Stanford University

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.

The Need for Sectoral Reform of the South Korean Economy

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Although South Korea is recovering relatively quickly from the worldwide recession in the wake of the U.S. financial sector crisis, it must address major structural weaknesses if it is to sustain growth over the long term. The Korean manufacturing sector is one of the world’s strongest and most efficient, but the services and (much smaller) agriculture sectors remain weak. Former senior South Korean economic policy official Byongwon Bahk argues that only by benchmarking the near miraculous success of its manufacturing sector can Korea convert traditionally weak sectors into new sources of job creation and foreign currency earnings. He will explain the necessity of, and obstacles to, inducing capital, technologies, and marketing from advanced companies in advanced countries; supporting R&D activities and education and training in weak sectors; and opening weak sectors to domestic and foreign competition.

Byongwon Bahk, a former senior South Korean government official, is the Korean Studies Program’s 2009-2010 Koret Fellow. During the past decade, he was in charge of the management of Korean macro-economic policy at the Ministry of Finance and Economy, including as vice minister. Most recently, he served in the Blue House as the senior economic advisor to President Lee Myung-bak. He received a BA and an MA in Law from Seoul National University, an MA in Industrial Engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Korea, and an MA in Economics from University of Washington.

This event is supported by a generous grant from the Koret Foundation.

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Byongwon Bahk

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Stanford University
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Byongwon Bahk, former Senior Advisor to President Lee Myung-bak of Korea, joined the Korean Studies Program as the recipient of the Koret Fellowship for 2009-10 academic year.

Mr. Bahk served as Vice Minister of the Ministry of Finance and Economy in Korea and was a senior advisor to President Lee Myung-bak briefly.  While at the Center, he will lead a reach project on economic affairs of Korea in relations to the U.S.

The Koret Fellowship, generously funded by the by Koret Foundation of San Francisco, was established at the Center in 2008 to bring leading professionals in Asia and the United States to Stanford to conduct research on contemporary U.S.-Korean relations, with the broad aim of fostering greater understanding and closer ties between the two countries.

Byongwon Bahk 2009-2010 Koret Fellow, Asia-Pacific Research Center Speaker
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Korean Studies Colloquium Series

Why Democracy Matters

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Condoleezza Rice is the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution and professor of political science at Stanford University.

From January 2005 to 2009, she served as the 66th secretary of state of the United States. Before serving as America's chief diplomat, she served as assistant to the president for national security affairs (national security adviser) from January 2001 to 2005.

Rice joined the Stanford University faculty as a professor of political science in 1981 and served as Stanford University's provost from 1993 to 1999. She was a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution from 1991 to 1993 and returned to the Hoover Institution after serving as provost until 2001. As a professor, Rice won two of the highest teaching honors: the 1984 Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 1993 School of Humanities and Sciences Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching.

She has authored and coauthored several books, including Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (1995), with Philip Zelikow, The Gorbachev Era (1986), with Alexander Dallin, and Uncertain Allegiance: The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army (1984).

Rice served as a member of the boards of directors for the Chevron Corporation, the Charles Schwab Corporation, the Transamerica Corporation, and the International Advisory Council of J.P. Morgan. She was a founding board member of the Center for a New Generation, an educational support fund for schools in East Palo Alto and East Menlo Park, California, and was vice president of the Boys and Girls Club of the Peninsula. In addition, she has served on several local and national boards of foundations and charitable organizations.

She currently serves as a member of the board of trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. In addition, she is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Rice earned her bachelor's degree in political science, cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Denver in 1974; her master's from the University of Notre Dame in 1975; and her Ph.D. from the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver in 1981.

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Condoleezza Rice

Hoover Institution
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6010

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Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Professor of Political Economy in the Graduate School of Business
Professor of Political Science
Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution
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Condoleezza Rice is the Tad and Dianne Taube Director of the Hoover Institution and a Senior Fellow on Public Policy. She is the Denning Professor in Global Business and the Economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. In addition, she is a founding partner of Rice, Hadley, Gates & Manuel LLC, an international strategic consulting firm.

