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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Is China's Soft Power a Threat? Reconceptualizing Capabilities and Foreign Policy
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The concept of "soft power" is central for the multi-dimensional rise of China as well as the evolving global strategy of the United States. Beijing is increasingly concerned with projecting soft power to neutralize perceptions of China as a threat while Chinese global influence grows. Washington, meanwhile, looks to employ soft power in remaking its post-Iraq international image, countering terrorist ideological extremism, and attracting the cooperation of international partners to deal with global challenges.
This seminar will address several key questions about soft power:
- What are the different implications when governments use "hard power" in "soft" ways versus when they try to use "soft power" in "hard" ways?
- How is soft power understood and operationalized differently in China than in the United States?
- What are the different visions for projecting soft power among various political actors in China?
- Can soft power be threatening? How can we disentangle capabilities and policies that may be threatening from those that are attractive to other states and encourage cooperation?
About the speakers
Qinghong Wang is currently coordinating the Education Exchange Program for the East-West Center in Honolulu. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2010. His dissertation is entitled, Reinventing Democracy through Confucianism: Representation, Application and Reorientation of Western Transnational Nonprofit Organizations (WTNPOs) in Post-Mao China. Dr. Wang earned his MA in Asian studies from the University of Hawaii in 2003 and his BA in Chinese language and literature from Peking (Beijing) University in 1999. Dr. Wang is originally from Beijing. He was the Lloyd (Joe) R. and Lilian Vasey Fellow with the Pacific Forum at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) from 2006 to 2007, and has since remained an adjunct fellow with the Forum. His research focuses on the development of civil society in China, U.S.-China relations, traditional and nontraditional security issues in the Asia Pacific, and comparative politics and philosophies of East and West.Image
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With regional perspective commentary by:
Donald Emmerson, Director, Southeast Asia Forum, Shorenstein APARC
Daniel Sneider, Associate Director for Research, Shorenstein APARC
David Straub, Associate Director, Korean Studies Program, Shorenstein APARC
Philippines Conference Room
Seminars
Images Against Words: German and Soviet Engagements of the Other in World War II (1941-1943)
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This talk presents the prolonged deadly encounter between the Germans and Soviets in World War II as a clash between two different interpretive templates. In engaging the Soviet enemy, Nazi German leaders and soldiers employed visual frames of analysis, centering on physiognomy and racial makeup. As they fought back, the Soviets assessed the German invaders through a palpably textual register, focusing on their psychology and political consciousness. The talk shows how these templates worked in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and how they collided in the course of the war.
Talk Synopsis:
In this seminar Jochen Hellbeck explains the German-Soviet war as having been a battle of "images against words," a term that reflects both a clash of wartime ideologies and the different choices of media used to express these ideologies. Germany, Hellbeck explains, relied heavily on visual media, using videos and photos as propaganda, while the Soviets used written materials to inspire their soldiers and citizens and to demoralize Germans. Hellbeck focuses on the battle of Stalingrad, which involved a long standoff and extended exposure between the two sides.
The Germans used multimedia, as well as strong visual imagery in written materials, to portray the battle as a conquest of an inferior race and a vast landscape available for the taking. A compilation of German soldiers' reports from the Eastern front in July 1941, and the 1942 war diary of a German journalist embedded with troops in Stalingrad, use descriptive imagery to paint Soviets as mute and beastly and Germans as war heroes full of vitality. Letters from German officials employed vivid language of the landscape, with repeated references to art as representations of German culture and greatness. Wartime photography by German soldiers, many of whom were amateur photographers, was common. The German use of visual media is exemplified by "Soviet Paradise," a 1942 short film made to discredit the Soviet Union's campaign of print propaganda. The film, which employed sophisticated cinematography techniques and very little commentary, was made into an exhibit in Berlin during the summer of 1942 and was visited by 1 million people.
In contrast, the Soviets did not come close to the amount of investment the Germans made in wartime multimedia. Soviet soldiers were forbidden from keeping photos, and only officers could occasionally take them, in the rare event they had access to cameras. Instead, Hellbeck finds ample written records of the Soviet wartime experience. The Soviet military leadership commissioned a war history and invested heavily in the work of Soviet writers and historians, rather than photographers or film crews, to document events on the front lines.
