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.
This workshop is part of the Program on Human Rights Collaboratory: Environmental Humanities Series, an interdisciplinary investigation of human rights in the humanities. The Series is funded under the Stanford Presidential Fund for Innovation in International Studies as the third in a sequence of pursuing peace and security, improving governance and advancing well-being.
Y2E2, Room 101
Walter H. Shorenstein
Asia-Pacific Research Center
616 Serra St C302-23
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Joseph Chinyong Liow is a professor of comparative and international politics and an associate dean at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
His research interests encompass Muslim politics in Southeast Asia and the international politics of the Asia-Pacific region. During his time at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Liow will conduct research and writing on social movement theory and armed resistance in Southeast Asia, as well as a dictionary of modern politics of Southeast Asia.
Liow is the author of Islam, Reform, and Education in Southern Thailand: Tradition and Transformation (2009); Piety and Politics: Islamism in Contemporary Malaysia (2009); and the Politics of Indonesia-Malaysia Relations: One Kin, Two Nations (2005). He is also editor of Islam in Southeast Asia, Four Volumes (2010); co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Asian Security Studies (2010); and co-author of Confronting Ghosts: Unpacking Southern Thailand’s Shapeless Insurgency (2010) and the East Asia Summit and Regional Security (2010). Liow is a co-editor of the Asian Security Book Series at Routledge, sits on the editorial board of South East Asia Research, and serves on the editorial team of Asian Security.
Liow holds a PhD in international relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science, an MSc in strategic studies from the Nanyang Technological University, and a BA (Hons) in political science from the University of Madison-Wisconsin.
David Lobell leads a 'Classes Without Quizzes' talk as part of Stanford Homecoming. Lobell discusses the latest trends in global food prices and hunger, explains how they are linked, and discusses some of the key factors to look for in understanding future developments in this area.
Bechtel Conference Center
Energy and Environment Building
473 Via Ortega
Stanford CA 94305
David Lobell is the Benjamin M. Page Professor at Stanford University in the Department of Earth System Science and the Gloria and Richard Kushel Director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment. He is also the William Wrigley Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy and Research (SIEPR).
Lobell's research focuses on agriculture and food security, specifically on generating and using unique datasets to study rural areas throughout the world. His early research focused on climate change risks and adaptations in cropping systems, and he served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report as lead author for the food chapter and core writing team member for the Summary for Policymakers. More recent work has developed new techniques to measure progress on sustainable development goals and study the impacts of climate-smart practices in agriculture. His work has been recognized with various awards, including the Macelwane Medal from the American Geophysical Union (2010), a Macarthur Fellowship (2013), the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences (2022) and election to the National Academy of Sciences (2023).
Prior to his Stanford appointment, Lobell was a Lawrence Post-doctoral Fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He holds a PhD in Geological and Environmental Sciences from Stanford University and a Sc.B. in Applied Mathematics from Brown University.
In their new book, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, Visiting Scholar Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan argue that compared to violent insurgency, nonviolent resistance builds longer-lasting and more peaceful democracies.
Winner of the 2011 Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Journalism, “Presumed Guilty” follows the story of two young lawyers and their struggle to free Toño Zúñiga, a young man from Mexico City wrongfully sentenced to 20 years in prison. Filmmakers Roberto Hernández and Layda Negrete expose the injustices of the Mexican legal system.
After the film, join Professors Beatriz Magaloni and Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar for a discussion about the Mexican justice system with director Roberto Hernández.
“The film puts Mexico’s secretive courts on full display for the first time.” – The New York Times
Light refreshments served.
CISAC Conference Room
Dept. of Political Science
Encina Hall, Room 436
Stanford University,
Stanford, CA
Beatriz Magaloni Magaloni is the Graham Stuart Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science. Magaloni is also a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, where she holds affiliations with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She is also a Stanford’s King Center for Global Development faculty affiliate. Magaloni has taught at Stanford University for over two decades.
She leads the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (Povgov). Founded by Magaloni in 2010, Povgov is one of Stanford University’s leading impact-driven knowledge production laboratories in the social sciences. Under her leadership, Povgov has innovated and advanced a host of cutting-edge research agendas to reduce violence and poverty and promote peace, security, and human rights.
