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.

Dr. William J. Perry discussed game changers in energy at the "Innovations for Smart Green Cities: What's Working, What's Not, What's Next" conference. The event was hosted by the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SPRIE) at the Stanford Graduate School of Business on June 26-27, 2012. Perry is the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor (at FSI and Engineering) and Co-director of the Preventive Defense Project at CISAC, a FSI Senior Fellow and CISAC Faculty Member. 

 

A video of the talk is available on YouTube. 

William J. Perry Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor (at FSI and Engineering) and Co-director of the Preventive Defense Project at CISAC; FSI Senior Fellow; CISAC Faculty Member Speaker
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Kavita N. Ramdas, executive director of the Ripples to Waves Program on Social Entrepreneurship at the Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law, has been appointed as the Ford Foundation representative to New Delhi serving India, Nepal and Sri Lanka. In this capacity, Ramdas will be leading the foundation's grant-making efforts to support democracy and social justice in South Asia.

In August 2012, Ramdas will step down as executive director of the Program to assume leadership of the Global Practitioner Council to provide strategic direction and guidance to the program's development and selection of the Social Entrepreneurs-in-Residence at Stanford (SEERS). Deborah Rhode, the Ernest McFarland Professor of Law and director of the Stanford Center on the Legal Profession at Stanford Law School who has served as the program’s faculty primary investigator since its launch last year, will assume leadership of the program. The Program on Social Entrepreneurship congratulates Ramdas on her new position and looks forward to welcoming Rhode in her new role as the program’s faculty director.

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Note:  The RSVP deadline has been extended to Oct. 12th

Good politics does not for good economics make, especially not in a sub-optimal currency area. Ten years into the euro, the skeptics were proven right. Instead of forcing all members into fiscal discipline and domestic reform, the common currency did neither; indeed it encouraged profligacy and business-as-usual. Now, the Eurozone has become a transfer and debt union. Europe, whose growth has been slowing for 40 years, will not regain competitiveness under the new dispensation.

This seminar is part of the European and Global Economic Crisis Series.

Josef Joffe Editor of "Die Zeit" in Hamburg, Distinguished Fellow at FSI, and the Marc and Anita Abramowitz Fellow at the Hoover Institution Speaker
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Rose McDermott is a Professor of Political Science at Brown University. McDermott received her Ph.D.(Political Science) and M.A. (Experimental Social Psychology) from Stanford. McDermott has also taught at Cornell, UCSB and Harvard and has held fellowships at Harvard’s Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and Harvard’s Women and Public Policy Program. She was a 2008-2009 fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and a 2010-2011 fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.  She is the author of three books, a co-editor of two additional volumes, and author of over ninety academic articles across a wide variety of academic disciplines encompassing topics such as experimentation, identity, emotion, intelligence, decision making, and the biological and genetic bases of political behavior.   She has served on the American Political Science Association Counsel and Administrative Counsel, as well as the publications committee for APSA and the International Studies Association. She is President of the International Society of Political Psychology.  She has taught courses in undergraduate and graduate International Relations Theory, graduate and undergraduate International Security, American Foreign Policy, and War in Film and Literature. 

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Rose McDermott Professor of Political Science Speaker Brown University
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Seminar presentation on John Bender's new book, "Ends of Enlightenment."  In his book, Professor Bender explores three realms of eighteenth-century European innovation that remain active in the twenty-first century: the realist novel, philosophical thought, and the physical sciences, especially human anatomy.

Commentary will be provided by William B. Warner, Professor of English, University of California at Santa Barbara.

Books will be available for sale at this event by the Stanford Bookstore.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature, Department of English and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.

CISAC Conference Room

424 Santa Teresa Street
Humanities Center
Stanford, CA 94305-4015

(650) 723-3052 (650) 723-1895
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Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies
Professor of English
Professor of Comparative Literature
John_Bender.jpg PhD

John Bender is Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and Affiliated Faculty of the The Europe Center. His research and teaching focus on the 18th century in England and France. His special concerns include the relationship of literature to visual arts, to philosophy and science, as well as to the sociology of literature and critical theory. 

 

Bender is the author of Spenser and Literary Pictorialism (1972), Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in 18th-Century England (1987), which received the Gottschalk Prize of the American Society for 18th-Century Studies, The Culture of Diagram (2010)--as co-author with Michael Marrinan—and Ends of Enlightenment (2012).

Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
John Bender Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies and Professor of English and Comparative Literature Speaker
William B. Warner Professor of English Commentator UC Santa Barbara
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Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Barbara Walter Professor of International Relations and Pacific Studies Speaker University of California, San Diego
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Effective water management is one key element of agricultural innovation and growth. This talk: outlines evolving and changing good global practices with respect to water management and agriculture; examines developments in both water and agriculture in Africa; and suggests avenues which might be explored in improving water management and increasing agricultural productivity in Africa.


 

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 is the Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Environmental Engineering and Environmental Health at Harvard University where he directs the Harvard Water Security Initiative. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on water management and development. In 2010 he was nominated for the Joseph R. Levenson Prize for exceptional teaching of Harvard undergraduates.

Briscoe's career has focused on the issues of water, other natural resources and economic development. He has worked as an engineer in the government water agencies of South Africa and Mozambique; as an epidemiologist at the Cholera Research Center in Bangladesh; and as a professor of water resources at the University of North Carolina. In his 20-year career at the World Bank, he held high-level technical positions, including Country Director for Brazil (the World Bank’s biggest borrower). Mr. Briscoe's role in shaping the governance and strategy of the World Bank is the subject of a chapter in the definitive recent history of the Bank, Sebastian Mallaby's The World's Banker (Penguin, 2006).

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 is an Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Policy in the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She is also an affiliate of Stanford University's Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE), where she was previously a postdoctoral researcher. Jennifer is a physicist by training whose research focuses on simultaneously achieving global food security and mitigating climate change. She designs, implements, and evaluates technologies for poverty alleviation and agricultural adaptation, and she studies the links between energy poverty and food and nutrition security, the mechanisms by which energy services can help alleviate poverty, and the environmental impacts of food production and consumption. Much of Jennifer's current research focuses on the developing world.

Bechtel Conference Center

John Briscoe Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Environmental Engineering Speaker Harvard University
Jennifer Burney Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Policy in the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies Commentator University of California, San Diego
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The graduating class at Stanford University has selected Larry Diamond as the 2012 Class Day speaker. A four-decade long tradition, the class day lecture is delivered by a well-liked Stanford faculty member who addresses the graduating class together with their friends and family, one last time. The class day lecture will be held on Saturday, June 16.

Maples Pavilion

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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Larry Diamond Director Speaker Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
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Professor Jang-Jip Choi argues that South Korean politics are characterized by extreme uncertainty and that this is exemplified by the campaign for the presidential election on December 19. Succeeding generations of politicians have failed to organize parties on a new social basis, to represent the interests and passions of the voters, or to develop their own competence in dealing with urgent social and economic problems. Professor Choi seeks to explain this phenomenon from historical and structural perspectives.

Specializing in the contemporary political history of Korea, the theory of democracy, comparative politics and labor politics, Professor Choi is the author of numerous books, scholarly articles and political commentaries on Korean politics, including Democracy After Democratization: The Korean Experience (forthcoming), From Minjung to Citizens (2008), and Which Democracy? (2007). He holds a BA from Korea University, and an MA and a PhD, both in political science, from the University of Chicago, and was a professor in the department of political science at Korea University until his retirement in 2008.

Philippines Conference Room

Jang-Jip Choi Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Korea University Speaker
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