Stanford University

Governance

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.

Ryo Masuda

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Corporate Affiliate Visiting Fellow
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Ryo Masuda is a corporate affiliate visiting fellow at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) for 2012-13.  Masuda has more than six years of experience in media markets working for Sumitomo Corporation, one of Japan's major trading and investment conglomerates.  Most recently, Masuda worked for Japan's largest CATV operator, one of Sumitomo Corporation's affiliated companies, where he was responsible for business development.  Masuda graduated from Hitotsubashi University with a bachelor's degree in commercial science.

Glwadys A. Gbetibouo

Energy and Environment Building
MC 4205
473 Via Ortega, room 365
Stanford CA 94305

(650) 721-2203
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Postdoctoral scholar
Glwadys_profile_pic.jpg MS, PhD

Glwadys Aymone Gbetibouo is a citizen from Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) where she received an Ingénieur Agronome degree in 2000 at the Institut National Polytechnique Houphouët Boigny. She then joined the University of Pretoria to pursue post-graduate studies in agricultural and environmental economics and policy analysis. She obtained both a MSc degree in Agricultural Economics in 2004 and a PhD in Environmental Economics in 2011 from the University of Pretoria. Her research interests include global warming and agriculture. Her area of expertise is on measuring the impacts of climate change on agriculture and the adaptation behavior and vulnerability of rural communities to climate change and variability.

Prior to joining FSE, Glwadys has been working as an international climate change consultant at C4EcoSolutions, a private consulting firm based in South Africa. During her time at C4 EcoSolutions, she has been involved in developing climate change adaptation project documents for the United Nations Agencies for funding under the Global Environmental Fund (GEF) Least Developing Countries Fund (LDCF) and Special Climate Change Fund (SCCF). Also she has provided technical guidance and advisory services for the implementation of climate change projects in countries such as Djibouti, Lesotho. Mozambique, Niger and Zambia.

Glwadys’s current research is on small scale irrigation technologies and adaptation to climate change.

Q&A: Stanford experts on Kofi Annan's resignation as Syria envoy

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When Kofi Annan announced his plans to step aside as special envoy for the conflict in Syria by the end of the month, he put much of the blame on the United Nations Security Council for the failure to make peace in the war-ravaged country.

"When the Syrian people desperately need action, there continues to be finger pointing and name calling in the Security Council," Annan said. "It is impossible for me or anyone to compel the Syrian government and also the opposition to take the steps to bring about the political process. As an envoy, I can't want peace more than the protagonists, more than Security Council or the international community, for that matter."

The uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad began in March 2011 and rights activists say it has left more than 19,000 dead. Annan became the U.N.-Arab League envoy to Syria in February, with the goal of getting both sides to put down their weapons. He designed a six-point plan for peace, which was never fully implemented.

Stephen J. Stedman, FSI's Freeman Spogli Senior Fellow, and Larry Diamond — a senior fellow at FSI and the Hoover Institution as well as director of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law — offer their analysis of the impact of Annan's resignation.

Does the resignation of Annan, who is well respected among diplomats, signal that there is no hope for peace in Syria?

Diamond: I think it's been apparent for several weeks, at least, that the peace mission was doomed, that the Assad regime was not prepared to negotiate, and that the refusal of Russia and China to agree to any kind of meaningful pressure on the Assad regime has left violent resistance by the opposition and the society as the only option.

Syria is sinking deeper and deeper into all-out civil war, and only an escalation of military pressure and economic sanctions on the Assad regime and its principal leaders and supporters offers any hope of resolution. Sometimes, when one or both parties refuse to negotiate, the only way to end a civil war is for one side to win. Libya provides the most recent example of that. If Assad and his allies are going to negotiate a peaceful exit, it will only be because they are staring at the prospect of fairly imminent military defeat.

Could Annan have done something differently?

Diamond: It is very difficult to negotiate with a regime that is bent on repression and total domination, especially when you can't credibly threaten to impose formidable costs on the regime if it refuses to compromise. I don't think there was anything more that Annan could have done, because he had no leverage, no tools to work with, as a result of the inability of the Security Council to agree on tough sanctions.

