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.
Reversing the Brain Drain? The Movement of People and Skills in an Era of Economic Globalization
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About the seminar
Dan Wang's talk will examine the economic impact of skilled return migrants on their home countries. While much scholarship contends that members of skilled diasporas are ideally positioned to transfer knowledge and resources back to their home countries, Wang's research
suggests that many returnees are often unable and/or unwilling to do so. He will present findings from a novel 1997–2011 survey of over 4,250 former J1 Visa holders from over 80 countries. The principal outcome under study concerns how skilled returnees reapply and make use of the knowledge they gain abroad (in this case, the United States) upon reentry to their home countries. Specifically, he compares the knowledge transfer outcomes of returnees to those who stayed abroad, and contrasts returnees from different countries and industry contexts, including returnee entrepreneurs. Finally, Germany and China are used as comparative case studies of returnee skill transfer.
About the speaker
Dan Wang is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University. His principal research interests include economic sociology, organizations, globalization, technology, and social network analysis. His past research has examined the relationship between China's changing domestic patent laws and the country's R&D collaboration patterns, tactical diffusion through American social movement organization collaboration networks, knowledge transfer in academic co-authorship networks, and statistical methods for addressing measurement error in network analysis. He received is BA in sociology and comparative literature from Columbia University in 2007.
Philippines Conference Room
Dan Wang
Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Sociology
Speaker
Stanford University
Seminars
Social Media in Democratic Mobilization in Egypt: New Trends
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About the Speakers
Ahmed Salah is the executive director of the House of New Future and Center For Legal and Human Rights Studies. Salah wears a number of other hats including that of a freelance reporter and independent political activist. He is one of the co-founders of Kifaya and Youth for Change. He is also a co-founder, strategist, ideologist, and foreign affairs representative of the April 6 Youth Movement. His plan to initiate a number of small rallies in the poor and middle class areas across Egypt subsequently helped create the first day of the revolution, January 25th. He is currently working on creating democratic representations from every part of the country.
Sabah Hamamou is one of Egypt’s most acclaimed new media journalists. Her YouTube channel has been viewed over 370,000 times. Hamamou is also a deputy editor at Al Ahram, Egypt’s most prestigious newspaper. Sabah initially joined the protests as a reporter, but when the protesters came under attack on the first evening of the revolution, she posted the videos she had taken from Tahrir Square, instantly getting 90,000 hits. Sabah then led successfully an in-house revolt at Al-Ahram over the newspaper’s insistence on reporting regime propaganda about the revolution.
Lunch will be served.
CISAC Conference Room
Ahmed Saleh
Egptian Activist
Speaker
Sabah Hamamou
Egyptian Activist
Speaker
Conferences
Kieran Oberman tteching Global Justice Class
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News
Date
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During spring quarter Kieran Oberman, Post doctoral Fellow for the Program on Global Justice has been teaching "An Introduction to Global Justice". The course looks at controversial ethical questions regarding international affairs such as what should be done to alleviate global poverty, under what circumstances is war justified and who should pay the costs of averting climate change. The course has proved extremely popular, so much so we have had to move to a much larger lecture theater to accommodate everyone. In class students have participated enthusiastically in debate and developed their positions on some of the world's most pressing problems.
The focus of his research this quarter closely pairs with that of his teaching. The paper he is currently working on is entitled "Justice and War: Is the War in Afghanistan an Injustice to Africa?" The paper holds that a strong argument against the resort to war is that war expends resources that could be used to address poverty. If a war is to be justified it must be justified to the victims of poverty as well as to the victims of the war. This point (he hopes) will seem intuitive to many, yet strangely it is almost entirely disregarded in modern just war theory. His paper asks why this is so.
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Interrogating Democracy in World Politics
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It is often assumed that democracy is both desirable and possible in global politics. Interrogating Democracy in World Politics provides an important counter-argument to this assumption by questioning the history, meaning and concepts of democracy in contemporary international and global politics.
Combining viewpoints from the fields of international relations, political theory and history, the book includes:
- Critical examinations of the concept of democracy as a political order and ethical ideal
- Assessment of the role and function of democracy in how contemporary political events are understood and evaluated
- Analysis of the relationship of democracy to international stability, liberalism and the emergence of capitalist economies
The book focuses on the move from the concept of ‘international politics’ to ‘world politics’, recognising the equal importance of understanding democratic interaction both within and between states. It reviews current scholarly thinking in the field before providing a complex theoretical re-engagement with the meaning of democracy in contemporary world politics.
Interrogating Democracy in World Politics will be of interest to students and scholars of politics and international relations, democratization studies and globalization.
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Publication Type
Books
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
Routledge
Number
978-0-415-59531-5
Bruce Jones and Francis Fukuyama on the World Bank's Development Report
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Bruce Jones will present on the World Bank's 2011 World Development Report, on "Conflict, Security and Development." The report, which is the World Bank's flagship annual research product, reviews and challenges previous Bank findings on the causes of conflict and fragility; provides new research findings on strategies for recovery from conflict and violence; and sets out a series of directions for national policy and international institutional reform. Dr. Jones will brief on these, as well as on the politics of research and implementation at the World Bank and the UN.
