International Development

FSI researchers consider international development from a variety of angles. They analyze ideas such as how public action and good governance are cornerstones of economic prosperity in Mexico and how investments in high school education will improve China’s economy.

They are looking at novel technological interventions to improve rural livelihoods, like the development implications of solar power-generated crop growing in Northern Benin.

FSI academics also assess which political processes yield better access to public services, particularly in developing countries. With a focus on health care, researchers have studied the political incentives to embrace UNICEF’s child survival efforts and how a well-run anti-alcohol policy in Russia affected mortality rates.

FSI’s work on international development also includes training the next generation of leaders through pre- and post-doctoral fellowships as well as the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program.

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Roland Hsu
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In the midst of the “Arab Spring”, and President Obama’s push for Palestinian-Israeli peace, The Europe Center (TEC) and the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute hosted a May 18-19 conference on “Democracy in Adversity and Diversity” in Jerusalem, the first of a sequence of conferences in TEC’s collaborative project on Reconciliation.

The conference gathered leading analysts of democratization and civil conflict, including FSI’s Francis Fukuyama, Stephen D. Krasner, and Kathryn Stoner.  During two days of conference sessions, scholars and analysts from Europe, the United States, and the Middle East compared historical and contemporary cross-border and civil society cleavages with the goal to promote informed policy.

Co-organizers Kathryn Stoner-Weiss (FSI) and Michael Karayanni (The Hebrew University) convened colleagues to address policy challenges including:

  • What has been and what should be democracy?
  • How do we translate democratic theory into practical governance?
  • How do we manage diversity in contemporary democracies?
  • What is the relationship between democracy and development?
  • How do we anticipate and respond to transitions and movements towards democracy?

Experts in liberal, secular, and fundamentalist political thought in Arab, Palestinian, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim policies proposed answers and areas for further study.  Insights included the following:

  • European and Israeli voters are increasingly electing far right nationalists, while Arab populations are calling for democracy. 
  • The deepest rifts are not between but within societies.  In Europe, Israel, and in the Hamas-Fatah Palestinian National Authority, far-right populist, ultra-orthodox, and fundamentalist parties appeal to anti-democratic world-views.  The result is hardening rhetoric that damages civil society and overwhelms the capacity for reasoned debate and resolution. Leaders compete with the minority far-right and in so doing compete for the narrow populist constituency rather than focusing on the greater interest of society.

Next steps include publications, scholar exchange, and a second international conference, “History and Memory: Global and Local Dimensions” (Stanford 2012), which aims to examine the interplay between history and memory, and how to overcome foundational narratives without requiring amnesia.

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Europe Center scholar Dr. Roland Benedikter (47), has been honored with the 2012 Klaus Reichert Award for Medical Philosophy. This award, given by the Center for Medical Philosophy in Karlsruhe, Germany, was bestowed on Benedikter in recognition of his outstanding merits for medical ethics, for advancing the debate on avant-garde issues at the interplay between contemporary politics, sociology, ethics and medicine, and for his efforts to re-humanize the contemporary thought and international debate about the future of the human being in times of "transhumanism" and "hyper-technologization". The award is the most highly regarded academic award of this genre in Germany.

The award ceremony will be held on October 6, 2012 in Karlsruhe. In his award speech "What future for the human being: Humanism or Transhumanism? Aspects at the interplay between technology, politics and ethics", Benedikter will give an overview of the current "global systemic shift", its trend towards a "neuromorphosis" of global culture (two notions co-coined by him) and the future of the human being in the age of "transhumanism" and invasive new technologies. Benedikter will in particular elucidate the contemporary relation between macro-philosophical trends that will dominate the years ahead in the advanced international thought on the interplay between medicine and society.

Benedikter shares the award with his long time collaborator Prof. James Giordano, director of the Center on Neurotechnology at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, Washington DC.

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David Lobell
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Originally appeared in The Chicago Council's Global Agricultural Development Initiative Global Food For Thought blog.


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For all of the talk about the need to adapt to climate change, we still know fairly little about two basic questions: what works best, and how much can adaptation deliver? It‘s time to learn quickly.

Why don’t we know more? It would be easy to blame our ignorance on complacency. There is a tendency to marvel at the progress made in agriculture in the past 50 years, and assume it can handle anything. For example, the USDA declared in the early 1970s that new technologies meant “man has reduced variation in yields in both good and bad weather.” This optimism quietly faded after a series of bad harvests in the late 1970’s and 1980’s, including the big drought of 1988. People realized that a period of unusually benign weather, and not the technological gains themselves, had limited volatility during the middle of the 20th century.