From January 2005 to January 2009, Rice served as the 66th Secretary of State of the United States, the second woman and first black woman to hold the post. Rice also served as President George W. Bush’s Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (National Security Advisor) from January 2001 to January 2005, the first woman to hold the position.

Rice served as Stanford University’s provost from 1993 to 1999, during which time she was the institution’s chief budget and academic officer. As Professor of Political Science, she has been on the Stanford faculty since 1981 and has won two of the university’s highest teaching honors.

From February 1989 through March 1991, Rice served on President George H.W. Bush’s National Security Council staff. She served as Director, then Senior Director, of Soviet and East European Affairs, as well as Special Assistant to the President for National Security. In 1986, while an International Affairs Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, Rice also served as Special Assistant to the Director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

She has authored and co-authored numerous books, most recently To Build a Better World: Choices to End the Cold War and Create a Global Commonwealth (2019), co-authored with Philip Zelikow. Among her other volumes are three bestsellers, Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom (2017); No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (2011); and Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family (2010). She also wrote Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity (2018) with Amy B. Zegart; Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (1995) with Philip Zelikow; edited The Gorbachev Era (1986) with Alexander Dallin; and penned The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army; 1948-1983: Uncertain Allegiance (1984).

In 1991, Rice co-founded the Center for a New Generation (CNG), an innovative, after-school academic enrichment program for students in East Palo Alto and East Menlo Park, California. In 1996, CNG merged with the Boys & Girls Club of the Peninsula, an affiliate club of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America (BCGA). CNG has since expanded to local BGCA chapters in Birmingham, Atlanta, and Dallas. Rice remains an active proponent of an extended learning day through after-school programs.

Since 2009, Rice has served as a founding partner at Rice, Hadley, Gates, & Manuel LLC, an international strategic consulting firm based in Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. The firm works with senior executives of major companies to implement strategic plans and expand in emerging markets. Other partners include former National Security Advisor Stephen J. Hadley, former Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, and former diplomat, author, and advisor on emerging markets, Anja Manuel.

In 2022, Rice became a part-owner of the Denver Broncos as a part of the Walton-Penner Family Ownership Group. In 2013, Rice was appointed to the College Football Playoff Selection Committee, formerly the Bowl Championship Series. She served on the committee until 2017.

Rice currently serves on the boards of C3.ai, an AI software company; and Makena Capital Management, a private endowment firm. In addition, she is Vice Chair of the Board of Governors of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America and a trustee of the Aspen Institute. Previously, Rice served on various boards, including Dropbox; the George W. Bush Institute; the Commonwealth Club; KiOR, Inc.; the Chevron Corporation; the Charles Schwab Corporation; the Transamerica Corporation; the Hewlett-Packard Company; the University of Notre Dame; the Foundation of Excellence in Education; the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; and the San Francisco Symphony.

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Rice earned her bachelor’s degree in political science, cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Denver; her master’s in the same subject from the University of Notre Dame; and her Ph.D., likewise in political science, from the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver.

Rice is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been awarded over fifteen honorary doctorates.

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Countering Terrorism: What Works?

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The Obama administration has adopted a new policy toward terrorism, rejecting the "war on terror" for a more nuanced approach. Is the new strategy likely to be more effective than the old in destroying Al Qaida and preventing future violence from extremists?

Martha Crenshaw is a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Freeman Spogli Institute, and professor of political science (by courtesy). Her current research focuses on why the United States is the target of terrorism, the effectiveness of counter terrorism policies, and mapping terrorist organizations. Professor Crenshaw served on the Executive Board of Women in International Security and chaired the American Political Science Association (APSA) Task Force on Political Violence and Terrorism. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2005-2006. Her edited book, The Consequences of Counterterrorism in Democracies, is being published by the Russell Sage Foundation.

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Martha Crenshaw Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) and Senior Fellow at CISAC and FSI Speaker
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Peter Semmelhack on open source hardware innovation

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Peter Semmelhack, founder of BugLabs, spoke about his company's goal to make hardware as malleable as software, freeing people to create the devices that meet their needs and improve quality of life.

While the Open Source movement has enabled rapid progress in the field of software in recent years, hardware innovation lags behind. The way that hardware products come to market is time consuming and expensive for all.  A number of factors mean that only big multinational players tend to be able to survive in this space:

  • Research and development and distribution of mass market products is an extremely expensive process
  • The upfront investment required to develop a new product is very high: typically it takes one year and a million dollars to produce just one prototype
  • To get a high enough price point you have to produce at a very large scale
  • Average returns tend to diminish significantly after about two years

However, there are big opportunities outside of mass market products, Peter argues. In the areas of healthcare and energy management, for example, there are niche markets for products with very specific uses. If an efficient platform could be used to develop these niche products, there are potentially as many gains in the ‘long tail' of the electronics market as in the mass market products such as DVD players and mobile phones.

Bug Labs provides an open source, modular system for hardware that enables businesses and individuals to innovate in a way that is affordable. Bugmodules, which include GPS, 3G, speakers and motion sensors, are designed to be clicked together to build new products with unique combinations of functionality. This approach frees individuals to start creating the specific gadgets they need in a low cost, efficient way.  Users can then add to their device any number of online applications created and shared by the BUG Community.

The BUG system can also be used to create products with specific social uses. For example, BUG4good is a handheld device designed to enable human rights workers to capture material (video, photograph etc) in such a way that it can be used as official evidence in the courts in Geneva. With total demand of just a few hundred units, this is not a market a large technology company would be likely to serve.

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Tapan Parikh: evaluating impact of various types of mobile technology

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Tapan Parikh, of UC Berkeley School of Information, spoke about a number of projects that are using mobile phone based technology to give small businesses the information they need to improve productivity. He argued that voice technology has distinct advantages over text, because it overcomes challenges of illiteracy while responding to a strong need people feel to be heard. 

Information is key for economic development and empowerment. But information is worthless unless it is also useable (leads to decisions the business owner can actually take), trusted (comes from a source he respects) and relevant (speaks about the issues he is facing). For information to be really empowering, it must also be two way: there must be ways for individuals to create content themselves.

Tapan described three current projects he is involved in:

Hisaab: Microfinance groups in India often suffer from poor paper based record keeping, making it difficult for the group to track loans and repayments. The Hissab software was designed with an interface suitable for those who may be illiterate and/or new to computing. The use of voice commands and responses in the local language, Tamil, prevented the software from feeling remote and inaccessible and contributed to the success of this initiative. 

Avaaj Otalo: Agricultural extension workers provide advice to farmers on pests, new techniques etc to help improve yields. But often they have limited reach, visiting areas only rarely, or perhaps lacking the expertise to respond to all the problems they encounter. Avaaj Otalo is a system for farmers to access relevant and timely agricultural information over the phone. By dialing a phone number and navigating through simple audio prompts, farmers can record questions, respond to others, or access content published by agricultural experts and institutions. The service has been hugely popular, with farmers willing to spend time listening to large amounts of material to find what they want. The opportunity to be broadcast was a major attraction, reflecting the desire to be heard and to create media rather than be a passive consumer of it.

Digital ICS: Smallholders' compliance with organic, fair-trade and quality requirements is usually measured via paper based internal inspections. The data uncovered by these is vital but often lost. Digital ICS is a mobile phone based application that allows inspectors to fill out the survey digitally, enhance it with visual evidence (e.g. from camera phones) and upload it onto a web application. This is being piloted with coffee farmers in Mexico. A key finding from the work is that farmers want to know who ends up drinking their coffee, what they pay for it and what they think about it. Greater links between producers and consumers may therefore be another area for this project to investigate.  

