FSI's research on the origins, character and consequences of government institutions spans continents and academic disciplines. The institute’s senior fellows and their colleagues across Stanford examine the principles of public administration and implementation. Their work focuses on how maternal health care is delivered in rural China, how public action can create wealth and eliminate poverty, and why U.S. immigration reform keeps stalling.
FSI’s work includes comparative studies of how institutions help resolve policy and societal issues. Scholars aim to clearly define and make sense of the rule of law, examining how it is invoked and applied around the world.
FSI researchers also investigate government services – trying to understand and measure how they work, whom they serve and how good they are. They assess energy services aimed at helping the poorest people around the world and explore public opinion on torture policies. The Children in Crisis project addresses how child health interventions interact with political reform. Specific research on governance, organizations and security capitalizes on FSI's longstanding interests and looks at how governance and organizational issues affect a nation’s ability to address security and international cooperation.
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Anna Lindh Visiting Scholar at The Europe Center, 2014-2015
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Maria Sjöholm currently holds the position as a post-doc researcher at the Faculty of Law of Stockholm University, Sweden. She is in the process of writing a monograph reviewing the integration of women’s human rights law into regional human rights treaties, analysing the methodological and theoretical frameworks with which such rights have been incorporated into these treaties. Her previous research includes the book “Defining Rape: Emerging Obligations for States under International Law?” (Brill) and an article on the approach by the European Court of Human Rights to human trafficking. She is a member of the Committee on Feminism and International Law of the International Law Association and has taught courses on international human rights law and international criminal law at various universities in Sweden.
In a recent interview with NPR, Larry Diamond provides insights and analysis on some of the most pressing political developments confronting the world today.
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Larry Diamond at the opening dinner of the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program.
Two-dozen congressional staffers joined academic and Silicon Valley experts at Stanford’s inaugural cybersecurity boot camp to discuss ways to protect the government, the public and industry from cyber attacks, network crimes and breaches of personal privacy.
The staffers listened to presentations from 25 business and technology leaders, as well as experts in privacy, civil liberties and intelligence during the three-day boot camp. They also took part in a role-playing exercise dealing with a cyber crisis, posing as staffers from the White House, Homeland Security, the State and Defense departments, as well as private enterprise.
The idea behind the workshop was to give Capitol Hill staffers the knowledge and contacts that will help them better craft legislation and policies on cybersecurity.
“We’re 3,000 miles away from Washington and we’re at ground zero for the tech revolution,” said CISAC Co-Director Amy Zegart. She is also the Davies Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, which co-sponsored the boot camp that that ran from Aug. 18-20.
“The boot camp is an important early step in what we envision to be a continuing, leading and lasting cyber program,” said Zegart, co-convener with Herbert Lin, chief scientist at the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council of the National Academies, who joins Stanford in January as a senior scholar for cyber research and policy at CISAC and research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Zegart had three goals for the boot camp. One was to bring together computer and social scientists across campus and across the country “to broaden and deepen our cutting-edge scholarship.”
Then, from the networking that naturally took place, Zegart hopes to create a Track II cybersecurity council that will convene regularly with leaders from the U.S. government, scholars and key stakeholders from the private industry.
“And finally, we want enhanced education programs not only for students here at Stanford, but key stakeholders for cybersecurity policy,” she said.
The presentations were videotaped and will be packaged and used for educational purposes at Stanford and eventually be made public online.
Some of the staffers said the boot camp exceeded their expectations and they were grateful for the jam-packed, 72-hour crash course in all things cyber.
“What Stanford has done really successfully here is they brought together people from D.C. who wouldn’t necessarily talk to each other, from different committees, from different sides of the aisle,” said Jamil Jaffer, Republican chief counsel and senior advisor to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. “Then from the valley community they brought lawyers, educators and technologists – you name it – from across the spectrum in a way that I’ve never seen before.”
He said he hoped CISAC and the Hoover Institution, which co-sponsored the Stanford Congressional Cyber Boot Camp, would convene the next boot camp with the New York business community as well.
“I think there’s a real opportunity to build bridges between these three major cities; I think we need to have these conversations together,” he said.
