diamond’s other books include Ill Winds:  Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency (Penguin Press, 2019), In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has also edited or coedited more than forty books on democratic development around the world. He directed the Stanford Program on Democracy in Taiwan for more than ten years and has been a regular visitor to Taiwan since 1995.

 

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James S. Fishkin holds the Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication at Stanford University where he is Professor of Communication, Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) and Director of the Center for Deliberative Democracy. He is the author of Democracy When the People Are Thinking (Oxford 2018), When the People Speak (Oxford 2009), Deliberation Day (Yale 2004 with Bruce Ackerman) and Democracy and Deliberation (Yale 1991). He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. His Deliberative Polling has been conducted in 30 countries around the world, including Mongolia. The Deliberative Poll provides data on representative and informed opinion in order to see what policies a population would support if they thought in depth about the issues.

Zandanshatar Gombojav Chairman of the State Great Hural, Parliament of Mongolia

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Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and Sociology
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Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.

Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad.  A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has edited or coedited more than fifty books, including China’s Influence and American Interests (2019, with Orville Schell), Silicon Triangle: The United States, China, Taiwan the Global Semiconductor Security (2023, with James O. Ellis Jr. and Orville Schell), and The Troubling State of India’s Democracy (2024, with Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha Mistree).

During 2002–03, Diamond served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other organizations dealing with governance and development. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq.

Among Diamond’s other edited books are Democracy in Decline?; Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab World; Will China Democratize?; and Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, all edited with Marc F. Plattner; and Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran, with Abbas Milani. With Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, he edited the series, Democracy in Developing Countries, which helped to shape a new generation of comparative study of democratic development.

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Former Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Faculty Chair, Jan Koum Israel Studies Program
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APARC is pleased to announce that two young scholars, Jeffrey Weng and Nhu Truong, have been selected as our 2020-21 Shorenstein postdoctoral fellows on contemporary Asia. They will begin their appointments at Stanford in autumn 2020.

The Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellowship on Contemporary Asia is open to recent doctoral graduates dedicated to research and writing on contemporary Asia, primarily in the areas of political, economic, or social change in the Asia-Pacific, or international relations in the region.

Fellows develop their dissertations and other projects for publication, present their research, and participate in the intellectual life of APARC and Stanford at large. Our postdoctoral fellows often continue their careers at top universities and research organizations around the world and remain involved with research and publication activities at APARC.

Meet our new postdoctoral scholars:


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Jeffrey Weng
Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow on Contemporary Asia

Research focus: How does society shape language, and how does language shape society?

Jeffrey Weng is completing his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds a BA in political science from Yale University, and his work has appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies and Theory and Society. His research focuses on the evolution of language, ethnicity, and nationalism in China.

Jeffrey's dissertation examines language in the context of Chinese nation-building. Mandarin Chinese was artificially created about a century ago and initially had few speakers. Now, it is the world’s most-spoken language. How did this transition happen? Weng's research shows how the codification of Mandarin was done with the intention to match existing practices closely, but not exactly. Top-down efforts by the state to spread the new language faced enormous difficulties, and ultimately its wide-spread adoption may have been catalyzed more by economic growth and urban migration. By investigating how these monumental social and political changes occurred, Weng’s work deepens the understanding of societal shifts, past and present, in one of the world’s predominant nations, while also contributing more broadly to scholarship on class, the educational reproduction of privilege, and the construction and reconstruction of race, ethnicity, and nation.

At Shorenstein APARC, Weng will continue to publish papers based on his doctoral research while reworking his dissertation into a book manuscript.



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Nhu Truong
Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow on Contemporary Asia

Research focus: Why are some authoritarian regimes more responsive than others?

Nhu Truong is a Ph.D. candidate in comparative politics in the Department of Political Science at McGill University, with an area focus on China, Vietnam, and Southeast Asia. She received an MPA in International Policy and Management from the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University, an MA in Asian Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA in International Studies from Kenyon College. Prior to embarking on her doctoral study, she worked in international development in Vietnam and Cambodia, and with policy research on China.