Magaloni’s work has contributed to the study of authoritarian politics, poverty alleviation, indigenous governance, and, more recently, violence, crime, security institutions, and human rights. Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006) is widely recognized as a seminal study in the field of comparative politics. It received the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations, as well as the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section. Her second book The Politics of Poverty Relief: Strategies of Vote Buying and Social Policies in Mexico (with Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estevez) (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores how politics shapes poverty alleviation.
Magaloni’s work was published in leading journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Criminology & Public Policy, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, Latin American Research Review, and others.
Magaloni received wide international acclaim for identifying innovative solutions for salient societal problems through impact-driven research. In 2023, she was named winner of the world-renowned Stockholm Prize in Criminology, considered an equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of criminology. The award recognized her extensive research on crime, policing, and human rights in Mexico and Brazil. Magaloni’s research production in this area was also recognized by the American Political Science Association, which named her recipient of the 2021 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review, the leading journal in the discipline.
She received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University and holds a law degree from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.
This paper was prepared for Stanford University’s Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series, hosted by the Center on Food Security and the Environment, and supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Relative to other regions of the world, most African economies are still heavily reliant on agriculture as a source of income and employment. And with more than 70 percent of the continent’s poor residing in rural areas, the production and productivity performance of African agriculture is pivotal to overall economic growth and the well-being of the poorest people in the region. After a dismal decade of output growth in the 1970s, the rate of aggregate agricultural output growth picked up for each of the subsequent three decades, and averaged 2.83 percent per year during the 2000s. With population growing at still record rates by world standards, per capita output grew much more slowly, just 0.36 percent per year during the past decade.
The productivity evidence is mixed and difficult to summarize. The rate of African crop yield growth (at least for the four crops given closer attention in this paper: corn, wheat, rice and soybean) is generally slower than elsewhere in the world, and in keeping with patterns seen elsewhere there has been a slowdown in the pace of average crop yield growth in Africa since around 1990. African land and labor productivity levels also generally lag those found elsewhere in the world, although aggregate land productivity in Africa outperformed that of Australia and New Zealand, another region of the world with challenging agricultural soils and heavy reliance on erratic (and often agriculturally marginal) weather. The reported rates of growth in multi-factor productivity (MFP) for African agriculture are also low by world standards, but the body of available evidence suggests that African MFP growth rates picked up in recent years. Unfortunately, the lack of reliable data and differences in the analytical details between the available studies makes it hard to reconcile the evidence and reach robust conclusions about MFP performance throughout sub-Saharan Africa.
Productivity levels and growth rates are affected by a host of factors, not least the technologies linking inputs to outputs and, by implication, the amount, nature and effectiveness of the innovative effort that develops and deploys these technologies. Although overall investments in African public agricultural research and development (R&D) have increased during the past decade or so, the growth in spending is not especially widespread and dominated by growth in just a few countries. Nigeria and Ethiopia account for half the region’s increase in agricultural R&D spending from 2000-2005—the latest year for which data are presently available. The intensity of public investment (i.e., agricultural R&D spending relative to the value of agricultural output) has increased as well. However, during the 2000-2005 period Africa spent just $0.54 on public research for every $100 of agricultural output, almost half the corresponding rest-of-world intensity ($1.05) and one-fifth of the rich country average ($2.70). Fragmented and typically small research agencies, and unstable funding streams still bedevil African agricultural research endeavors and undermine efficiencies in agricultural research that are intrinsically long-term in nature. Turning around these research realties in a meaningful and sustained fashion will be critical to realizing the long-term growth in African agriculture productivity that will be required to grow that sector in particular and the region’s economies more generally.
Indonesia is currently the world’s top palm oil producer. Since the 1980s total land area planted to palm oil has increased by over 2,100 percent growing to 4.6 million hectares – the equivalent of six Yosemite National Parks. Plantation growth has predominately occurred on deforested native rainforest with major implications for global carbon emissions and biodiversity.
Trade-offs between food and biofuels:
Biomass supply and demand:
Biofuels, land-use, and economic transition:
Biofuels, food prices, and the poor:
Climate and crops, diversification and irrigation:
