Stanford University

Security

FSI scholars produce research aimed at creating a safer world and examing the consequences of security policies on institutions and society. They look at longstanding issues including nuclear nonproliferation and the conflicts between countries like North and South Korea. But their research also examines new and emerging areas that transcend traditional borders – the drug war in Mexico and expanding terrorism networks. FSI researchers look at the changing methods of warfare with a focus on biosecurity and nuclear risk. They tackle cybersecurity with an eye toward privacy concerns and explore the implications of new actors like hackers.

Along with the changing face of conflict, terrorism and crime, FSI researchers study food security. They tackle the global problems of hunger, poverty and environmental degradation by generating knowledge and policy-relevant solutions. 

Redistributive Colonialism: Caste, Conflict and Development in India

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Abstract:


Prior work on colonialism has shown that colonial institutions can influence modern developments outcomes, but has not examined the distributional effect of colonialism within societies. This chapter examines how the strategic goals of the colonial state altered the distribution of wealth across Indian caste groups, and how these differences have persisted into the post-independence period. Colonial administrators were only likely to transfer formal or informal power to the precolonial elite if they were secure militarily. This theory is tested using an empirical strategy that uses European wars as an exogenous determinate of colonial military stress. In areas annexed at times of European war, precolonial elites have low levels of wealth today relative to other groups, while in areas annexed at times of peace in Europe precolonial elites retain a more substantial economic advantage. The results highlight the variable impact of colonialism within societies, the strategic nature of colonial policy choices, and the long term consequences of colonial conquest. 

Speaker bio:

Alexander Lee's research focuses on the historical factors governing the success or failure of political institutions, particularly in South Asia and other areas of the developing world. His dissertation examined the ways in which colonialism changed the distribution of wealth in Indian society, and the ways in which these changes affected the development of caste identities. Additional research areas include the study of colonialism and European expansion in a cross- national perspective, and the causes of political violence, especially terrorism. His work has been published in World Politics and the Quarterly Journal of Political Science. Alex earned his PhD from Stanford in 2013. More information on his work can be found on his website: https://people.stanford.edu/amlee/

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Alexander Lee Postdoctoral Fellow, 2013-14 Speaker CDDRL
Seminars

Economic Development and Conflict Resolution: Lessons and Challenges from Palestine

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Efforts to bolster economic and private sector development in Palestine are central components to many current efforts to build peace and resolve the conflict. But what do we really know about the relationship between economic development and conflict resolution? What does research, and experience tell us about when economic interventions help reduce conflict, and when they fail? This distinguished panel will offer insights and lessons from Palestine -- with voices from the Palestinian business community, the US government, and academia.

The panel is co-sponsored by the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.

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Stanford Law School
Moot Courtroom, Room 80

Ammar Aker CEO Speaker Palestine Telecom Group
Allen Weiner Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation Moderator Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation
Sonia Franceski Director Speaker Middle East Affairs, Office of the US Trade Representative
Sabri Saidam Advisor to the President on Telecom, IT and Technical Education, and former Minister of Telecom & IT Speaker
Saumitra Jha Assistant Professor of Political Economy Speaker Stanford Business School
Conferences

Democratic Governance in China

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Professor Yu Keping will systematically survey the dominant processes and key issues of China’s governance changes over the last 30 years since reform. His talk will summarize the major achievements and the ongoing problems of this 30 year long process. It will offer a brief analysis of the underlying reasons for these reforms and the main characteristics of China’s governance model. After enumerating an array of factual evidence, Yu will show that the drive behind China’s governance reforms stems from unitary governance to pluralist governance, centralization to decentralization, rule of man to rule of law, regulatory government to service oriented government, and from internal party democracy to the people’s democracy.

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Dr. YU Keping is the Deputy President of the Central Compilation & Translation Bureau (CCTB), and the founding Director of the China Center for Global Governance and Development (CCGGD). He also serves as Prof. and Director of the Center for Chinese Government Innovations at Peking University, and Prof. and Director of the Institute of Political Development at Tsinghua University. He was a visiting professor or senior fellow at many top universities, including Harvard University, Duke University in the US and Free University in Berlin. His fields of expertise include political philosophy, comparative politics, globalization, civil society, governance and politics in China. Among his many books are Governance and Rule of Law in China (ed., Brill, 2012) and Democracy Is A Good Thing (Brookings, 2010).  As a leading intellectual in China, Professor Yu was selected as one of the “30 most influential figures in the past 30 years since the reform in China” in 2008 and ranked 19 in “2011 Global Top 100 Thinkers” by Foreign Policy in the US.

