Stanford University

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.

Drell Lecture 2026 | The Science of Nuclear Winter: What We Know and What We Don't Know about the Consequences of a Nuclear War

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Media: please reach out to cisacevents@stanford.edu

About the Event 

Estimates of fatalities in a nuclear war range from none to Earth’s population. We can confidently state if there is never a nuclear explosion, there will be no fatalities. But what is the most probable loss? Fatalities from explosions in populated areas could be in the hundreds of millions, exceeding those from fallout radiation by a factor of ten. However, fatalities from environmental changes and the breakdown of society, which together may collapse global agriculture, could exceed those from blast by another factor of ten, approaching the population of the planet. Fatalities from blast, burns and prompt radiation are relatively easy to compute, but those from environmental changes are difficult to predict. We know that physically similar, but more extreme, environmental insults occurred 66 million years ago due to an asteroid impact and caused the extinction of about 75% of the known species. Toon will go through the chain of complex issues that need to be addressed to compute the environmental changes, their uncertainties and their impacts on humans: likely targets; fuel loads; fire ignition; smoke production, composition, lofting and rainout; climate response to stratospheric smoke; and agricultural responses to climate changes. A recent U.S. National Academy of Science panel recommended that multiple agencies fund research to reduce the uncertainties. For example, new satellite based global measurements of building types and volumes can provide improved fuel loads. Measurements of smoke from burning buildings, now non-existent, could determine smoke composition. New aircraft data on smoke from wildfires could inform lofting. However, no federal agency has developed a research program, just as they have avoided doing for the past 40 years. Thousands of scientific papers have been written about the extinction of the dinosaurs, but tens about our possible fate from a nuclear conflict. NASA is searching for asteroids that might hit us and planning how to stop them. But nuclear stockpiles are increasing, more countries seek nuclear weapons, and new and more terrifying weapons are being built.

About the Speaker

Brian Toon studies radiative transfer, aerosol and cloud physics, and parallels between Earth and planets. He led NASA airborne missions studying volcanic clouds, ozone holes, and cloud-climate impacts. Toon published about 400 refereed scientific papers, and co-authored Earth in Flames. He received the American Physical Society's Leo Szilard Award for work on nuclear winter and was recognized by the UN Environmental Program for contributions to the Nobel Peace Prize winning IPCC reports. Additionally, he won the American Geophysical Union’s Roger Revelle Medal, the American Meteorological Society’s Carl-Gustaf Rossby Medal, and the 2022 Future of Life Award for reducing the risk of nuclear war.

Please join us for refreshments in the Oksenberg Conference Center following the conclusion of the lecture from 5:00 - 6:00 PM.  All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

James D. Fearon
James Fearon

The Bechtel Conference Center

Brian Toon
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Call for Applications: CDDRL 2027-28 Pre- & Postdoctoral Fellowships

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The Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is pleased to invite applications from pre-doctoral students at the write-up stage and from post-doctoral scholars working in any of the four program areas of democracy, development, evaluating the efficacy of democracy promotion, and rule of law. The application cycle for the 2027-2028 academic year will be open from Monday, September 21, 2026, through Monday, November 30, 2026.

Our goal is to provide an intellectually dynamic environment that fosters lively exchange among Center members and helps everyone to do excellent scholarship. Fellows will spend the academic year at Stanford University focusing on research and data analysis as they work to finalize and publish their dissertation research while connecting with resident faculty and research staff at CDDRL.

Pre-doctoral fellows must be enrolled currently in a doctoral program or equivalent through the time of intended residency at Stanford and must be at the dissertation write-up (post-coursework) phase of their doctoral program. Post-doctoral fellows must have earned their Ph.D. within 3 years of the start of the fellowship, or plan to have successfully defended their Ph.D. dissertations by July 31, 2027.

