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.

Regional Advantage: The Non-Silicon Valley Way

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This seminar is part 1 of SPRIE's 5-part series on "Greater China: Entrepreneurial Leaders."

For a long time, researchers have asked whether the success of Silicon Valley can be replicated elsewhere. There have been various levels of attempts and various levels of success outside the United States.

Depending on how success is measured, one can draw different conclusions. How do we evaluate Hsinchu Science Park? Have they created innovative products? Have they produced entrepreneurs? How do they stack up to Silicon Valley? What is their competitive edge? As China joins the WTO, what should its strategy be?

On a long-term basis, what are the factors that will drive and deliver sustainable competitive advantages? With changes in global economic conditions, how does one re-evaluate the Silicon Valley model? As China joins the WTO, what should its strategy be? And as China becomes the manufacturer of the world, what is its impact on Taiwan and Silicon Valley?

This talk offers an analysis of experiences in Silicon Valley and Asia in the past twenty years. It also offers some reflections on the model and strategy for Greater China.

Since November 1998, Sha has been a managing partner at Spring Creek Venture, which specializes in early-stage venture investment and business consultation with Internet and infrastructure companies. Sha is currently serving on the board of directors of several start-up companies, including Appstream, Acela, Aduva, E21, LiveABC, Optoplex, Mediostream, and Tom.com.

Sha has extensive experience as a leader of high technology companies. He served as CEO for Sina.com and senior vice president of Commerce Solutions at Netscape Communications. While at Netscape, he served concurrently as president and CEO of Actra Business Systems, a joint venture formed by Netscape and GE Information Services. A company Sha built from scratch, Actra was the first company to focus on business-to-business e-commerce and e-procurement application systems. Prior to Actra, Mr. Sha served as vice president and general manager of business-to-consumer integrated application business at Netscape Communications and vice president of the UNIX Product Division at Oracle Corporation.

In his community service, Sha served as chairman of the Monte Jade West Coast association from 2000-2001. Sha currently is serving as chairman of the Monte Jade Global Association, the premier technology entrepreneur association with twelve chapters in the United States, Canada, Singapore, and Taiwan.

Mr. Sha holds an MS in EECS from the University of California at Berkeley, an MBA from Santa Clara University, and a BS in EE from Taiwan University.

Philippines Conference Room

James C. Sha Managing Partner Spring Creek Venture
Seminars
Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SPRIE)

New Modes of Organizing Trade in the Asia Pacific

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Vinod Aggarwal is professor in the Department of Political Science, affiliated professor of Business and Public Policy in the Haas School of Business, and director of the Berkeley Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Study Center (BASC) at the University of California at Berkeley. He has been at Berkeley since 1980, and from 1991-1994 was chairman of the Political Economy of Industrial Societies Program.He is also the founder and editor-in-chief of the journal Business and Politics. Dr. Aggarwal consults regularly with multinational corporations on strategic planning, trade policy, and international negotiations. In the public sector, he has been a consultant to the Mexican Government, the U.S. Department of Commerce, OECD, the Group of Thirty, IFAD, and the World Bank. In 1990, he was special adviser on Trade Negotiations to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in connection with the GATT Uruguay Round negotiations and has also served as an adviser to Dr. Fred Bergsten, chairman of the APEC Eminent Persons Group. In 1997, he won the Cheit Outstanding Teaching Award at the Haas School of Business. Professor Aggarwal's authored books include Liberal Protectionism, International Debt Threat, and Debt Games, and his edited volumes include Asia-Pacific Crossroads. He is currently completing a volume on American corporate market and nonmarket strategies in Asia. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University. This seminar is part of the Shorenstein Forum's ongoing series, "The California-Asia Connection." Lunch will be served to those who RSVP to Debbie Warren at dawarren@stanford.edu or 650-723-2408 by Friday, January 31, 2003.

Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room

Vinod Aggarwal Director, APEC Study Center Speaker Professor, Political Science, University of California, Berkeley
Workshops
Walter H. Shorenstein Forum for Asia Pacific Studies

Program on Sovereignty

Work on the complex and evolving nature of sovereignty has been underway at Stanford IIS since the mid-1990s. The Center will build on this foundation of knowledge by taking up the issues of intervention, or efforts by external actors to alter domestic authority structures in other states. While influencing domestic authority structures of target states has been central to statecraft for centuries, it has been all but ignored by most international relations theorists.