Her research focuses on authoritarian politics and the nature of communist and post-communist regimes, particularly as it pertains to regime repressive-responsiveness, the dynamics of social resistance, repertoires of social contention, and political legitimation.
 
Nhu Truong’s dissertation explains how and why the communist, authoritarian regimes of China and Vietnam differ in their responsiveness to mounting unrest caused by government land seizures. Drawing on theory and empirical findings from 16 months of fieldwork and in-depth comparative historical analysis of China and Vietnam, Truong uses these two regimes as case studies to explore the nature of responsiveness to social pressures under communist and authoritarian rule and the divergent institutional pathways that responsiveness can take. She posits that authoritarian regimes manage social unrest by relying on raw coercive power and by demonstrating responsiveness to social demands. But not all authoritarian regimes are equally responsive to social pressures. Despite their many similarities, the Vietnamese communist regime has exhibited greater institutionalized responsiveness, whereas China has been relatively more reactive.
 
As a Shorenstein Fellow, Truong will develop her dissertation into a book manuscript. She plans to continue exploring the variable outcomes and knock-on effects of authoritarian responsiveness in places like Cambodia, which will further support her comparative research on China and Vietnam and lay the groundwork for her next project.

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This event is co-sponsored with the Project on Russian Power and Purpose in the 21st Century

 

Seminar Recording:   https://youtu.be/5gWmnsTD0MA

 

About this Event: Russia has deployed cyber operations to interfere in foreign elections, launch disinformation campaigns, and cripple neighboring states—yet the regime has also maintained a thin veneer of deniability and avoided strikes that cross the line into acts of war. How should a targeted nation respond? The international effort to counter Russian cyber operations by imposing sanctions and indictments, in combination with a new defend forward approach, has done little to alter Moscow’s behavior.  Therefore, in his new book on Russian Cyber Operations, Scott Jasper takes a deep dive into the legal and technical maneuvers that are used to avoid consequences, proposing that nations develop robust solutions for resilience to withstand future attacks.

 

About the Speaker: Scott Jasper, CAPT, USN (ret) is a Lecturer at the National Security Affairs Department and the Institute for Security Government at the Naval Postgraduate School, specializing in defense strategy, hybrid warfare, and cyber policy. Scott has published chapters in various handbooks related to cybersecurity and articles in Strategic Studies Quarterly, the International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, United States Cybersecurity Magazine, The National Interest, Small Wars Journal, and The Diplomat. He is the author of Russian Cyber Operations: Coding the Boundaries of Conflict, Strategic Cyber Deterrence: The Active Cyber Defense Option and editor of Conflict and Cooperation in the Global Commons, Security Freedom in the Global Commons, and Transforming Defense Capabilities: New Approaches for International Security. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Reading, U.K. 

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Scott Jasper Naval Postgraduate School
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Last fall, SPICE provided me an opportunity to design and organize its first post-collegiate online course. The Stanford-Hiroshima Collaborative Program on Entrepreneurship (SHCPE’s Japanese-friendly pronunciation, “shu-ppe”) was conducted in collaboration with the Hiroshima Business and Management School (HBMS) at the Prefectural University of Hiroshima (PUH). HBMS offers the only Master of Business Administration (MBA) program in Japan’s western region of Chugoku and Shikoku. Interacting with amazing individuals on both sides of the Pacific, this unique experience brought me priceless moments.

Innovation in Itself

SHCPE, a course to help nurture entrepreneurial thinking, was an innovation in itself. The program was born out of Governor Hidehiko Yuzaki’s vision to design and implement a social challenge to help accelerate Hiroshima’s regional growth. Harnessing the resources of Stanford and Silicon Valley, the new online class was launched to empower the students and to revitalize the business sector in Hiroshima. SPICE created the curricular content and HBMS provided the learning environment designed to maximize the academic experience for the students. As the course’s curriculum designer, I leveraged the expertise of my fellow SPICE online instructors and applied design thinking, a method developed by Stanford faculty, practiced widely in Silicon Valley, and popularized globally to understand the end-user, challenge our assumptions, and reconstruct alternative perspectives to generate innovative ideas.