Hellbeck’s presentation also includes analysis of the war records of prominent military personnel on both sides, as well as a review of the sources he used in his research, and his perceptions of how the Germans and Soviets interpreted each other’s wartime records. The next step in Hellbeck's research project will involve comparing techniques used in German and Soviet news film chronicles.
A discussion period following the talk addressed such questions as: did Germans and Soviets employ the same strategies in their military engagements with other countries? Why is there so much portrayal of Soviet POWS in Germany, and so little of German POWs in the Soviet Union? How was the defeat at Stalingrad represented by the Germans and by the Soviets? How did the strategies resonant with the respective sides?
About the Speaker:
Jochen Hellbeck is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Rutgers University. He is the author of Revolution On My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Harvard, 2006), and is currently writing a book about the clash and the entanglements of Germans and Soviets in the battle of Stalingrad.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Jochen Hellbeck
Associate Professor, History
Speaker
Rutgers University
Seminars
Climate trend and global crop production since 1980
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One way of understanding how climate change is likely to affect global food production and food security is to better understand the recent past. That is, how have changes al-ready influenced agricultural activities and production? For example, considerable debate has taken place on whether future impacts in agriculture will be driven mainly by rising temperatures, or if instead precipitation changes are the main concern. The answer to this would influence strategies to adapt, such as investing in heat tolerance versus waiting for better rainfall projections. To inform questions such as these, we analyzed historical weather and crop data throughout the world over the past 30 years. From this anal-ysis, we draw several conclusions that are relevant to policy makers.
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Climate Trends and Global Crop Production Since 1980
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Efforts to anticipate how climate change will affect future food availability can benefit from understanding the impacts of changes to date. Here we show that in the cropping regions and growing seasons of most countries, with the important exception of the United States, temperature trends for 1980-2008 exceeded one standard deviation of historic year-to-year variability. Models that link yields of the four largest commodity crops to weather indicate that global maize and wheat production declined by 3.8% and 5.5%, respectively, compared to a counter-factual without climate trends. For soybeans and rice, winners and losers largely balanced out. Climate trends were large enough in some countries to offset a significant portion of the increases in average yields 16 that arose from technology, CO2 fertilization, and other factors.
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Science
Internal and External Innovation Ecosystems in China 2.0
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About the seminar
Strategic value creation networks have become critically important in technology development and economic growth; co-creation relies the relationship infrastructure of people, organizations and policies. These complex intangible relationship assets can be observed through network analysis of small, medium and large enterprises. By identifying relationships through which information and financial resources flow, visual insights toward a shared vision can be created and strategic network orchestration can be implemented. Using social network analysis, these relationship patterns can reveal competitive forces, gatekeepers and collaboration opportunities - within and across sectors - in internal and external innovation ecosystems around the world, including China 2.0.
Dr. Russell's presentation is available here.
About the speaker
Martha G. Russell is a senior research scholar at the Human Sciences Technology Advanced Research Institute and associate director of Media X at Stanford University, a membership-based, interdisciplinary research catalyst focused on people, media, technology, and innovation.
Dr. Russell’s background spans a range of business development, innovation, and technology-transfer initiatives in information sciences, communications, and microelectronics at the University of Minnesota, the University of Texas at Austin, and Stanford University. She collaborates with Stanford’s Innovation Ecosystems Network and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Interactive Advertising, the Journal of Electronics, and Technology Forecasting and Social Change.
Philippines Conference Room
Martha G. Russell
Associate Director
Speaker
Media X at Stanford University
Seminars
Announcing the 2011-12 pre and post-doctoral fellows
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Each year, CDDRL awards fellowships to four outstanding pre and post-doctoral students who are in the write-up stage or recent graduates from doctoral programs examining the fields of democracy, development, and the rule of law. Fellows spend the academic year at the Center completing their projects, participating in seminars, and interacting with the resident faculty and research staff.