Staffers also exchanged views about the wide gap between the government and Silicon Valley tech companies with regard to privacy when they met with senior security chiefs at Google during a visit to the nearby Google X campus.
And there were plenty of lively debates about Internet security vs. privacy and whether the government should step in to police public networks.
Benjamin Wittes of Brookings and Hoover faced off with Jennifer Granick, director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society at the Law School.
“Liberty is a feature of security – and security is a feature of liberty,” Wittes said. “So the urge to think that any security measure is going to negatively impact your liberty, or conversely that anything that augments online liberty is going to have negative implications on security is a very easy, and I would say, very lazy instinct.”
Granick countered by saying most professionals in Silicon Valley do not trust the government to police the Internet without secret hacks. For example, documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden indicated the National Security Agency tapped into fiber optic cables transmitting data for Yahoo and Google.
“Last night you heard Eric Schmidt say that the NSA had hacked Google,” she said, referring to a keynote dinner conversation between the Google chairman and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and a senior fellow at Hoover and the Freeman Spogli Institute.
The NSA has denied hacking into Google and Yahoo.
“Everyone here in Silicon Valley agrees with what he says,” she said. “Don’t fool yourself that he’s just saying that because that’s just Google marketing. Everybody at Twitter believes it; everybody at Facebook believes it. I am embedded in the privacy world and we’re all worried about consumer privacy and what these companies are doing with this information – but that doesn’t mean we trust the government to protect us.”
Aside from the government trust debate, other big takeaways were that surprisingly little is secure on the Internet and the threat of cyber attacks against the United States is one of the biggest issues facing Washington policymakers today.
They heard a warning in stark and unambiguous language from Jane Holl Lute, president of the Council on CyberSecurity and a consulting professor at CISAC.
"It's no longer possible to ignore this issue," said Lute, who until last year was deputy secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, where she was responsible for the day-to-day management of the department's efforts to prevent terrorism and enhance security. "Life online is fundamentally unsafe.”
She emphasized that the Internet is about "the power to connect, not to protect" and stressed the importance of practicing "cyber hygiene" to reduce problems. This includes monitoring the hardware and software running on a network, limiting administrative permissions, and real-time patching and monitoring of system vulnerabilities.
If organizations would just follow these steps, she said, 80 to 90 percent of cyber attacks would be prevented.
"We know a lot, but we're just not doing it,” she said.
Lute emphasized that today's world has an "existential reliance" on the Internet – more than 3 billion people in the world, including 80 percent of North Americans, have access to the Internet. All of this dependence comes against the reality that many companies and sites do not carry out basic hygiene to protect their networks.
The U.S. Senate and House staffers attending the boot camp come from both political parties and work on the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Homeland Security, Appropriations, Judiciary, Energy and Commerce committees. The group also includes staffers working with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Ed Markey, D-Mass., among others.
Senior executives from Microsoft, Visa, Palantir, Palo Alto Networks and U.S. Venture Partners had a robust discussion about how their companies battle cyber crime and share network data.
Ellen Richey, global head of enterprise risk for Visa, talked about her frustration with the international organized crime rings that attack financial institutions and credit cards companies.
“And they’re using that money to finance other types of illicit activities, such as human trafficking, drugs and terrorism, yet their governments don’ t go after them, or if they do go after them, they are released due to corruption in the courts,” Richey said.
She said Visa believes that at the end of the day, it’s not possible to adopt measures that are going to adequately protect against the growing threat of cyber crimes.
“So we believe that the ultimate answer for us is to get vulnerable data out of their hands,” Richey said. “You’ve got to shrink the battlefield.”
Facebook CSO Joe Sullivan addresses the boot camp, Aug. 20, 2014.
And the staffers heard a plea by Joe Sullivan, chief security officer at Facebook, to join them in the valley’s quest for better network security.
“The pace that we work at here in Silicon Valley is amazing. It’s exciting and fun to be a part of – but it’s really scary, too,” said Sullivan, a former federal prosecutor devoted to high-tech crime. “There are challenges that we have to deal with every day and we have to have really large and nimble security teams that are thinking about the next big thing before it launches.