Philippines Conference Room

YU Keping Director of the Center for Chinese Government Innovations Speaker Peking University
Seminars

General C. Robert "Bob" Kehler

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This event is now full. We cannot accept any more RSVP's, but you can e-mail Zhila Emadi (zemadi@stanford.edu), if you would like to be placed on a waitlist.

 

About the Speaker:

General C. Robert Kehler is the commander of U.S. Strategic Command. He provides the President and Secretary of Defense with a broad range of strategic capabilities and options. He is responsible for the plans and operations for all U.S. forces conducting strategic nuclear and conventional deterrence and Department of Defense space and cyberspace operations.

General Kehler entered the Air Force in 1975 as a distinguished graduate of the Pennsylvania State University Air Force ROTC program. He has commanded at the squadron, group, wing and major command levels, and has a broad range of operational tours in ICBM, space launch, space control, space and missile warning operations.

General Kehler's staff assignments include tours with the Air Staff and Strategic Air Command headquarters. He was also assigned to the Secretary of the Air Force's Office of Legislative Liaison, where he was the point man on Capitol Hill for matters regarding the President's ICBM Modernization Program. As director of the National Security Space Office, General Kehler integrated the activities of a number of space organizations on behalf of the Under Secretary of the Air Force and Director of the National Reconnaissance Office. He has also served as deputy director of operations, Air Force Space Command, and as deputy commander, U.S. Strategic Command.

CISAC Conference Room

General C. Robert "Bob" Kehler Commander, United States Strategic Command Speaker
Seminars

The Trans-Pacific Partnership and Taiwan's Future Development Strategy

Abstract:

On October 11 and 12th, the Democracy in Taiwan Project at the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, in cooperation with the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, will hold its 8th annual conference, on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The TPP is a free trade agreement currently being negotiated by at least nine Pacific Rim countries that has the potential to re-shape economic relations in the region for the coming decades. This conference will bring together policymakers and scholars from Taiwan with leading specialists from other Asian countries and the U.S. to examine the evolution, geopolitics and future of the TPP, and also to consider how Taiwan is responding to the challenge of freer trade and what its strategy for deepening its trade relations and maintaining its economic development should be.

 

Among the issues to be addressed are:

  • How the economic and trading environment of East Asia is evolving, and what Taiwan’s future place will be in that regional environment.
  • The development of the Trans-Pacific Partnership as a potentially far-reaching new economic and strategic framework for the region, including the origins and evolution of the TPP, US participation and China’s response, and the implications for the balance of power in East Asia.
  • Taiwan’s response to the challenge of freer trade to date, including the impact on US-Taiwan relations and domestic constituencies for free trade in Taiwan.
  • The perspectives of other key countries in the region toward the TPP, including Japan, Korea, Singapore, and the People’s Republic of China.

This event is co-sponsored by The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center

 

Conference Resources

 

Agenda

Speaker Bios

Presentations

Conference Papers

Conference Report (full report, abridged report)

 

 

Conferences
CDDRL Conferences

Troy Stoner

CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C235
Stanford CA 94305-6165

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Senior Military Fellow

Measuring NSA Surveillance

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About the Topic: What do the National Security Agency’s bulk surveillance programs reveal about Americans?  This talk presents ongoing studies of Internet and telephone metadata.  Preliminary results suggest that technical restrictions are far less effective than many observers have assumed. 

If you would like to read about the topic before the seminar, Jonathan’s work on the subject is available at http://bit.ly/1iMdkkM and http://stanford.io/1iMdjNM.

Speaker bio:

Jonathan Mayer is a Ph.D student in Computer Science and a J.D. student in Law at Stanford University. He joined CISAC as a predoctoral cybersecurity fellow in 2012, and continued as a cybersecurity fellow at CISAC for 2013-2014.

His research aims to advance difficult problems in technology policy. His recent work has focused on how to protect consumer privacy while promoting online innovation. In one line of studies, Jonathan has used web measurement to shed light on the information collected about consumers online. Another project aims to develop third-party web services that deliver functionality without tracking users.

Jonathan completed his undergraduate degree at Princeton University in 2009, with a concentration in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. 

CISAC Conference Room

Jonathan Mayer Cybersecurity Fellow, CISAC Speaker
Seminars

Didi Kuo

Encina Hall, C150
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

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Center Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
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Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.