It is also tempting to blame ignorance on inexperience. After all, many people continue to view climate change as something to deal with in the future. But the evidence is clear that climate has already been changing over the past 30 years in most agricultural areas, and farmers are doubtlessly trying to adapt. Up until now, the United States was an exception to that trend. But the 2012 drought has changed that, and projections indicate that years like this will be increasingly common in the coming decades.

With widespread evidence for climate change and its impacts, complacency and inexperience should give way to rigorous evaluations of what has happened. For example, why was US agriculture not better prepared for the 2012 drought? And did anything work well that can be scaled up?

A lot has changed in US agriculture since the 1988 drought, and many of the changes were textbook examples of what should help to reduce impacts of hot summers. Farmers now sow corn and soybeans more than a week earlier on average, and use longer maturing varieties than in 1988. Advances in cold tolerance along with spring warming trends allowed corn to expand in northern states where temperatures are cooler. For example, North and South Dakota increased corn area by more than 35% (nearly 2.5 million acres) just since 2009. Carbon dioxide levels, which improve crop water use efficiency, have increased by more than 10% since 1988. And farmers have begun to grow drought tolerant seeds that were unavailable in 1988.

Yet when the 2012 drought arrived, with fairly similar characteristics to 1988, impacts on crop yields were roughly the same. Corn yields are expected to be about 25% below trend, close to the 28% drop in 1988.

What can we learn from this experience? It is too early to say anything definitive, but two explanations seem plausible. First, it may be that some of the above changes were truly beneficial, but were counteracted by other changes making agriculture more, not less, sensitive to weather. For example, breeding progress in corn has generally been faster for good conditions than bad. As farmers become even better at eliminating yield losses from pests, nutrient stress, and other factors, the benefits of having favorable rainfall and temperature become that much greater, and the relative damages of not having them become that much worse.

A second possibility, of course, is that the adaptive changes in agriculture simply did not help much in dealing with adverse weather. For example, migrating corn northward may help, but the vast majority of corn production remains where it has been for decades, so the quantitative effect is small.

Hopefully researchers will quickly distinguish between these and other explanations, and the lessons can help guide efforts to further adapt. But any explanation will likely imply that there are limits to how much adaptation can reduce impacts of climate change. This fact does not diminish the urgency and importance of efforts to adapt to climate variability and change throughout the world. But it is a reminder that greenhouse gas mitigation is pivotal in any strategy to reduce impacts of climate change. Adaptation can only do so much.

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Lobell Anne Schnoebelen 9 12 cropped
Anne Schnoebelen
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Industrial Control Systems (ICSs) are used throughout the industrial infrastructure and military applications. These systems are designed to be highly reliable and safe, but were not designed to be cyber secure. Moreover, many of these systems do not even have cyber logging or forensics. Consequently, these systems, which constitute the “soft underbelly” of the American economy and defense, can enable a “cyber Pearl Harbor” to occur without having the capability of even knowing the impacts were cyber-induced. Stuxnet and Aurora have demonstrated that cyber can be used as a weapon to damage or destroy engineering equipment and systems.

To date, there have been more than 225 actual control system cyber incidents worldwide affecting electric power, water, chemicals, pipelines, manufacturing, mass transit, and even aircraft. Most of the incidents have been unintentional. Selected unintentional incidents will be addressed at the ICS Cyber Security Conference (http://www.icscybersecurityconference.com/). However, there have been a number of targeted cyber attacks. The Stanford presentation will focus on Stuxnet and Aurora. It will address the lack of air-gaps, insecureable legacy ICSs, lack of cyber forensics, and cultural issues between IT and Operations that can enable these attacks to occur and evade detection.


Joseph Weiss is an industry expert on control systems and electronic security of control systems, with more than 35 years of experience in the energy industry. Mr. Weiss spent more than 14 years at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) where he led a variety of programs including the Nuclear Plant Instrumentation and Diagnostics Program, the Fossil Plant Instrumentation & Controls Program, the Y2K Embedded Systems Program and, the cyber security for digital control systems. As Technical Manager, Enterprise Infrastructure Security (EIS) Program, he provided technical and outreach leadership for the energy industry's critical infrastructure protection (CIP) program. He was responsible for developing many utility industry security primers and implementation guidelines. He was also the EPRI Exploratory Research lead on instrumentation, controls, and communications.

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Joseph Weiss Consultant Speaker Applied Control Solutions
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Like many distributed systems, both natural and engineered, ant colonies operate without any central control. No ant can assess what needs to be done. Each ant responds to its interactions with other ants nearby and in the aggregate, these dynamical networks of interaction regulate colony behavior. Ecological studies show how collective organization evolves to respond to local, changing conditions. Harvester ant colonies living in the desert in Arizona use a simple positive feedback system, without any spatial information, to adjust foraging activity to the food supply. The rate at which foragers return to the nest with food determines the rate at which outgoing foragers leave the nest to search for more food.Turtle ant colonies living in the tropical forest in Mexico use interactions at temporary nest sites to regulate the shape and stability of the circuit of ants travelling through the trees. The talk will discuss models based on analogies between these systems and other dynamical networks, including the internet and brains. Exploring these analogies helps to elucidate how collective behavior evolves, shaping distributed algorithms in relation to changing environments.