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How I Write

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Philip Taubman is a consulting professor at CISAC and the author of Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America's Space Espionage. He is currently working on a book project about nuclear threats and the joint effort of Sid Drell, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, Bill Perry and George Shultz to reduce nuclear dangers. Professor Taubman worked at the New York Times as a reporter and editor for nearly 30 years, specializing in national security issues, including intelligence and defense policies and operations. At the Times, Taubman served as a Washington correspondent, Moscow bureau chief, deputy editorial page editor, Washington bureau chief and associate editor.

Taubman was a history major at Stanford, Class of 1970, and served as editor-in-chief of the Stanford Daily in 1969. Before joining the New York Times, he worked as a correspondent for Time magazine and was sports editor of Esquire.

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Philip Taubman

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Philip Taubman is affiliated with the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Before joining CISAC in 2008, Mr. Taubman worked at the New York Times as a reporter and editor for nearly 30 years, specializing in national security issues, including United States diplomacy, and intelligence and defense policy and operations. He served as Moscow bureau chief and Washington bureau chief, among other posts. He is author of Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America's Space Espionage (2003), The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb (2012),  In the Nation's Service: The Life and Times of George P. Shultz (2023), as well as co-author (with his brother, William Taubman) of McNamara at War: A New History (2025).

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Engineers of Jihad: The Interpretation

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Diego Gambetta is a sociologist at Nuffield College, Oxford, working on theories of trust and signals. He is known for his book The Sicilian Mafia and his edited volume, Making Sense of Suicide Missions. While at Stanford, he will discuss his recent manuscript, "Engineers of Jihad" as well as his recently published book, Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate.

Diego Gambetta will be visiting Stanford from late March to late April, 2010.

Abstract
Among violent Islamists individuals with an engineering education are four times more frequent than we would expect given the share of engineers among university students in Islamic countries.  We argue that a combination of two factors – engineers’ relative deprivation in the Islamic world and mindset – is the most plausible explanation. In this second talk I will focus on the mindset.

This talk is the final of a two part series presented by Dr. Gambetta. His first talk, "Engineers of Jihad: The Facts," will be presented at noon on Friday, April 2, at the Stanford Humanities Center.

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Diego Gambetta FSI-Humanities Center International Visitor; CISAC Affiliate Speaker
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Lucky Gunasekara and Tom Wiltzius on democratizing health care using mobile phone networks

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Lucky Gunasekara, a student at Stanford's School of Medicine, and Tom Wiltzius, a student in Stanford's Computer Science program, took us through the rationale behind working with mobile phones and the content of their project working with health workers in Malawi.

According to the International Telecommunication Union, there are now more mobiles in the developing world than developed world. Mobile phone connectivity is much more common in Africa than internet connectivity. And mobile phones are much cheaper, around $35 for a standard phone compared to $200 for even the designed-to-be-affordable One Laptop per Child. Mobile phones are therefore the obvious tool of choice for groups interested in exploring the use of technology for development in Africa.

FrontlineSMS is a free software platform enabling large-scale, two-way text messaging using a laptop, mobile phones, and a GSM signal. FrontlineSMS:Medic uses this platform to support Community Health Workers (CHW), initially piloting this work in Malawi. The role of CHWs is to provide continuity of care in places where there are limited health professionals. However, they can be extremely disconnected from the patients they are serving, often responsible for huge geographical areas. Having access to mobile phones through the FrontlineSMS:Medic project has enabled CHWs to respond to actual need and what is happening in the villages they serve. It has also resulted in significant efficiencies, both in saved healthcare hours spent on the road, visiting areas where there is no immediate need, and in fuel costs.

The team is now working with a number of clinics to implement a system to replace paper collection of clinical data with simple forms on mobile phones with the aim of improving accuracy and efficiency of collection and analysis. All FrontlineSMS:Medic's work is characterized by a commitment to provide solutions that are locally owned, genuine replicable and shaped by user feedback.