Bridging Silicon Valley and Hiroshima

SHCPE’s 18 MBA students in Hiroshima met every Saturday morning for three hours from September 28 to November 16, 2019 to connect online with Japanese entrepreneurs, professionals, and scholars in Silicon Valley. The first virtual class focused on discussing the mindset expected for the course as well as the conceptual framework. In the following six weeks, we welcomed guest speakers who shared their diverse experiences. What were their prior experiences, expertise, and insights? What resources did they have to achieve their goals? What were the major promoters and impediments to their journeys? Through active exploration of these questions, the students were exposed to real-life case studies to analyze Silicon Valley’s ecosystem and think critically about entrepreneurial competence and qualification. The course was conducted entirely in Japanese.

The guest speakers engaged and energized the HBMS students. Akira Onozato spoke about the evolution of Silicon Valley over the past three decades. His diverse experiences as a serial entrepreneur painted a rich picture of the San Francisco Bay Area’s growth cycle. Akira’s story provided a great segue to Rika Nakazawa’s lecture on the mindset and culture surrounding startups. Rika highlighted grit, tolerance of failure, and branding as important assets of successful entrepreneurs. Dr. Fumiaki Ikeno spoke on the landscape and trends in the medical device industry. He pointed to Japan’s declining productivity and economic competitiveness and discussed the persistent fear of failure as a major impediment to promoting entrepreneurship. As an active venture capitalist on both sides of Pacific, Seiji Miyasaka explained the funding schemes and financial cycles surrounding the investment climate of startups. Using case studies, he highlighted the role of investors who act as coaches to aspiring entrepreneurs. Tatsuki Tomita’s definition of a startup was shaped by his own experiences of starting multiple companies. His discussion of the pivot pyramid provided a visual guideline for how startups can experiment with ideas and find their product-market fit. Tasha Yorozu shared her expertise as a legal counsel, walking through the steps of starting a business in Silicon Valley. Along with Jumpei Ishii, a visiting legal counsel from Japan, Tasha further discussed their observations of successful startup practices and common pitfalls. The diversity of SHCPE guests represented the vibrant Silicon Valley community. 

Active Learning and Knowledge Construction

While these professionals provided informative accounts of their expertise, SHCPE’s ultimate goal was to help each HBMS student to develop a mindset of an active learner. The MBA students were constantly challenged to think critically about the weekly theme, and work in pairs or teams to discuss assigned topics. The experience offered a dynamic and interactive learning environment for the Japanese students in their 30s, 40s, and 50s who had been accustomed to traditional lecture-style formats. SHCPE’s curriculum based on design thinking adopted an inquiry-based learning pedagogy, which engaged every student through weekly assignments and in-class discussions. During the first class, the students were informed that SHCPE would not teach them entrepreneurship. Instead, this course would provide them with the opportunity to reconstruct their knowledge of entrepreneurship and innovation based on what they observe, hear, and feel during the class. In addition, the students were required to provide feedback after each class, which was utilized to redesign the lesson plans for the following week.

This active and experiential mindset was envisioned by Dr. Gary Mukai, Director of SPICE and a renowned Japan–U.S. educator. “At SPICE, we provide students an opportunity to own their learning experience. Education is about empowering the students,” Dr. Mukai asserts. This tradition comes from the American philosopher and education reformist John Dewey, who said, “I believe finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing.” SHCPE’s inaugural curriculum aimed to implement this philosophy through direct, real-life interaction with founders and movers in Silicon Valley, and through the iterative process to deconstruct and reconstruct their knowledge on entrepreneurship.

Innovation Through Education

What SHCPE aimed to achieve was innovation through education. The weekly three-hour online class was roughly divided into three parts: guest lecture, class discussion, and interview. Prior to the interview session, a pre-assigned team of three students met with me in a separate online room and brainstormed their interview questions. For the majority of the students, it was their very first time to formally interview a person, and the experience brought a novel learning opportunity to think critically about entrepreneurial competence. Many commented on the challenge and the excitement of getting to know strangers by engaging them in a thoughtful conversation. The weekly interview highlighted the philosophy, aspiration, and raw sentiments of the guest speakers, evoking passion, energy, and empathy among the students.