Deborah M Gordon is a Professor in the Department of Biology at Stanford. She studies the evolution of collective organization by investigating the ecology and behavior of ant colonies. Her work includes the long-term demography and behavior of harvester ant colonies in Arizona; the factors that determine the spread of the invasive Argentine ant in northern California; and the ecology of ant-plant mutualisms in tropical forests in Central America. She is the author of two books, Ants at Work (2000) and Ant Encounters:Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior (2010). She has been awarded fellowships from Guggenheim and the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences. She is interested in analogies between ant colonies and other distributed networks such as brains, the immune system, the internet, and distributed robotic systems.

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Deborah M. Gordon Professor of Biology Speaker Stanford University
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This study quantifies worldwide health effects of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident on 11 March 2011. Effects are quantified with a 3-D global atmospheric model driven by emission estimates and evaluated against daily worldwide Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) measurements and observed deposition rates. Inhalation exposure, ground-level external exposure, and atmospheric external exposure pathways of radioactive iodine-131, cesium-137, and cesium-134 released from Fukushima are accounted for using a linear no-threshold (LNT) model of human exposure. Exposure due to ingestion of contaminated food and water is estimated by extrapolation. We estimate an additional 130 (15–1100) cancer-related mortalities and 180 (24–1800) cancer-related morbidities incorporating uncertainties associated with the exposure–dose and dose–response models used in the study. Sensitivities to emission rates, gas to particulate I-131 partitioning, and the mandatory evacuation radius around the plant may increase upper bound mortalities and morbidities to 1300 and 2500, respectively. Radiation exposure to workers at the plant is projected to result in 2 to 12 morbidities. An additional 600 mortalities have been reported due to mandatory evacuations. A hypothetical accident at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant in California, USA with identical emissions to Fukushima may cause 25% more mortalities than Fukushima despite California having one fourth the local population density, due to differing meteorological conditions.


Mark Z. Jacobson is Director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Woods Institute for the Environment and Senior Fellow of the Precourt Institute for Energy. He received a B.S. in Civil Engineering with distinction, an A.B. in Economics with distinction, and an M.S. in Environmental Engineering from Stanford University, in 1988. He received an M.S. in Atmospheric Sciences in 1991 and a PhD in Atmospheric Sciences in 1994 from UCLA. He has been on the faculty at Stanford since 1994. His work relates to the development and application of numerical models to understand better the effects of energy systems and vehicles on climate and air pollution and the analysis of renewable energy resources. He has published two textbooks of two editions each and ~130 peer-reviewed scientific journal articles. He received the 2005 American Meteorological Society Henry G. Houghton Award for “significant contributions to modeling aerosol chemistry and to understanding the role of soot and other carbon particles on climate.” He has served on the Energy Efficiency and Renewables Advisory Committee to the U.S. Secretary of Energy.

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Mark Jacobson Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Speaker Stanford University
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Tavneet Suri is a development economist, with a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Broadly, she studies the evolution of markets and various market failures in these economies. In particular, her main areas of focus are agriculture and formal and informal financial access. For example, she has worked on the adoption of seed technologies in Kenya and the extent of informal risk pooling mechanisms in rural Kenya. Her ongoing research includes understanding the adoption and impact of mobile money (M-PESA) in Kenya; the role of infrastructure in agricultural markets in Sierra Leone; the diffusion of improved coffee farming practices through social networks in Rwanda; the role of different types of formal and informal collateral in credit markets for assets in Kenya. She regularly spends time in the field, managing her various research projects and data collection activities.

Tavneet is a Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER, an Affiliate of BREAD, J-PAL and CEPR, and Co-Director of Agriculture Research Program at the International Growth Center.

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Tavneet Suri Assistant Professor of Applied Economics Speaker MIT
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Abstract
The so-called "Arab Spring" saw politically and economically disenfranchised citizens take advantage of new tools such as social media and smartphones to break the state’s monopoly on information, and mobilize mass protest. While governments were quick to employ familiar, time-tested mechanisms of repression against demonstrators in the streets and main squares, they fumbled at first in controlling this new digital dissent.  

Against an increasingly security-aware online community, the traditional tools
of blocking, filtering, and wiretapping had become less effective. Nervous regimes turned to the largely unregulated $5 billion a year industry in Internet surveillance tools. Once the realm of the black market and intelligence agencies, the latest computer spyware is now sold at trade shows for dictator pocket change.