Tom outlined a number of current challenges, including:

  • Reliability of cell phone networks: This is not always high in remote areas, creating difficulties in emergencies. Overload on the network can result in messages being held in a queue, delaying sending
  • The ability of older or less literate individuals to use the system: improving the interface to ensure it is as intuitive as possible will be important in addressing this
  • Cost of data transmission: individual texts are not expensive but if many CHWs throughout different clinics are each sending multiple messages a day, this becomes a significant cost. One solution may be not to send the data via text but to transfer it onto another phone via GPRS when in range
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Jonathan Zitrain: 'minds for sale'

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Jonathan Zittrain is a Visiting Professor at the Stanford School of Law. In his presentation he raised a number of concerns about current trends in online behavior. He suggested that these developments may undermine the practice of ‘civic technologies’, where unconnected individuals voluntarily come together to achieve something they could not do individually. 

The web is now full of opportunities to engage in tasks that somehow benefit a company or organization. At the most skilled end of the spectrum, there are sites such as Innocentive, a market place that organizations use to post specific problems they need solved; anyone can respond with their solution to win a cash prize. Then there are companies like LiveOps which draw their entire workforce from internet users who engage in call-centre tasks from home. There are also unskilled tasks available in exchange for extremely small amounts of pay; for example, Mechanical Turk gets workers to complete Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) such as labeling photos. ESP Game offers no pay at all but gets users to participate in its goal to label web images by turning this into a competitive game. Then there are activities we might not even realize could be beneficial to someone else – for example, creating hyperlinks in material you put online helps search engines to rank pages effectively.

Jonathan posited two kinds of concerns about these activities. Relating to participants themselves he is concerned about:

  • Alienation: participants do not get to see the outcome of their work, but view a tiny part of the whole
  • Moral valence: participants often have no idea who is hiring them and for what purpose
  • Misappropriation: participants have no say in how their work is used
  • Lack of rights: there is no protection for online workers – an individual can get laid off from LiveOps at any time, regardless of their time investment

He also set out some systemic concerns:

  • Given the conditions of moral valence and misappropriation, the door is open for online users to be complicit in totalitarian government efforts to use the net to monitor and suppress (imagine Mechanical Turk being used to match protestor photos with citizen databases)
  • There is likely to be a ‘race to the bottom’ – companies wanting to get tasks done in this way will operate wherever regulation protecting ‘workers’ is most lax
  • Monetization of online tasks could mean the crowding out of voluntary contributions to the internet. Would so many people have freely devoted time to Wikipedia had there been a rival site offering pay for each entry?

Jonathan acknowledged that these are tough issues to address, but suggested a number of responses including: finding ways to apply labor standards so that those who invest a lot of time working on something like LiveOps have some protection; allowing workers to take their experience with them, so that it counts elsewhere if they get laid off; forcing companies to disclose the intended outcome of the overall task to enable users to make more informed decisions about how they use their time.

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Pious Words, Puny Deeds: The "International Community" and Mass Atrocities

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Rajan Menon is the Monroe J. Rathbone Professor of International Relations at Lehigh University. He was an Academic Fellow and Senior Advisor at the Carnegie Corporation of New York for two years, where he played a key role in developing the Corporation's Russia Initiative. Dr. Menon was also a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and as Director for Eurasia Policy Studies at the Seattle-based National Bureau for Asian Research. He is the author of Soviet Power and the Third World (Yale University Press, 1986) and co-editor of Limits to Soviet Power (Lexington Books, 1989). He is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times and has also written for The Financial Times, The Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, Newsday, and World Policy Journal, among other publications. Dr. Menon received his doctorate in political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Dr. Menon's latest book, The End of Alliances, was published by Oxford University Press in 2007. He is working on his next book, Hubris: The Anatomy of Military Disasters. Dr. Menon's other areas of research and writing include Russian politics and foreign policy; the international relations of Central Asia, the South Caucasus, South Asia, and the Asia-Pacific; energy development in the Caspian Sea zone; security issues in Asia; globalization, and the comparative study of empires.

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Rajan Menon Professor, International Studies Speaker Lehigh University
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