Stanford-Hiroshima Collaborative Program on Entrepreneurship (SHCPE) staff with Ken-ichi Nakamura, President of the Prefectural University of Hiroshima SHCPE 2019 team with Ken-ichi Nakamura, President of the Prefectural University of Hiroshima
Through observations and discussions, the SHCPE participants built their own knowledge and understanding of what constitutes entrepreneurship. To conclude the eight-week course, I had the chance to visit Hiroshima to offer the last SHCPE class in person, and to observe first-hand their reaction to the curriculum design. Meeting the students as well as the HBMS faculty and staff who supported SHCPE, was an incredibly rewarding experience. My class focused on education and empowerment. The students discussed in teams how they might develop a curriculum to promote entrepreneurship in Hiroshima. Much to everyone’s delight, one of the students expressed his hope to apply what he learned in this course and serve as an angel investor to support local startups. The class culminated with a closing ceremony during which each student was presented an official Certificate of Completion. My trip to Hiroshima also provided a valuable opportunity to visit Governor Yuzaki as well as PUH President Ken-ichi Nakamura, who emphasized the importance of adding a real-life, global perspective to the HBMS curriculum. Programs such as SCHPE were made possible through these leaders’ foresight and support.

SHCPE strived to adopt the pedagogy of active learning and the toolsets of design thinking to implement Governor Yuzaki’s vision of “learning innovation.” The course appears to have succeeded in helping to realize his vision as one student reflected upon his experience:

This class does not intend to offer answers [to the question what entrepreneurship is]. Instead, it urges the students to constantly think on their own and engage themselves in learning. This is very different from the Japanese traditional pedagogy, which relies on rote memorization and mechanical process of practice problems. This class highlighted the fundamental difference in the philosophy of how we look at education, and I enjoyed this eye-opening experience.

SHCPE ’19 concluded with much enthusiasm. SPICE looks forward to continuing its partnership with HBMS to build upon the invaluable lessons learned from the inaugural program. With Stanford e-Hiroshima, an online course for high school students managed and taught by my colleague Rylan Sekiguchi, SPICE will continue its efforts to empower the people in Hiroshima.

Acknowledgement

I am greatly indebted to Dr. Gary Mukai for providing me this invaluable opportunity. Special thanks go to Carey Moncaster, Dr. HyoJung Jang, Jonas Edman, Meiko Kotani, Naomi Funahashi, Rylan Sekiguchi, Sabrina Ishimaru, Dr. Tanya Lee, and Waka Takahashi Brown for their valuable comments on the preliminary curriculum. I thank all of my colleagues at SPICE for their support and encouragement throughout the process.

My special gratitude goes to Akira Onozato, Dr. Fumiaki Ikeno, Jumpei Ishii, Rika Nakazawa, Seiji Miyasaka, Tatsuki Tomita, and Tasha Yorozu who took the time out of their busy Friday evening to participate in the virtual classroom. Their contagious enthusiasm energized the students.

Last but not least, I would like to express my deep appreciation to my collaborators at HBMS. I thank Professor Katsue Edo for his hard work and commitment to implement the program, Professor Yasuo Tsuchimoto for his technical expertise and dedication to administer the distance-learning, Professor Narumi Yoshikawa for supporting in-class discussions, and Kazue Hiura, Yoshihiko Oishi, and Kenji Okano for their capable assistance and thoughtful arrangements. Last but not least, my heartfelt congratulation goes to the 18 MBA students who successfully completed SHCPE ’19. The inaugural class will always have a special place in my heart.


To stay informed of news about Stanford e-Japan and SPICE’s other programs, join our email list and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.