In addition to our regular call for applications, CDDRL invites applications for the following fellowships:


Gerhard Casper Fellow in Rule of Law: We welcome research on any aspect of rule of law, including judicial politics, criminal justice, and the politicization of judicial institutions. We are an interdisciplinary center; candidates from any relevant field (i.e., the social sciences, law) are welcome to apply. This is a 9-month, residential fellowship, and the Gerhard Casper Fellow will be part of CDDRL’s larger cohort of pre- and postdoctoral fellows. Please apply through the CDDRL fellowship application process and indicate that you would like to be considered for the Gerhard Casper Rule of Law Fellowship.

Jan Koum Israel Studies Program Fellow: We welcome research on any aspect of modern Israel, including Israeli politics, constitutionalism, economics, society, diplomacy, and international affairs. We are an interdisciplinary center; candidates from any relevant field (i.e., the social sciences and law) are welcome to apply. This is a 9-month, residential fellowship, and the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program Fellow will be part of CDDRL’s larger cohort of pre- and postdoctoral fellows. Please apply through the regular CDDRL fellowship application process and indicate that you would like to be considered for the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program Fellowship.

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Maria Nagawa presents during the 2025 Global Development Postdoctoral Fellows Conference.
Maria Nagawa presents during the 2025 Global Development Postdoctoral Fellows Conference.
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The Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law welcomes applications from pre-doctoral students at the write-up stage and from post-doctoral scholars working in any of the four program areas of democracy, development, evaluating the efficacy of democracy promotion, and rule of law.

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Milada Vachudova | REDS Seminar: Europe in the Face of War

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Vachudova REDS Seminar 2026
We are amid the greatest transformation of Europe’s domestic politics, international institutions and geopolitical ambitions since the collapse of communism three decades ago. Russia’s war, Ukraine’s steadfast response, and America’s authoritarian turn are reshaping political contestation while also transforming Europe’s security order and testing its institutions: NATO is fortifying, the OSCE is incapacitated, and the EU has started to ramp up its defense and its geopolitical power. All of this is happening as Europe and the US have become more polarized and unpredictable. 
 
Across Europe, governments that uphold liberal democracy are confronted by governments and political parties that have undermined liberal democratic institutions at home and sought favors from the Kremlin abroad. Within some European countries, elections are fought between two blocs of parties – those who vow to protect liberal democratic institutions and those who have a track record of diminishing them. In this time of polarization and war, can international institutions and transatlantic cooperation defend the democratic West? The rise of authoritarian-minded political parties in Europe and the US puts at risk fundamental interests: a shared and prosperous liberal democratic West, the stability and decisiveness of NATO, and the survival and recovery of Ukraine.


 

Milada Anna Vachudova is a Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her current projects include protest in defense of liberal democracy across Europe, the revival of EU enlargement, and the upending of European security amidst the transformation of European politics and institutions owing to Russia’s war against Ukraine. Her recent articles explore the trajectories of European states due to strengthening ethnopopulism and democratic backsliding – and how these changes are impacting party systems and civic participation. She is part of the core team of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) on the positions of political parties across Europe. Professor Vachudova holds a B.A. from Stanford University. As a British Marshall Scholar, she completed an M.Phil. and a D.Phil. at the University of Oxford. She has held fellowships and grants from various institutions including the European University Institute, the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, the Center of International Studies at Princeton University, the National Science Foundation and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research.


REDS: RETHINKING EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT AND SECURITY


The REDS Seminar Series aims to deepen the research agenda on the new challenges facing Europe, especially on its eastern flank, and to build intellectual and institutional bridges across Stanford University, fostering interdisciplinary approaches to current global challenges.

REDS is organized by The Europe Center and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and co-sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Learn more about REDS and view past seminars here.

Anna Grzymała-Busse, Kathryn Stoner

Philippines Conference Room (3rd floor)

For Zoom, if prompted for a password, use: 123456

Milada Vachudova, University of North Carolina Presenter
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Jannis Panagiotidis | Racism against East Europeans in Germany: History and Present

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Racism against East Europeans constitutes a major gap in racism research and anti-racism debates. Yet there is a long tradition of treating the region and its inhabitants as inferior, with devastating consequences throughout history. This book is the first comprehensive study of racism in the entangled histories of Germany and Eastern Europe—a racism that is not based on skin color and affects people despite their mostly phenotypical whiteness. Embedded in colonial imaginations of Eastern Europe, anti-East European racism took its most radical and brutal shape during Nazism. But racist knowledge persisted across the rupture of 1945 and the Cold War and took on new shapes after the fall of communism in 1989, when East-West migration once again became an important feature of European and German reality. This book makes a case for the long overdue eastward expansion of the contemporary racism debate. 
 