Dr. Bruce Jones is director and senior fellow of the NYU Center on International Cooperation, and senior fellow and director of the Managing Global Insecurity Program at the Brookings Institution. Currently, his is also the Senior External Advisor for the World Bank's Development Report (WDR) on Conflict, Security and Development. Jones will provide an overview and account of the WDR and will be joined by Dr. Francis Fukuyama who will participate as a discussant on the topic.
In March 2010, Jones was appointed by the United Nations Secretary-General as a member of the Senior Advisory Group to guide the Review of International Civilian Capacities.
Dr. Jones’ research focuses on US policy on global order and transnational threats; on multilateral institutions in peace and security issues; on the role of the United Nations in conflict management and international security; and on global peacekeeping, post-conflict operations and fragile state engagements.
Prior to assuming the Directorship of the Center, Dr. Jones served in several capacities at the United Nations. He was Senior Advisor in the Office of the Secretary-General during the UN reform effort leading up to the World Summit 2005, and in the same period was Acting Secretary of the Secretary-General’s Policy Committee. In 2004-2005, he was Deputy Research Director of the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. From 2000-2002 he was Special Assistant to the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East peace process; and held assignments in the UN Interim Mission in Kosovo, and in the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Dr. Jones has been interviewed by or cited in US and international media, including the New York Times, LA Times, Globe and Mail, BBC, CNN, Fox, NPR, and Al Jazeera.
Dr. Jones holds a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics; and was Hamburg Fellow in Conflict Prevention at Stanford University. He is co-author with Carlos Pascual and Stephen Stedman of Power and Responsibility: Building International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats (Brookings Press, 2009); co-editor with Shepard Forman of Cooperating for Peace and Security (Cambridge University Press, 2009); author of Peacemaking in Rwanda: The Dynamics of Failures; Series Editor of the Annual Review of Global Peace Operations (Lynne Reinner) and author of several book chapters and journal articles on US strategy, global order, the Middle East, peacekeeping, post-conflict peacebuilding, and strategic coordination.
He is Consulting Professor at Stanford University, Adjunct Faculty at the NYU Wagner School of Public Service, and Professor by Courtesy at the NYU Department of Politics.
CISAC Conference Room
Stephen J. Stedman
CDDRL
Encina Hall, C152
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
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sstedman@stanford.edu
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
Stephen Stedman is a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), an affiliated faculty member at CISAC, and professor of political science (by courtesy) at Stanford University. He is director of CDDRL's Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy, Development and Rule of Law, and will be faculty director of the Program on International Relations in the School of Humanities and Sciences effective Fall 2025.
In 2011-12 Professor Stedman served as the Director for the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy, and Security, a body of eminent persons tasked with developing recommendations on promoting and protecting the integrity of elections and international electoral assistance. The Commission is a joint project of the Kofi Annan Foundation and International IDEA, an intergovernmental organization that works on international democracy and electoral assistance.
In 2003-04 Professor Stedman was Research Director of the United Nations High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change and was a principal drafter of the Panel’s report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility.
In 2005 he served as Assistant Secretary-General and Special Advisor to the Secretary- General of the United Nations, with responsibility for working with governments to adopt the Panel’s recommendations for strengthening collective security and for implementing changes within the United Nations Secretariat, including the creation of a Peacebuilding Support Office, a Counter Terrorism Task Force, and a Policy Committee to act as a cabinet to the Secretary-General.
His most recent book, with Bruce Jones and Carlos Pascual, is Power and Responsibility: Creating International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2009).
Director, Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy, Development and Rule of Law
Director, Program in International Relations
Affiliated faculty at the Center for International Security and Cooperation
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Francis Fukuyama
Encina Hall, C148
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305
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f.fukuyama@stanford.edu
Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy
Research Affiliate at The Europe Center
Professor by Courtesy, Department of Political Science
Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a faculty member of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also Director of Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy, and a professor (by courtesy) of Political Science.
Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His book In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir will be published in fall 2026.
Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation, and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004. He is editor-in-chief of American Purpose, an online journal.
Dr. Fukuyama holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), Aarhus University (Denmark), the Pardee Rand Graduate School, and Adam Mickiewicz University (Poland). He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Trustees of Freedom House, and the Board of the Volcker Alliance. He is a fellow of the National Academy for Public Administration, a member of the American Political Science Association, and of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.
(October 2025)
Global Populisms
A new project examining the global surge in populist movements and what it means for established democratic rules and institutions.
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CV
Document
francis_fukuyama_cv_april_2024.pdf
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Bruce Jones
Director and Senior Fellow
Speaker
NYU Center on International Cooperation
Seminars