The selection process was extremely competitive this year, as the Center received 95 applications to the program and awarded four fellowships to scholars whose research demonstrated significant depth and alignment with the mission and research programming at the Center. The scholarly community at CDDRL will be enriched and enhanced by the addition of two pre-doctoral and two post-doctoral scholars hailing from leading graduate programs in the United States. Fellows will be arriving in September to begin the nine month fellowship.
Please join CDDRL in welcoming:
Michael Albertus
Post-doctoral Fellow
Stanford University
Ph.D. In Political Science, expected June 2011
Research
Interests: Political Regimes,
Democratization, Autocratic Survival, Wealth Redistribution, Economic
Inequality, Clientelism
Dissertation: "Political Regimes and
Redistribution"
Eric Kramon
Pre-doctoral Fellow
University of California Los Angeles
Ph.D. In Political Science, expected June 2012
Research
Interests: Clientelism,
Distributive Politics, Democratization, Politics and Health, Political Economy
of Development, Natural Resource Politics, African Politics, Experimental
Methods
Dissertation:
"Clientelism, Vote Buying and Democracy in Africa"
Reo Matsuzaki
Post-doctoral Fellow
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Ph.D. In Political Science, expected June 2011
Research
Interests: Civil War and
Post-Conflict Reconstruction, Ethnic and Identity Politics,
Comparative-Historical Analysis of Governance Institutions, East Asia
Dissertation: "Institutions by Imposition:
Colonial Lessons for Contemporary State- Building"
Alexander Ruiz Euler
Pre-doctoral Fellow
University of California San Diego
Ph.D. In Political Science, expected September 2013
Research
Interests: Inequality, Poverty,
Democratization, Public Goods
Dissertation: "The Effects of Income Inequality
in the Provision of Public Goods: The Case of Mexico"
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Assisting the escape from persistent ultra-poverty in rural Africa
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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.
Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is home to two-thirds of the world’s ultra-poor today. This paper offers current thinking on the structural causes of the spatially concentrated, persistent ultra-poverty that has plagued Africa for a generation and some key entry points for facilitating Africans’ escape from persistent ultra-poverty.
The increased recognition of persistent ultra-poverty has rekindled long-dormant interest in poverty traps. The essence of a poverty trap is that there exists one or more low equilibrium level(s) of well-being in which people appear caught unnecessarily. Small adjustments fail to move people out of those equilibria sustainably. Rather, systems must change, major positive shocks must occur, or both. And in the absence of systemic change, recurring adverse shocks only drive more people into the trap.
The ultra-poverty trap that characterizes much of rural SSA today is intimately caught up with (i) the bidirectional interrelationship among hunger, ill-health, low productivity, weak institutions and natural resources degradation, all of which become manifest in low incomes, (ii) poor initial conditions associated with health and nutrition, especially early in childhood, but also with the state of infrastructure and the natural resource base on which rural livelihood disproportionately depend, and (iii) uninsured risk exposure, which is especially severe in rural areas and in agriculture. The closely coupled nature of these problems adds substantially to the challenge of addressing any one of them on its own and thereby makes integrated strategies essential.
The available theory and evidence suggests that the policy focus must fall squarely on stimulating a smallholder food productivity revolution. Toward that end, the paper concludes by identifying and explaining key entry points for assisting the escape from persistent ultra-poverty in sub-Saharan Africa.
- Build and protect the productive asset endowments of the ultra-poor
- Improve the productivity of the ultra-poor’s current asset holdings
- Improve risk management options for the ultra-poor
- Facilitate favorable transitions out of agriculture
Although the topic of persistent ultra-poverty would seem to lend itself to a pessimistic ending, the future for Africa is actually rather hopeful. The East Asian experience demonstrates that mass, rapid escape from persistent ultra-poverty is feasible. Real agricultural output growth rates are accelerating in SSA, nearly doubling from the 1980s rate so that per capita food output is growing again, helping reduce rural poverty rates in countries enjoying increased agricultural productivity. Finally, the policymaking and donor communities are now appropriately focusing on how best to stimulate investment incentives, productivity growth, risk management and productive transitions out of agriculture. These broad foci are appropriate and reasonably well-grounded in both theory and empirical evidence.
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Center on Food Security and the Environment