 
Jannis Panagiotidis is a historian and migration scholar. He is scientific director of the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna. His publications include the monographs The Unchosen Ones: Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and Germany (Indiana UP 2019), Postsowjetische Migration in Deutschland: eine Einführung (Beltz Juventa 2021), and Antiosteuropäischer Rassismus in Deutschland: Geschichte und Gegenwart (Beltz Juventa 2024, with Hans-Christian Petersen).
Anna Grzymała-Busse
Anna Grzymała-Busse
Jannis Panagiotidis, University of Vienna Presenter
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Jana Hunter | The Child of Freedom: Temporal Sovereignty in Habsburg Bohemia

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Jana Hunter TEC event Dec 3
Who decides what time it is? In Habsburg Bohemia, that question drew in nearly every other: nation and empire, identity and sovereignty, capital and a newly connected world. Railways and telegraphs created a time shared across distance, and with it a debate over who had the power to set it. Histories of time standardization have told a story of unification; histories of Habsburg sovereignty, meanwhile, have located its conflicts in diets and parliaments. This talk brings them together, asking how an empire tried to synchronize every local clock, where authority over time was located, and why time became a question of sovereignty. After 1867, Bohemia's unresolved constitutional status moved into the infrastructure of daily life: whose observatory produced noon, which meridian ran the trains, whose clocks kept the time. At stake was not only who ruled Bohemia, but how time could be controlled at all. 
 
By the turn of the century, Bohemians called their divided time dualismus, the word for the constitutional settlement itself. This talk traces these jurisdictional disputes over four decades from railway decrees to universal time. The lines of conflict did not run simply between empire and nation: German liberals, Czech nationalists, intellectuals, and businessmen appealed to historic rights, national identity, commercial interest, and civic embarrassment. Jurisdiction over time was scalar, dispersed across ministries, railway companies, international conferences, and municipal councils, and exercised through everyday practice; sovereignty over time was claimed everywhere but located nowhere. The talk closes by asking, as the satirists of the day did, whether any authority could make a polity agree on something as basic as noon.
 
 
Jana Hunter is Assistant Professor at Stanford University, where she works on modern Central and Eastern Europe with particular interests in time, science and technology, modernity, and environmental change. Her first book project, Kingdom of Hours: The Transformation of Time in Habsburg Bohemia, 1848-1918, uses time as a lens to rethink the making of modern Central Europe. Rather than treating modern time as a single, accelerating rhythm, the study examines the coexistence of natural and industrial, religious and secular, nationalist and imperial, and mechanical and subjective temporalities that structured everyday life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bohemia. Moving from rural villages and mining towns to Prague’s municipal councils and the Reichsrat, the book reconstructs how local actors reworked temporal regimes to serve imperial, national, regional, and commercial aims, offering a new framework for understanding modernization beyond the categories of nation and empire. 
 
Her second project, Testing Grounds: From Marx to Oppenheimer—Czechoslovakia’s Global Legacy, 1918-Present, traces how twentieth-century ideologies of modernity were lived, imposed, and resisted through the uranium-mining town of Jáchymov. Once dubbed the “cradle of the atomic bomb,” Jáchymov became a testing ground for successive empires and energy regimes, its landscape transformed by extractive ambition, political violence, and environmental fallout. Bringing Karl Marx’s ecological critique into dialogue with J. Robert Oppenheimer’s nuclear physics, the project reframes the history of militarized landscapes and energy transitions, situating East-Central Europe within global histories of extraction and environmental change. Hunter received her D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 2024 and her M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge. She has held fellowships at Princeton University, the Czech Academy of Sciences, the University of Vienna, and the Herder Institute. Before joining Stanford, she was a Lecturer in Modern European History at New College, Oxford.
Anna Grzymała-Busse
Anna Grzymała-Busse
Jana Hunter, Stanford University Presenter
Seminars
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When a “Salami Slice” Becomes a Maritime Blockade: China’s Maritime Disruptions in the Indo-Pacific and Consequences for Human Populations