Will the failure to make peace in Syria tarnish Annan's legacy?

Stedman: The failure to make peace in Syria should not and will not tarnish Annan's legacy. First, he is already a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and one failure in an extraordinarily difficult case does not diminish the rest of his diplomatic successes. With regards to Syria, no one expected him to succeed, but he needed to try and he needed to be seen to try. His position was special envoy of the Security Council, and if anyone is looking for a scapegoat they should start looking at the council.

Diamond: No, I don't think this will tarnish Annan's legacy. He had a nearly impossible mission; everyone knew that. The failure was a collective failure of the international system, not the failure of an individual mediator. Annan is a great man who has made major contributions to world peace and security. It's not his fault that a brutal regime, backed by the world's two most powerful authoritarian states, refused to negotiate.

Brooke Donald is a writer for the Stanford News Service.

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One Decade of the International Criminal Court: challenges and possibilities

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During the academic year of 2012-2013, the Program on Human Rights’ Sanela Diana Jenkins International Human Rights Series will examine the International Criminal Court (ICC) featuring debates with local, national and international experts, academics and activists. The focus will be on current challenges and possibilities for the ICC, such as how to determine reparations for victims, US and ICC relations, nation state cooperation and the still-to-be included crime of aggression.

The International Criminal Court in The Hague opened its doors 10 years ago amid buoyant optimism and sharp criticism. Supporters of the ICC hope that a permanent criminal court ensures the worst human rights offenders -- those who have committed genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity -- are brought to justice, and that nation states will progressively structure their own criminal systems so that genocidaires will face a fair trial before their own people and their own courts. Some critics of the ICC argue that the Court is biased against countries like the U.S., and that it jeopardizes national sovereignty through falsely claiming to be apolitical.  Other critics say that the ICC is biased against the entire region of Africa, noting that so far the ICC has indicted only Africans. Still others say that the ICC process is slow and expensive, noting that after ten years the Court has only completed one prosecution.

One decade later, how should the international community assess the ICC?  How fair are allegations against the ICC of bias and politicization? Have nation states really given over their national sovereignty to the ICC?  Have the ICC, the ad hoc tribunals (the ICTY and the ICTY) and hybrid tribunals (those in Sierre Leone, Cambodia and East Timor) had a deterrent effect on would-be genocidaires? More broadly, what are the pros and the cons of the international criminal justice system, and its less formal cousins such as truth and reconciliation commissions and gacacca?  Does the ICC present a fairer and cheaper alternative to war?

The International Speakers Series will be part of a three quarter sequence comprising a fall workshop, a winter one-unit credit course open to all Stanford students and a spring conference. The results of these conferences will be compiled in a PHR Working Paper Series on the ICC and international criminal justice.

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CISAC Conference Room

Honorable Luis Moreno-Ocampo First Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Speaker
Richard Steinberg Visiting Professor of International Relations at Stanford, Professor of Law at UCLA, Director of the Sanela Diana Jenkins Human Rights Project Host
Helen Stacy Director of the Program on Human Rights Host CDDRL
Conferences

Human Rights Defenders on the Front Line: Voices from the Congo

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The Program on Human Rights at CDDRL, the Center for African Studies and its Africa Table Lecture Series and Student Anti-Genocide Coalition STAND are honored to host Abbé Benoît Kinalegu and Ida Sawyer for this special seminar.

Congolese activist Abbé Benoît Kinalegu works to document and expose abuses by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and rehabilitate its victims.

The LRA is a rebel armed group that has terrorized civilians for years, first in Uganda and now in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan. It is known for extreme brutality, and stands accused of killings, rapes, cutting off people’s lips and limbs, and looting. But it’s perhaps most notorious for abductions of adults and children to serve as soldiers, laborers, or sex slaves. Since 2008, the LRA has killed more than 2,600 civilians and abducted more than 4,000 others.