Activists and journalists soon found themselves the target of e-mails promising exclusive or scandalous information.  We analyzed messages forwarded to us by suspicious users, and found spyware products apparently from Gamma International and Hacking Team, recognized players in the surveillance industry.  For the first time, we analyzed their products, chasing internet addresses and shell corporations across the globe.  As we published our findings, servers disappeared, and spyware was rewritten.

In this talk, we detail the cat and mouse game between authoritarian regimes and dissidents, as well as our ongoing efforts to map out the relationship between surveillance software companies and governments.


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Morgan Marquis-Boire works as a Security Engineer at Google specializing in Incident Response, Forensics and Malware Analysis. He is a security researcher and Technical Advisor at the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto. Recently, he has been working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation on issues surrounding dissident suppression in Syria.

 


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Bill Marczak is a Computer Science PhD student at UC Berkeley working on developing new languages, abstractions, and tools for distributed
programming.  Bill is also a founding member of Bahrain Watch, a
monitoring and advocacy group that seeks to promote effective,
accountable, and transparent governance in Bahrain through research and evidence-based activism.

  

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Bill Marczak Computer Science, PhD Student Speaker UC Berkeley
Morgan Marquis-Boire Security Engineer Speaker Google
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Abstract
The manifestations of 'open' are permeating the society enabled by the rise of participatory culture and improved communication technologies. In her research, Tanja Aitamurto examines the impact of openness on traditionally closed processes such as journalism, policy-making and design. Aitamurto draws on several case studies, in which collective intelligence is harnessed through crowdsourcing, open innovation and co-creation. Her work is based on data from 150 in-depth interviews and about 8,000 data points recorded by netnography. Aitamurto's research is situated in social sciences, informed by organization studies and management science and engineering. She finds that the 'open' challenges the incumbent power structures when participatory mechanisms become a means to practice social control.

Tanja Aitamurto is a visiting researcher at the Program on Liberation Technology at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford. In her PhD project she examines how collective intelligence, whether harvested by crowdsourcing, co-creation or open innovation, impacts incumbent processes in journalism, public policy making and design process. Her work has been published in several academic publications, such as the New Media and Society. Related to her studies, she advises the Government and the Parliament of Finland about Open Government principles, for example about how open data and crowdsourcing can serve democratic processes.

Aitamurto has previously studied at the Center for Design Research and at the Innovation Journalism Program at Stanford. She is a PhD Student at the Center for Journalism, Media and Communication Research at Tampere University in Finland, and she holds a Master’s Degree in Public Policy, and a Master of Arts in Humanities. Prior to returning to academia, she made a career in journalism in Finland specializing in foreign affairs, doing reporting in countries such as Afghanistan, Angola and Uganda. She has also taught journalism at the University of Zambia, in Lusaka, and worked at the Namibia Press Agency, Windhoek. More about Tanja’s work at www.tanjaaitamurto.com and on Twitter @tanjaaita.

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Tanja Aitamurto Visiting Researcher, Program on Liberation Technology, CDDRL Speaker Stanford University
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Abstract:
For almost a decade, network neutrality has been among the most contentious and high-profile subjects of debate in Internet policy.  This debate has taken place in government agencies, legislatures, courts, and the public square, in countries around the world. In the U.S., both sides assume the mantle of free expression. Advocates of network neutrality argue that adopting a rule to keep networks "neutral"--forbidding ISPs from discriminating against or blocking particular sites or software--would ensure that anyone can speak and listen to anyone else, without permission, and that any developer can create new speech-technologies like Blogger, Twitter, and Tumblr. Those opposed to network neutrality--primarily ISPs like cable and phone companies--argue that government involvement in the decisions of ISPs abridges their First Amendment rights. They assert a right to "edit" the Internet like a newspaper or cable company edits and curates articles and channels. They also argue that, under standard First Amendment doctrine, network neutrality is presumptively unconstitutional--an argument many academics seem to believe. 

The FCC's network neutrality rule, adopted in December 2010, is currently on appeal. Four different amicus briefs, from scholars, former government officials, and others have addressed the First Amendment question. 

What can the network neutrality debate tell us about freedom of speech, and translating Constitutional provisions, in the Internet Age?

Marvin Ammori heads a small law firm that advises Silicon Valley companies on public policy issues and is also a Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation and a Visiting Scholar at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet & Society, writing about the U.S. First Amendment. He was previously the head lawyer of an advocacy group, Free Press, where he worked primarily on network neutrality and open Internet issues and handled the Comcast/BitTorrent case. His work for several companies in their opposition to SOPA and PIPA earned him recognition by Fast Company magazine as one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business in 2012

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Marvin Ammori Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow, New America Foundation and Counsel Speaker Ammori Group Law Firm
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