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About the event: China is practicing gray-zone coercion in the Indo-Pacific, deploying military vessels for drills in the waters between Taiwan and the Philippines. This “salami-slicing” strategy, advanced under Xi Jinping, incrementally escalates pressure on neighboring states while remaining below the threshold of open conflict. Disruption of critical sea lanes—through which fuel and food supplies transit—would have catastrophic implications for human populations dependent on uninterrupted maritime traffic. This talk presents research from the Stanford Geopolitical Coercion and Global Health Impact Initiative on maritime disruptions in the Indo-Pacific and what they would mean for human populations if maritime traffic were interrupted in a manner comparable to a closure of the Strait of Hormuz, with particular attention to effects on food security, energy access, and maternal and child health.

About the speaker: Dr. Ruth Gibson is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Innovation in Global Health, Affiliated Scholar at CISAC and the Founding Executive Director of the Stanford Geopolitical Human Impact Research Lab—the first research initiative at Stanford University dedicated to examining how geopolitical decisions shape human lives, with particular attention to children. Based in the Department of Pediatrics at the Stanford School of Medicine, the Initiative brings together health modeling, open-source intelligence, and international humanitarian law to produce rigorous, policy-relevant scholarship. She co-leads The Lancet Series on Foreign Engagement and Health in an Era of Geopolitical Crisis with Professor Gary Darmstadt. Dr. Gibson earned her PhD in geopolitical coercion and global health from the University of British Columbia and completed postdoctoral training at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation from 2022 to 2025. Drawing on more than a decade of international global health experience across five continents, her research focuses on the health consequences of sanctions, blockades, and armed conflict, especially their effects on maternal and child health.

William J. Perry Conference Room 

Ruth Gibson

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Dr. Ruth Gibson is the founding Executive Director of the Stanford Geopolitical Human Impact Research Lab. This research lab is the first at Stanford University dedicated to researching the human impact of geopolitical decisions, with particular attention to the lives of children. She is also an affiliated scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), where she completed postdoctoral training from 2022 to 2025.

Her scholarly expertise encompasses global health, foreign affairs, and strategic studies, with a particular emphasis on enhancing maternal and child health in geopolitically fragile regions—nations contending with war, sanctions, and diplomatic challenges. She is presently co-leading the Lancet Series on Foreign Policy and Global Health in an Era of Geopolitical Crisis with Professor Gary Darmstadt.

Dr. Gibson collaborates with the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner and the Special Rapporteur on Unilateral Coercive Measures to establish a universal monitoring framework to evaluate the effects of sanctions on human rights. She has contributed to reports prepared for the International Criminal Court. She is a research collaborator with the Global Burden of Disease Consortium at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, supporting efforts in global health estimation and forecasting, and a reviewer for Nature. Her research has appeared in The Lancet and The Lancet Global Health, and international media outlets, including TIME magazine and The New York Times, have featured her insights on geopolitics and human health. She writes publicly on Substack.

Before her academic career, Dr. Gibson spent a decade working in humanitarian and global health efforts across eight countries on five continents. Her efforts focused on fragile states confronting poverty, human rights violations, and armed conflict. She led a humanitarian foundation in Madagascar after a military coup, amid the disintegration of the healthcare system and international sanctions on foreign aid—an experience that continues to inform her research on unilateral coercive measures. While living in the Middle East, she worked for Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Health Affairs and the Health Ministries of Yemen and Somalia on telemedicine-driven medical education, while also cultivating diplomatic relations through shared health objectives amid periods of conflict. Throughout this decade of overseas experience, Dr. Gibson directly observed the human costs of war and geopolitical coercion.