“The question is: are government agencies thinking about these issues? Far too often – that is not the case. Hopefully when you go back to Washington you think about how we engage companies, how we engage with government agencies, think about the roles that we all play.”
Sullivan talked about Facebook’s “white hat” program, in which the social network invites users to find security vulnerabilities and report them for a bounty.
He said they have spent $3 million in the last three years in payouts to users around the world, such as the young Palestinian man who was able to hack into Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s page to warn him of a security flaw.
“We’ve focused on encryption, we’ve hired a lot of people and we’ve looked at data center traffic and all those things,” Sullivan said. “But one of the areas where I think we’ve tried to be at the forefront is about talking about security in a more open way.”
Sullivan said he believes there’s a “disconnect” when one talks about security between the private and public sectors and consumers.
“I feel like when the government talks about security, they’re talking about surveillance,” Sullivan said. “I think when consumers talk about security, they’re talking about safety.”
The big tech companies – Facebook, Microsoft and Google – must take “full ownership” of network security, though he wishes that were not always the case.
“We honestly don’t count on any government agency anywhere in the world to make the people who use Facebook secure,” he said. “We realize we have to do it on our own. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I would suggest it’s a bad thing. I think we’d all like more help in securing our services.”
For more details about the boot camp speakers and program, visit this website.
Marine Le Pen and the French political party she leads, the National Front, are the topics of a book being written by Stanford Associate Professor Cécile Alduy. Photo Credit: Jacques Brinon/AP
In an unexpected turn of events in May, France's far-right National Front political party won the largest share of votes (25 percent) in the European Parliament election and 24 of France's 74seats.
While the National Front victory was one of numerous wins for right-wing groups across Europe, the National Front has ascended in popularity quite rapidly – thanks in part to a strategic rebranding initiative led by party president Marine Le Pen, the daughter of longtime National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. She has guided the party away from the anti-Semitic, radical rhetoric that characterizedher father's tenure from 1972 to 2011.
Stanford Associate Professor Cécile Alduy, a scholar in French literature, is currently working on a book about the evolution of the National Front's discourse under Marine Le Pen's leadership. Her research interests span Renaissance poetics, the cultural history of gender, and the history and mythology of national and ethnic identities since the Renaissance.
In an interview, Alduy shared her study of modern French politics and how Renaissance ideologies are playing out there today.
How does your academic background inform your ideas about contemporary French politics?
I think that it makes me particularly attentive to two things: first, the long history in which recent evolutions in the definition of French national identity take place and, second, the rhetoric of political discourse. That is, the fact that politics is a lot – and maybe first and foremost – speech, communication and symbols. Political leaders act – and are judged – as much by what they say as by what they actually do.
How do you apply French history to current affairs?
My first book examined the rise of a proto-national sentiment in French Renaissance literature – how poets and rhetoricians elaborated certain myths, figures and narratives to give shape to a nascent national consciousness. This led me to be on the lookout for reminiscences or reincarnations of such representations of collective identity in contemporary literature and public discourse.
During the Renaissance, it took a lot of rhetorical guts to describe France as a unified kingdom when most of its people did not speak the same language and its borders were still in flux. Poets and lawmakers worked hand in hand to establish French as the official language throughout and to rein in regional and religious differences. One of the images that helped was that of the king of France as the incarnation of the people. I see reminiscences of this powerful image in the attempt made by several political leaders in the past 10 years to appear as providential men (or women), particularly in the far-right self-portrayal as the voice of the people.
Your forthcoming publication, Marine Le Pen: Words, Myths, Media (to be published by Seuil in 2015), investigates Le Pen's use of language. What about her political discourse do you find most striking?
What is most striking is how she has managed to smooth out her father's rhetorical asperities – such as his anti-Semitic gaffes, for instance, including the latest one on rounding up a bunch of artists for the next fournée, or batch for the furnace – to offer instead a sleek, almost mainstream rhetoric to the public. In contrast to the often clearly racist slurs of her father, she has launched a two-pronged attack on immigration on cultural and economic grounds. Immigration from non-European countries is in her words unsustainable because of cultural rather than racial differences, and even more importantly because it is unaffordable in the current economic crisis.