As head of the Catholic Church’s Peace and Justice Commission in northern Congo’s Haut-Uele District, Kinalegu helped create an Early Warning Network in which local activists report LRA attacks and movements by high-frequency radio. These offer advance warning to UN workers, humanitarians, and local communities in the LRA’s path. Kinalegu is also setting up a rehabilitation center to help some of the most traumatized children who escaped from the LRA and who now need to find their families and try to restore a normal life.

Kinalegu was one of the main advocates for the adoption in 2010 of the Obama administration’s LRA Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act, and he has become a powerful voice urging the international community to bring LRA commanders to justice.

Human Rights Watch has worked with Kinalegu on numerous joint research and advocacy projects, and his organization is a steering committee member of the Congo Advocacy Coalition, which Human Rights Watch coordinates. In October 2011, Kinalegu’s organization and Human Rights Watch co-led a workshop in Dungu, northern Congo, with more than 30 civil society activists from across the LRA-affected regions of central Africa. Participants shared experiences and developed a common position on mobilizing regional and international pressure to end LRA depredations.

Human Rights Watch honors Abbé Benoît Kinalegu for his commitment to protecting civilians and ending the threat posed by the LRA.

Ida Sawyer is Congo researcher and advocate in the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch in Kinshasa, Congo's capital, where she has been based since October 2011. Hired as Goma-based Congo researcher in January 2008, Ida has conducted research across Congo and in areas of northern Congo and neighboring countries affected by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). She is one of the main researchers and authors of six Human Rights Watch reports and dozens of press releases and public letters. Ida also conducts outreach with local civil society groups. Ida came to Human Rights Watch from Cairo, where she worked as a freelance journalist. Her previous Great Lakes experience includes work for Care International and the Charity for Peace Foundation in Northern Uganda, as well as research in Congo on the cross-border dynamics of natural resource exploitation. She holds a master's in International Affairs, specializing in Human Rights, from Columbia University.

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CISAC Conference Room

Abbé Benoît Kinalegu Human Rights Defender Speaker
Ida Sawyer Africa Research and Advocate Speaker Human Rights Watch
Seminars

Health, Human Rights and Why We Should Care

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Health is a product of biological and behavioral factors, and humanitarian law and human rights approaches have a long record of assisting the medical community to identify vulnerable people and groups at risk. But the human rights approach also takes into
consideration that health is the product of social relations and distributive justice. It recognizes the critical role of governments in ensuring access to health and a fair distribution of the social determinants of health. A human rights approach also addresses
issues of human dignity, human agency, and the ethics of collaborative decision-making between professional service providers and the people they serve.

This multi-disciplinary workshop will explore and expand the understanding of the right to health, one that includes the provision of reproductive, maternal and child health as well as
prevention, treatment and control of epidemic, endemic, occupational and other diseases. Vital aspects of this examine the role of governments, the medical and public health sector, and international agencies.

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Lucas Conference Center, the Landau Building - Stanford University

Workshops

The Long and Winding Road: Brazil's unique path to a Truth Commission and the hopes for justice in the future

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On May 16, 2012, President Dilma Rousseff inaugurated the Truth Commission (Comissão da Verdade) and announced the Access to Information Law (Lei de Acesso à Informação).  Inspired by other Truth Commissions in other countries such as Argentina, Chile, Peru, Guatemala and El Salvador, the Brazilian Truth Commission has its own distinctive characteristics that respond to specific national political culture and costumes. Understanding these characteristics is fundamental to recognize how these laws may represent and advance the process of accountability for human rights violations in Brazil and the challenges that still persist due to opposing positions between the Legislative and Executive powers that have recognized these violations and a conservative Judiciary supported by the military.

Bolivar House

Nadejda Marques Manager Speaker Program on Human Rights
Seminars

International Public Interest Initiative Symposium

This two-day symposium will bring together lawyers who are litigating human rights cases in international tribunals, lawyers who deploying international human rights frameworks to advance legal reform goals in their respective countries and public policy advocates who are pressing for legal reforms that are more protective of individual rights

This year’s symposium will focus, as a case study, on achieving gender equality through strategic use of both international and domestic strategies.