Dr. Gibson earned an Honors Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science from the University of Toronto, a fellowship in Medical Education from the Wilson Center at the University Health Network, and a PhD in Global Health and Strategic Studies from the University of British Columbia. She completed postdoctoral training at Stanford University from 2022 to 2025, including fellowships at the Center for Innovation in Global Health (CIGH), Stanford Medicine, and the Department of Health Policy. She speaks English (native), French, and Mandarin Chinese.

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The Rise and Future of the Korean Semiconductor Memory Industry: Perspectives and Insights from 1983 to 2026 and Beyond

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Flyer for the seminar "The Rise and Future of the Korean Semiconductor Memory Industry," featuring headshot of the speaker, C.S. Park.

The recent Nasdaq debut of a Korean semiconductor memory producer, SK hynix—raising $26.5 billion in the largest-ever listing by a foreign company—has garnered global recognition after temporarily overtaking Samsung Electronics as South Korea’s most valuable chipmaker. Together, the two companies account for more than half of KOSPI’s total market capitalization.

This talk will explore how South Korea built a globally competitive semiconductor memory industry, navigated intense industry competition and consolidation, survived historical boom-and-bust cycles, and emerged as a crucial player in the global artificial intelligence (AI) era. Specifically, the discussion will shed light on how South Korean firms overcame initial technological, financial, and human capital constraints to ultimately transform a historically low-margin commodity memory business into the highly profitable High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) products required for AI. Finally, the presentation will consider the future trajectory of Korea’s memory industry, including Moore’s Law, the growing semiconductor ecosystem, its U.S. footprint, the rise of Chinese memory makers, engineering talent, demand cyclicality, stock volatility, socio-economic impact, and geopolitics as the global AI industry continues to evolve.

Speaker:
C.S. Park is the former Chairman and CEO of Hynix Semiconductor (now SK hynix). In 1983, he joined Hyundai Electronics as a founding member, where he held several positions, including President of U.S. operations, Head of Semiconductor Marketing & Sales, and CEO. He was instrumental in restructuring and transforming Hyundai Electronics into Hynix Semiconductor, a leading memory company. He was also Maxtor’s CEO until its merger with Seagate, where he served as Lead Independent Director. In the past, he served on a number of boards, including DLA Piper, Enphase Energy, Computer Sciences Corp., Ballard Power, Brooks Automation, Smart Modular, STATS ChipPAC, and Silicon Valley Community Foundation. Currently, he serves as a Board Advisor for ScaleFlux, a memory and storage company scaling the AI data pipeline.

Directions and Parking > 

Philippines Conference Room (C330)
Encina Hall, 3rd Floor
616 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305

C.S. Park, former Chairman and CEO, Hynix Semiconductor (now SK hynix)
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Registration: The Rise and Future of the Korean Semiconductor Memory Industry: Perspectives and Insights from 1983 to 2026 and Beyond. Photo: C.S. Park
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Mikhail Fishman — The Successor: Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Putin and the Decline of Modern Russia

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11.17 Revised Event Slide

When did Russia lose its chance of freedom? 1990: As a new openness sweeps Russia, a talented young physicist, Boris Nemtsov, begins his career in politics. Charismatic, confident, liberal and vehemently opposed to corruption, he swiftly rises to prominence. For the first time, another future seems possible. 2015: Putin holds the country in the grip of tyranny once more. Nemtsov, now his fiercest and most unrelenting opponent, is assassinated on a Moscow bridge. This is the story of how a nation's dreams of democracy died. Drawing on buried archives and off-the-record interviews, exiled journalist Mikhail Fishman gives a gripping insider account of the tragedy of modern Russia, told through many lives of Boris Nemtsov — activist, playboy, leader-in-waiting, dissident and, finally, victim. From the economic reforms under Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin's oligarchy, through two wars in Chechnya and the invasion of Ukraine, this is the story of a man fired by the belief that Russia could, still, have another future.