Could you provide an example of Le Pen's "semantic takeover" and explain her media strategy?
Marine Le Pen has decided to portray her party as the true champion of laïcité (France's strict notion of the separation of church and state, which forbids any display of religious affiliations in public offices and schools). But she has stretched the concept so much, and in a unique unilateral direction, that in her mouth, laïcité is a politically correct, and readily acceptable, word for an attack on any display of the Muslim faith in public – not just in public schools but in the streets.
She is collapsing two different meanings of "public" into one: public-funded entities (schools, companies or government) and everything that we say is "in the public eye" or that happens "in public." This is a devious play on words but it works: people, including politicians and journalists, have started to confuse the two notions. The meaning of laicité is dangerously slipping from that of a legal framework that guarantees the neutrality of public education and services to a restrictive normative system of values that excludes from the national community certain behaviors and religions.
How has the French mindset about immigration evolved from the Renaissance era to today?
Immigration was not seen as a problem in the Renaissance – rather the opposite. For one thing, foreigners could be taxed more and on more things. They also brought new art forms, technologies and money.
France's notion of national identity was constructed during the Renaissance as something cultural rather than what we would now call "ethnic." French poets and authors of the Renaissance put forward an image of France as the "Mother of the Arts and Letters" (a phrase, incidentally, reused by Marine Le Pen in her speeches). France was to be unique in the world because of its contribution to the arts, to philosophy, literature and sciences. The French kings were adamant to invite foreigners who could help them achieve these goals (Leonardo da Vinci is only the most famous example).
This is a very different take from now, when anti-immigration movements point out what they think is the unbearable economic and "civilizational" cost of immigration for the country. (Economists have concluded that the balance sheet of immigration in France is actually positive but the representation of immigration as costly continues to prevail.)
This summer you will be working on "Extreme Rhetoric: 40 Years of National Front Speeches (1972-2013)," a digital humanities project and database of Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen's public speeches since 1972. What will you and your fellow researchers be looking for?
We are looking for what has changed and what has not changed in the party over the last 40 years. We want to uncover the structural components that form the backbone of its ideological makeup and point out the evolution in diction, word choice and topics.
For instance, the representation of history in their discourse has not changed over the last 40 years. Father and daughter have been telling the same narrative of France's decadence: both wax lyrical in their nostalgia for a Golden Age, lament the fall of France from its former grandeur, resort to conspiracy theories to account for its fall, and call for a renewal thanks to the union of the people to a charismatic leader (themselves). But the enemies have changed. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, communism was the threat. Now it's Europe, globalization and even unregulated capitalism.
Both leaders differ also in the kinds of rhetorical authorities they are trying to embody. In a smaller-scale study of Marine Le Pen's lexical universe last year, I showed how she beefed up the economic side of her discourse, quoting liberal French economist Thomas Piketty and American economist Paul Krugman, for instance, to present herself as a pragmatist and an expert. Her father, by contrast, situated his discourse almost exclusively in the realms of moral principles ("the good," "justice," "moral obligations," etc.) and rarely condescended to explain how his economic agenda would work in the real world. But their platform has not changed. In other words, the content remains the same, but the rhetorical surface has been reworked.
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France's far right National Front political party leader Marine Le Pen waves at supporters during the National Front's annual May Day rally in Paris
With contributions by Stephan Braese, Barbara Hahn, Christine Ivanovic, Martin Klebes, Vivian Liska, Fred Moten, Sigrid Weigel, Liliane Weissberg, and Thomas Wild, this book explores the thoughts of Hannah Arendt which move in a border area between the disciplines and yet goes beyond the concept of interdisciplinarity.