Rule of Law Program

Today, it is widely recognized that the absence of the rule of law constitutes a critical barrier to economic growth and democractic political development. Increasingly, scholars and policy makers alike are turning their attention toward the concept of economic rights - ranging from broad affirmations of the importance of secure property rights to more particular descriptions of modes of corporate governance - to inform their thinking about growth and development.

Program on Economic Performance

Nearly half the world's population - some 2.8 billion people - lives on less than two dollars per day. The gap between the rich and the poor is vast. There are two overarching reasons for those fortunate enough to reside in the more affluent West to be concerned about poverty in the developing world. One is humanitarian. The other is self-interest. Poverty triggers violence. In the over one hundred large civil wars that have engulfed many parts of the world since the Second World War, the leading cause of insurgency is poverty - not ethnicity or religion.

Program on Democracy - Completed

In the past three decades, the number of democracies in the world has tripled, and democracy has become the only broadly legitimate form of government. But many of the regimes that have replaced dictatorships themselves suffer from many illiberal practices, or hold multiparty elections only as a façade to mask continuing authoritarian domination.

Eva Meyersson Milgrom

CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall, Room C144
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 724-7985 (650) 724-2996
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Visiting Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Business
milogram.jpg PhD

Eva Meyersson Milgrom is a senior research scholar at CDDRL and a visiting associate professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and the Public Policy Program. She is also an associate professor and senior research fellow at the School of Business at Stockholm University in Sweden.

Her current research focuses on the following topics: (1) implications of social behavioral theories on economic growth, in conjunction with Guillermina Jasso of New York University; (2) institutional change and its effects on promotion and demotion in Swedish private companies; inter-firm wage mobility in Sweden from 1979-1990; labor markets segregation (firm and individual characteristics) in collaboration with Illong Kwon of the University of Michigan along with Mike Gibbs and Kathy Lerulli; (3) equity considerations and the trade-offs between complementarities and influence costs within organizations; and (4) the structure of inequality and extremism. At Stanford, she has taught courses on international corporate governance and on managing diversity.

Her previous interdisciplinary work includes the following: In the summer of 2002, she organized a laboratory to provide an institutional analysis of economic growth based on firm-matched data from four Scandinavian countries. In fall 2002, she organized a conference that brought together scholars from diverse fields to analyze the phenomenon of suicide bombing and to discuss how this phenomenon affects current social science thinking and research. A book is in the works on this topic. Meyersson Milgrom also organized sessions on rational choice at the August 2002 meeting of the American Sociological Association.

Meyersson Milgrom previously served as a visiting scholar in the sociology departments at Stanford University (1998-2000) and Harvard University (2000-2001), and also served as a visiting associate professor at the Sloan School of Management, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2001-2002).

Her recent books published in Sweden include: The State as a Corporate Owner (1998, with Susannah Lindh) and Compensation Contracts in Swedish Publicly Traded Firms (1994). Her recently published articles include: "An Evaluation of the Swedish Corporate System" in Hans T:son Soderstom (January 2003); "Pay, Risk and Productivity" in Finnish Economic Papers (with Trond Petersen and Rita Asplund); "Equal Pay for Equal Work? Evidence from Sweden, Norway and the United States" in the Scandinavian Journal of Economics (vol. 4, 2001, with Trond Petersen and Vermund Snartland); and "More Glory and Less Injustice: The Glass-Ceiling in Sweden 1970-1990" in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility (Kevin T. Leicht, editor, with Trond Petersen).

Meyersson Milgrom was born in Sweden and received a PhD in sociology from Stockholm University.

CDDRL Senior Research Scholar

Larry Diamond

CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C147
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 724-6448 (650) 723-1928
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Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and Sociology
diamond_encina_hall.png MA, PhD

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.

Download full-resolution headshot; photo credit: Rod Searcey.

Former Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Faculty Chair, Jan Koum Israel Studies Program
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