SPEAKERS

Mikhail Fishman is one of Russia’s leading political journalists. Active since the late 1990s, he has chronicled Russia’s dramatic political life. He served as editor-in-chief of Russian Newsweek and The Moscow Times, as well as hosting the Friday night news round-up at independent news network TV Rain. In 2017, Fishman and Vera Krichevskaya released The Man Who Was Too Free, a documentary feature on Boris Nemtsov. It was the highest-grossing documentary in Russia in at least a decade and laid the groundwork for this book, which was an instant bestseller on Russian publication in 2022. Fishman faced increasing intimidation and suppression from the state; when Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he left for Amsterdam, where he now lives in exile with his family.

Kathryn Stoner is the Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Satre Family Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). From 2017 to 2021, she served as FSI's Deputy Director. She is Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) at Stanford and teaches in the Department of Political Science, the Program on International Relations, and the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy Program. She is also a Senior Fellow (by courtesy) at the Hoover Institution.

Kathryn Stoner
Kathryn Stoner

Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to William J. Perry Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Mikhail Fishman Presenter
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Stanford’s Asia-Pacific Research Center Invites Applications for 2027-2029 Postdoctoral and Visiting Fellowships

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Stanford University's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) invites applications for several fellowships in contemporary Asia studies beginning in fall quarter 2027.

APARC offers a postdoctoral fellowship on contemporary Asia, broadly defined, and, through its research programs, postdoctoral and visiting fellow positions focused on Asia health policy, contemporary Southeast Asia, contemporary Taiwan, and research tracks of the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab.

Learn more about each opportunity and its specific application deadline and requirements:

2027-2028 Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellowship on Contemporary Asia


APARC offers two postdoctoral fellowship positions to recent PhD recipients for research on contemporary Asia. The primary research areas focus on political, economic, or social change in the Asia-Pacific region (including Northeast, Southeast, and South Asia), or international relations and international political economy in the region. Appointments are for one academic year beginning in fall quarter 2027. The application deadline is December 1, 2026. 

2027-2028 Asia Health Policy Program Postdoctoral Fellowship


Offered by the Asia Health Policy Program at APARC, the fellowship is awarded to one recent PhD recipient for research on contemporary health or healthcare policy of high relevance to countries in the Asia-Pacific region, especially developing countries. Appointments are for one academic year beginning in fall quarter 2027. The application deadline is December 1, 2026.

2027-2028 Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellowship on Southeast Asia


The Lee Kong Chian Fellowship supports scholarship on contemporary Southeast Asia. It is open to candidates of all career stages with professional backgrounds and ongoing positions in the social sciences or humanities. Lee Kong Chian Fellows spend two to three quarters at Stanford pursuing research and writing projects. APARC's Southeast Asia Program supports research conducted under the fellowship. Appointments must begin and conclude within the period September 1, 2027, to June 30, 2028. The application deadline is January 25, 2027.

Note: The fellowship is no longer offered as a joint-residency program with the National University of Singapore. Fellows appointed through Stanford will be hosted at Stanford's Asia-Pacific Research Center, while those appointed through NUS will be hosted at NUS. Applicants who wish to pursue the fellowship at NUS should apply through the NUS application portal.

Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab Postdoctoral and Visiting Fellowships

 

The Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL) addresses Asia's emergent social, cultural, economic, and political challenges. Housed at Shorenstein APARC, the lab is led by Korea Program Director Gi-Wook Shin. It focuses on four research themes: “Talent Flows and Development,” “Nationalism and Racism,” “U.S.-Asia Relations,” and “Democratic Crisis and Reform.”

SNAPL invites applications for three different fellowship offerings:

I. 2027-2029 Next Asia Policy Postdoctoral Fellowship

SNAPL offers two positions to recent PhD recipients for research on any of the lab's four research tracks. Appointments begin in fall quarter 2027 and are for two years, with a possibility of extension contingent on satisfactory performance and funding. The application deadline is December 1, 2026.

II. 2027-2028 STINT-SNAPL Postdoctoral Fellowship

Jointly with the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (STINT), SNAPL offers one fellowship position to recent PhD recipients, focused on scientific policy and the internationalization of higher education and research in the Asia-Pacific, with preference given to projects that directly or indirectly engage with Swedish perspectives. The appointment begins in fall quarter 2027 and is for one year, with a possibility of extension contingent on satisfactory performance and funding. The application deadline is December 1, 2026.