Welcome Remarks – Eric T. Wakin, Robert H. Malott Director of Hoover Institution Library & Archives
Opening Remarks – Amir Weiner, Stanford University
9:15-10:45 AM – Chair: Amir Weiner
Toomas Hiio, Estonian War Museum. Multi-ethnic (or Multi-national) Student Body of the University of Tartu and the WW I: Choices, Political Movements, Volunteers, Mobilizations, and Postwar Consequences
Darius Staliunas, Lithuanian Institute of History. Anti-Jewish Violence in Lithuania at the Turn of the 20th Century
11:00 AM – 12:30 PM Chair: Aivars Stranga, The University of Latvia
Ēriks Jēkabsons, University of Latvia. The War for Independence of Latvia and the United States
Tomas Balkelis, Vilnius University. Paramilitarism in Lithuania: Violence, Civic Activism and Nation-making, 1918–1920
Conference organizers: Professors Lazar Fleishman (Slavic Department) and Amir Weiner (History Department)
Sponsored by: Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Office of the Provost, Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford Global Studies Division, The Europe Center, Stanford University Libraries, Division of Literatures, Cultures, & Languages, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Department of History, Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and the Stanford Humanities Center.
The atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki just before 18-year-old William J. Perry landed in Japan during the War of Occupation as a mapping specialist. He saw the devastation left behind by American firebombers on Tokyo and Okinawa.
The young man quickly understood the staggering magnitude of difference in the destruction caused by traditional firepower and these new atomic bombs. He would go on to devote his life to understanding, procuring and then trying to dismantle those weapons.
But that was seven decades back. And many young Americans today believe the threat of nuclear weapons waned alongside the Cold War and Cuban Missile Crisis.
So as faculty at Stanford and the Center for International Security and Cooperation evolve with the digital age by taking their lessons online, one of the university’s oldest professors is also adapting to online teaching in an effort to reach the youngest audience, urging them to take on the no-nukes mantle that he’s held for many years.
“The issue is so important to me that I tried all sorts of approaches from books and courses and lectures and conferences to try to get my contemporaries and the generations behind me engaged – all with limited success,” says the 86-year-old Perry, a CISAC faculty member and the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor (emeritus) at the center’s parent organization, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
“First – which is a sine qua non – they must become seriously concerned that there is a nuclear danger, which most of these kids don’t understand at all,” said Perry. “Secondly, we want to convince them that there is something they can actually do about it.”
To reach those students, he believes he must go digital. So Perry – who co-teaches with CISAC’s Siegfried Hecker the popular Stanford course, “Technology and National Security” – began to map out a classroom course that would be videotaped and serve as a pilot for an online class that would be free and open to the public.
That course, “Living at the Nuclear Brink: Yesterday & Today” included lectures by some of the best people working in the field of nuclear nonproliferation today. Among those who will be highlighted in the online course are Perry and Hecker; Joe Martz of the Los Alamos National Laboratory; Stanford nuclear historian David Holloway; Stanford political scientist Scott Sagan; and Ploughshares Fund president, Joseph Cirincione.
The Perry Project will produce short-segment videos highlighting key information and stories from the course, packaging them in an online course available in multiple platforms and possibly offered by the university.
Perry used his personal journey as a young soldier during WWII, a mathematician and later a developer of weapons for the U.S. nuclear arsenal as undersecretary of defense for the Carter administration – and then trying to dismantle those weapons as secretary of defense for President Bill Clinton.
“I’m not doing this simply because I want to put a notch on my belt, to say that I’ve done a MOOC,” Perry said. “I’m doing it because I really want to get across to hundreds of thousands of young people.”
Last summer, he launched the Perry Project by inviting a dozen high school and college students to campus for a nuclear weapons boot camp so that they could take back to campus the message that nuclear annihilation is still a real, contemporary possibility.
He asked them: How do I get through to your generation?
“They said, `We don’t get our information by books or even by television, we get it through social media and YouTube, the various social media platforms. And you want to make the message relevant and relatively compact,’” he recalls.
Perry listened. “Living at the Nuclear Brink: Yesterday and Today” is in production now and a short-segment pilot video should be made available in the fall.
And lectures from CISAC's signature course, “International Security in a Changing World” (PS114S) will soon go up on YouTube as lecture modules entitled, “Security Matters.”
“Online learning offers a way to expand CISAC's reach to new audiences, geographies, and generations,” says CISAC Co-Director Amy Zegart, who has co-taught the popular course for the past few years with CISAC’s Martha Crenshaw.