Goals:

  1. To learn about successes with respect to using international human rights mechanisms to mobilize domestic law reform
  2. To evaluate the extent to which international human rights mechanisms have had an impact on justice on the ground
  3. To strategize on how human rights litigators, domestic public interest attorneys and domestic public policy advocates can more effectively coordinate their work  in order to impact justice on the ground  through international human rights mechanisms
  4. To examine in-depth how the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and monitoring mechanisms are shaped by local activists and how local activists use the international documents and mechanisms to press for change on the ground.
  5. To examine the impact of local norms and practices on whether a global consensus is reached on international human rights standards and whether the standards are adopted in a domestic context

Content:

Panels will address :

  1. What is the power of human rights ideas for transnational and local social movements and how have these ideas contributed to a rethinking of gender equality around the world?
  2. Using gender equality and CEDAW as a case study, have human rights created a political space for reform in particular countries and what have been the key challenges?
  3. What key successes have lawyers and advocates had in using international human rights mechanisms to ensure gender equality with respect to organizing, litigation and public policy? 
  4. What are the lessons learned from the global gender equality movement for other human rights struggles?
  5. Looking forward, what are the key challenges and opportunities for more strategic collaboration between the movement for gender equality and other aspects of  the human rights movement?

Keynotes will include Christopher Stone, the President of Open Society Foundation and The Honorable Judge Patricia Wald. Panelists are Executive Directors or Presidents of innovative human rights and international justice organizations and public interest attorneys from leading public interest legal organizations in Kenya, Nigeria, China,
South Africa, Malaysia, Palestinian Territories, China and Chile.

The Program on Human Rights at CDDRL is proud to co-sponsor this event
and hopes you take advantage of this wonderful opportunity.

For registration details, please visit:
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/law/forms/LevinPILSymposium.fb

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Stanford Law School

Symposiums

Karl Eikenberry on Afghanistan and Pakistan at the 2012 Aspen Security Forum

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Karl Eikenberry, FSI's Payne Distinguished Lecturer and a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, participated in the 2012 Aspen Security Forum on July 27. Eikenberry joined Eklil Hakimi and Sherry Rehman, the ambassadors to the U.S. from Afghanistan and Pakistan, respectively, in a discussion about those countries. The panel also included Doug Lute, a retired lieutenant general who is now President Barack Obama's special assistant on Afghanistan and Pakistan, and was moderated by Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes.

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Eikenberry
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Defying Gravity: How Long Will Japanese Government Bond Prices Remain High?

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Recent academic papers have shown that the Japanese sovereign debt situation is not sustainable. The puzzle is that the bond rate has remained low and stable. Some suggest that the low yield can be explained by domestic residents’ willingness to hold Japanese government bonds (JGBs) despite its low return, and that as long as domestic residents remain home-biased, the JGBs are sustainable. About 95% of JGBs are currently owned by domestic residents. This paper argues that even with such dominance of domestic investors, if the amount of government debt breaches the ceiling imposed by the domestic private sector financial assets, the JGB rates can rapidly rise and the Japanese government can face difficulty rolling over the existing debt. A simulation is conducted on future paths of household saving and fiscal situations to show that the ceiling would be breached in the next 10 years or so without a drastic fiscal consolidation. This paper also shows that the government debt can be kept under the ceiling with sufficiently large tax increases. The JGB yields can rise even before the ceiling is hit, if the expectation of such drastic fiscal consolidation disappears. This paper points out several possible triggers for such a change in expectation. However, downgrading of JGBs by credit rating agencies is not likely to be a trigger, since past downgrades have not produced any change in the JGB yield. If and when the JGB rates rapidly rise, the Japanese financial institutions that hold a large amount of JGBs will sustain losses and the economy will suffer from fiscal austerity, financial instability, and inflation.

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Publication Type
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Journal Publisher
The National Bureau of Economic Research
Authors
Takeo Hoshi
External URL
http://www.nber.org/papers/w18287.pdf?new_window=1
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