III. 2027-2028 Next Asia Policy Visiting Fellowship

SNAPL offers two visiting fellow positions to researchers and professionals from the Asia-Pacific region who hold a PhD or a substantial record of achievement related to the lab's four research themes. In this fellowship cycle, the lab will prioritize scholars working on economic security. Two visiting fellow positions are available, with one of them specifically dedicated to research on the Philippines. Appointments begin in fall quarter 2027 and are for one academic year. The application deadline is March 1, 2027.

2027-2028 Taiwan Program Kwoh-Ting Li Visiting Fellowship 


Offered by the Taiwan Program at APARC, the Kwoh-Ting Li Visiting Fellowship is open to mid-career and senior scholars in Taiwan studies. The fellowship provides an opportunity to conduct research, write, participate in seminars, or teach a course on contemporary Taiwan. It supports research on issues related to Taiwan’s economy, society, demography, environment, technology, and other areas of contemporary Taiwan studies. The appointment begins in fall quarter 2027 and runs for one academic year. The application deadline is March 1, 2027. 

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APARC Names 2026-2028 Incoming Fellows

Seven scholars researching diverse topics across contemporary Asian studies will join the APARC community starting this summer.
APARC Names 2026-2028 Incoming Fellows
Portrait photo of Gaea Morales.
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How Cities Are Rewriting Global Climate Governance

Political scientist Gaea Morales, APARC’s 2025-26 Shorenstein postdoctoral fellow on contemporary Asia, studies questions at the nexus of global policy and local action and how Southeast Asian megacities build climate resilience by drawing on local knowledge and global networks to drive change from the ground up, even in the absence of central government support.
How Cities Are Rewriting Global Climate Governance
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Q&As

Insights from the Rich Worlds of Southeast Asian Islam

Teren Sevea, APARC’s Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellow on Southeast Asia, reveals how overlooked histories and everyday ethics in Southeast Asia can reshape our understanding of the past and our responsibility for the future.
Insights from the Rich Worlds of Southeast Asian Islam
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The center and its research programs offer multiple postdoctoral and visiting fellowships in Asian studies starting in fall quarter 2027. Opportunities are open to scholars of contemporary Asia from a wide range of disciplines, encompassing both pan-regional research and specialized tracks focused on specific regions and themes.

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Marcela Ibáñez — Authoritarian Aid and Democratic Attitudes: Backlash, Not Diffusion

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11.5.26 Seminar

How does the local presence of an authoritarian power shape citizens' commitment to democracy? Existing theories suggest engagement with authoritarian states should weaken democratic commitment through norm diffusion, accommodation, or authoritarian learning. This paper challenges that expectation by examining Chinese development finance in Latin America. Using geocoded data, it estimates the subnational effect of exposure to Chinese aid on democratic attitudes. Exposure increases support for democracy rather than undermining it. The effect is strongest in authoritarian and weakly democratic settings and absent in consolidated democracies. Exposure does not improve perceptions of China or the United States, casting doubt on soft power or foreign-comparison explanations. Instead, the paper argues that visible Chinese projects make incumbents' authoritarian character more salient, triggering an accountability response. These findings recast authoritarian external influence as a contingent catalyst for democratic reinforcement.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Marcela Ibáñez is a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at CDDRL and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Zurich. Her work lies at the intersection of political economy and development studies. Her current research examines how development finance from authoritarian donors shapes political attitudes in recipient countries. Her broader interests include authoritarian politics, inequality and opportunity in low- and middle-income economies, democracy after conflict, and strategic communication. Methodologically, she draws on causal inference and econometrics, using experimental and quasi-experimental designs, geospatial and survey data, and quantitative text analysis. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Mannheim.

Hesham Sallam
Hesham Sallam

Virtual to Public. If prompted for a password, use: 123456

Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Conference Room E-008 in Encina Hall, East, may attend in person.

Marcela Ibáñez Visiting Scholar Presenter Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
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