“At the same time, the PS114 online modules will give us a living lecture library so that future Stanford students can compare faculty lectures on similar topics across time – learning, for example, how Martha Crenshaw assessed the terrorist threat in 2010 vs. 2015,” Zegart said.
Guest lecturers whose presentations will be included for the YouTube package include:
Jack Snyder of Columbia University: Democratization and Violence
Francis Fukuyama of Stanford: The Changing Nature of Power
Zegart: Understanding Policy Decisions: The Cuban Missile Crisis
Scott Sagan of CISAC: The Nuclear Revolution; and Why Do States Build/Forego Nuclear Weapons?
Abbas Milani, director of Iran Studies at Stanford: Historical Perspective on Iran
Former FBI Director Robert Mueller: the FBI’s Transformation Post 9/11
U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry (Ret.) and former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan: The War in Afghanistan and the Future of Central Asia
Jane Holl Lute, former deputy secretary of Homeland Security: Emerging Threats in Cybersecurity
Perry: Security Issues in Russia, Yesterday and Today
Brad Roberts: former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear and Missile Defense Policy: Ensuring a (Nuclear) Deterrence Strategy that is Effective for 21st Century Challenges
CISAC Co-Director David Relman: Doomsday Viruses
And lectures at CISAC’s Cybersecurity Boot Camp for senior congressional aids will also be videotaped and packaged for YouTube and online consumption later this year.
“We are excited to enter into this phase of experimentation to see what works, what doesn't, and how we can further CISAC's teaching mission both here at Stanford and around the world,” Zegart said.
Erin Baggott Carter (赵雅芬) is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California and a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. She is also a non-resident scholar at the UCSD 21st Century China Center. She has previously held fellowships at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and the Center for International Security and Cooperation. She received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University.
Dr. Carter's research focuses on Chinese politics and propaganda. Her first book, Propaganda in Autocracies (Cambridge University Press), explores how political institutions determine propaganda strategies with an original dataset of eight million articles in six languages drawn from state-run newspapers in nearly 70 countries. She is currently working on a book on how domestic politics influence US-China relations. Her other work has appeared in the British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Security Studies, and International Interactions. Her work has been featured by a number of media platforms, including the New York Times and the Little Red Podcast.
Her research has been supported by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Center for International Studies at the University of Southern California, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University.
Dr. Carter regularly tweets about Chinese politics and propaganda at @baggottcarter. She can be reached via email at baggott [at] usc.edu or ebaggott [at] stanford.edu.
Distinguished Austrian Chair Professor (2013-2014)
Visiting Professor, Stanford Law School
Professor of Law, University of Vienna, Austria
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Manfred Nowak graduated from the Vienna Law School (Dr. iur. 1973) and from Columbia University New York (LL.M. 1975). He has been professor at the Institute of Constitutional and Administrative Law at the University of Vienna since 1986. He was member of the Austrian Delegation to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights (1986 and 1993) as well as director of the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM) at the University of Utrecht (1987-1989). In 1989, he founded the Austrian Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights in Vienna and coordinated NGO-parallel events during the 1993 UN Conference for Human Rights in Vienna while he also was Professor of Law at the Austrian Federal Academy of Public Administration in Vienna until 2002.
As U.N. expert on missing persons in the former Yugoslavia he started a process aiming at the identification of missing persons through exhumation of mortal remains between 1994 and 1997.
From 1996-2003, Manfred Nowak was a judge at the Human Rights Chamber in Bosnia. Since 2000, he is head of an independent human rights commission at the Austrian Interior Ministry. From 2002 to 2003 he was visiting professor at the Raoul Wallenberg of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at the University of Lund. He has been a UN expert on legal questions on enforced disappearances since 2002 and was appointed UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment in 2004 with a mandate until 2010.
In addition, Manfred Nowak is also Chairperson of the European Masters Degree in Human Rights and Democratisation (since 2000). Manfred Nowak has published more than 400 books and articles on international, constitutional, administrative, and human rights law, including the standard commentary on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. He was awarded the UNESCO Prize for the Teaching of Human Rights in 1994 and the Bruno Kreisky Prize for Human Rights in 2007.