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Students and staff of the 2019 Stanford-Hiroshima Collaborative Program on Entrepreneurship (SHCPE)
Students and staff of the 2019 Stanford-Hiroshima Collaborative Program on Entrepreneurship (SHCPE) | Kazue Hiura
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Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/BGjRsO0fKds

 

About this Event: Germany plays a key role in shaping European and Western policy toward Russia.  Berlin is a leading voice within the European Union on Russian issues, and Chancellor Angela Merkel co-chairs with the French president the "Normandy" effort that seeks to broker a setttlement between Ukraine and Russia to the conflict in Donbas.  Emily Haber, the German ambassador to the United States, will join us for a conversation on how Berlin sees the Russian challenge and how the West should respond.

 

About the Speaker: Emily Margarethe Haber has been German Ambassador to the United States since June 2018. 

Immediately prior to this, Haber, a career foreign service officer, was deployed to the Federal Ministry of the Interior, serving as State Secretary overseeing security and migration at the height of the refugee crisis in Europe. In this capacity, she worked closely with the US administration on topics ranging from the fight against international terrorism to global cyberattacks and cybersecurity. In 2009, she was appointed Political Director and, in 2011, State Secretary at the Foreign Office, the first woman to hold either post. 

Emily Haber is married to Hansjörg Haber. The couple has two sons. 

Emily Margarethe Haber German Ambassador to the United States
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This event is co-sponsored with the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law

 

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/cPaeCJiRWuM

 

About this Event: In 2011, the impact of the Arab Spring and the emergence of YouTube videos evidencing ballot stuffing during Russian parliamentary elections, which nearly led to a revolution in Russia, forced Kremlin strategists to suddenly realize that the Internet had become a major media — and a major power. This was the case not only in Russia, but everywhere on the planet. The Kremlin spent years and billions of dollars [or rubles?] to subdue this power, and  to learn how to make use of it. Was this crusade successful? Is it true that Putin is now capable of influencing elections everywhere in the world? Will he be able to cut Russia off from the global internet? And what are the troll farms trying to achieve? Leonid Volkov, an internet expert and the founder of the Internet Protection Society, the leading Russian digital rights NGO—and, simultaneously, Chief of Staff for Alexey Navalny, the leader of Russian opposition—is known for his optimistic view on these issues. While Putin is far from possessing almighty internet warfare, the situation has complex implications for Russian society and democracy.

 

About the Speaker: Leonid Volkov is a Russian politician and IT-expert. He oversees regional political operations, IT and electoral campaigns for the leader of Russian opposition Alexey Navalny. Previously Volkov served as campaign manager and chief of staff for Alexei Navalny’s 2013 mayoral campaign for Moscow, as well as for Navalny’s attempt to get registered for the 2018 presidential election. Leonid Volkov is a former deputy of the Yekaterinburg City Duma. He has over 20 years of experience as an IT professional, running and consulting several of Russia’s largest software firms. Since 2016 Leonid is active also as founder and chairman of the Internet Protection Society, a NGO focused on internet freedom and digital rights in Russia.

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Leonid Volkov Russian Politician and IT-Expert
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Explore our series of multimedia interviews and Q&As with the contributors to this volume: 


China's future will be determined by how its leaders manage its myriad interconnected challenges. In Fateful Decisions, leading experts from a wide range of disciplines eschew broad predictions of success or failure in favor of close analyses of today's most critical demographic, economic, social, political, and foreign policy challenges. They expertly outline the options and opportunity costs entailed, providing a cutting-edge analytic framework for understanding the decisions that will determine China's trajectory.

Xi Jinping has articulated ambitious goals, such as the Belt and Road Initiative and massive urbanization projects, but few priorities or policies to achieve them. These goals have thrown into relief the crises facing China as the economy slows and the population ages while the demand for and costs of education, healthcare, elder care, and other social benefits are increasing. Global ambitions and a more assertive military also compete for funding and policy priority. These challenges are compounded by the size of China's population, outdated institutions, and the reluctance of powerful elites to make reforms that might threaten their positions, prerogatives, and Communist Party legitimacy. In this volume, individual chapters provide in-depth analyses of key policies relating to these challenges. Contributors illuminate what is at stake, possible choices, and subsequent outcomes. This volume equips readers with everything they need to understand these complex developments in context.

Available May 2020.

This book is part of the Stanford University Press series, "Studies of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center"

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