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Brenda Jarillo Rabling

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford CA 94305-6055

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Brenda Jarillo Rabling is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Program of Poverty and Governance. She received her Ph.D. in international and comparative education from the Stanford Graduate School of Education (2013), and, graduated cum laude with a B.A. in economics from the Center for Research and Teaching of Economics (CIDE) in Mexico (2004).

Brenda’s primary fields of interest are economics of education and education policy in United States and Latin America. Her research focuses on (a) interventions to improve the educational outcomes of disadvantaged populations; (b) the impact of poverty and violence on educational outcomes (c) and issues related to young children’s health, development and learning.

Her dissertation consists of three-related research papers that investigate the role of the timing, type and quality of early childhood education programs in reducing the school readiness gap in the United States. Using a novel strategy to account for dynamic selection bias, she estimated the differential effect of the age of entry into preschool, and the effect of switching from one type of care to another on children’s cognitive and socio-behavioral outcomes. Her second paper utilizes a matching estimator approach to evaluate the effectiveness of after-school child care programs to reduce the differences in academic achievement between low-income minority children and their more affluent peers. The last paper estimates how much of the social-class gradient in cognitive and socio-behavioral outcomes is explained by socio-economic disparities in the quality of child care environments. Her dissertation work was supported by the American Educational Research Association Dissertation Grants Program and the Stanford Graduate School of Education Support Grant.

Brenda is currently working on three main projects related to violence and education in Mexico. One investigates the impact of exposure to violent crime on educational outcomes. The second is an assessment of a government-sponsored violence prevention program implemented in public schools since 2007. The third one is an evaluation of a community-based program targeting training and educational opportunities for school dropouts who are unemployed and live in areas where crime, violence and vandalism are common.

PovGov Postdoctoral Fellow, 2013-16

Technology, accountability and democracy in South Asia and beyond

Authors
Vivek Srinivasan
News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs
Technology, accountability and democracy in South Asia and beyond

Location: University of Mumbai, India

Dates: January 17-18, 2014

Over the last few years, there has been unprecedented focus on corruption and accountability across South Asia.  Accountability movements have resulted in a variety of initiatives including special monitoring bodies, transparency laws, monitoring mechanisms, judicial reforms and refining government processes.  These initiatives bring different understandings of problems and approaches, with varied strengths and weaknesses.  Despite these differences, they are increasingly converging on the use of technology to augment a growing set of accountability strategies.

The availability of new devices, the power of the Internet, the reach of mobile phones, and citizen activism give us reason to believe that the use of technology has real promise in advancing the accountability agenda. Yet the claim of technology’s promise is not without its critics. The use of technology has created new avenues for corruption despite claiming to combat it. Technologies rolled out in the name of advancing citizenship also create avenues for greater surveillance and disenfranchisement.  Many initiatives are not controversial, but their effectiveness is yet to be evaluated rigorously. Finally marginalized people, who need tools for accountability more than anyone else, have significantly lower levels of engagement with it.  The promises and problems of technology’s relationship with accountability require closer examination.

This conference proposes to bring together people who are engaged in these questions as activists, officials, academics and innovators to examine how technology is currently being used for accountability projects and to build meaningful platforms for the future. We specifically seek to bring together people with experience in accountability movements (with or without the use of technology), young innovators and researchers in order to promote rich multidisciplinary conversation and to build new collaborations.

One of the most persistent criticisms of technology for democracy projects is that they focus heavily on the tools without paying attention to the complexity of their use and the fact that accountability is a political project steeped in power relations.  In order to ensure that technical imagination goes hand in hand with a sophisticated understanding of the problems and strategies necessary to make technology a tool for progressive change, we propose to invite seasoned civil society activists and leaders from the government who have had a successful track record in managing positive change to meet individuals who are just beginning to consider technology as a response to the same problems. The conference will thus foster an exchange of ideas between innovators and experienced activists so that innovators can share their tools and experiences while also deepening their understanding of technology’s relevance and challenges for potential uses on the ground.  In turn, experienced political, social and economic leaders will gain ideas on how elements of technology can be introduced into in their work.  With this in mind, the conference format provides for opportunities to learn about technology projects, meet with platform creators, and participate in workshops to gain tools suitable for diverse campaign needs. 

The conference will be based on four broad themes: (1) Citizen activism for free and fair elections (2) Combatting “last-mile” corruption in public services (3) Gender, technology and accountability and (4) Building safeguards around India’s Aadhar project.  For further details including application, please download the call for papers here.

 

Organization:

The conference is led by the Center for South Asia and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) both at Stanford University.  It will be organized in partnership with Department of Civics and Politics, University of Mumbai and the Stanford Alumni Association of India.

 

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