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.
The origin and ethics of violence
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What can possibly explain the transformation that sometimes happens from non-violent civilian to combatant to criminal? Pulitzer Prize winning author and CISAC affiliate Richard Rhodes tackled this bedeviling question head-on in a recent lecture for Stanford's Ethics & War series, co-sponsored by the Center for International Security and Cooperation. Drawing heavily upon the work of Lonnie H. Athens, a Seton Hall University criminology professor, about whom Rhodes wrote a 1999 book entitled Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist, Rhodes argued that all violent criminals go through a process that Athens called "violentization." The first stage, "brutalization," consists of witnessing abusive or violent behavior, often at a young age, and receiving encouragement to act in a similar way to resolve disputes. In the second stage, "belligerency," the individual takes stock of what has happened, examines his or her situation, and decides to begin to move to the third stage: using serious violence, if provoked, as a means of protection.
In Rhodes' view, this process is essentially identical to the training a military recruit undergoes. Both, he says, go through a period of re-socialization during which even lethal violence become acceptable, expected, and rewarded. Military recruits are "deliberately and systematically rebuked, scorned and punished for civilian behavior and coached and rewarded for military behavior including the controlled use of violence," he observes. "Violent domination, personal horrification and violent coaching are fundamental to basic military training." There is, however, a fundamental difference. The violent criminal moves on to a fourth stage, "virulence," in which the individual becomes willing to commit serious violence without provocation and embraces the sense of confidence and power created by the successful completion of these acts. The soldier, by contrast, is constrained within the third stage of violentization by the rule of law, by ethics, by codes of honor, and "implicitly," says Rhodes, "support from military leaders up the chain of command," who "are expected to limit their demands of violent action to appropriately defensive campaigns."
Within these constraints, the limitations of violence are clear. Self-defense is justifiable, and by extension so is the killing of an enemy combatant. Even the strategic bombing during World War II (and presumably more recently) can be justified with such arguments, Rhodes argues, "although that logic grew increasingly thin as the bombing expanded from military targets to military industrial targets and finally to the homes and neighborhoods of enemy civilians."
What, then, to make of My Lai, in which American soldiers killed babies and children, the Einsatzgruppen, who shot hundreds of thousands of innocent Jews with horrific efficiency, or the heinous war crimes committed in conflicts around the world? In these cases, the perpetrators have found themselves moving into virulence. The constraints that circumscribed their violent actions have broken down. Authorities in the chain of command either overlooked or ignored the need to enforce the limitations required to prevent criminal violence. In the eyes of the perpetrators, and in some cases those making the direct orders, the enemy became an omnipotent and ubiquitous presence, and the power that came with committing lethal violence was overwhelming. The line between self-defense and murder became so attenuated that it was essentially meaningless. Virtually the only possible outcome: unrestrained lethal violence.
Rhodes argues that the need to understand this dynamic has become increasingly urgent. The nuclear deterrent has largely foreclosed the prospect of conventional war, and "modern combat has strained the traditional limitations of violence on war to the breaking point and beyond." Modern weapons make it possible to do more lethal violence than the old days of single-shot rifles and hand grenades, he says, and the line between combatants and civilians can become difficult to define.
The quandary now is how to ensure that the process of violentization among members of the military does not extend to the fourth category. Even Heinrich Himmler, commander of the Einsatzgruppen, understood this on some level. He was horrified, Rhodes says, that members of his elite fighting squad had become such enthusiastic killers that they would take it upon themselves to find and shoot Jews. Others, in other wartime situations, unable to deal with the consequences of their actions as they meandered toward that fourth stage, killed themselves, suffered serious psychological problems, or committed acts of violence back at home. Now we are seeing similar consequences among the men and women who are forced to draw distinctions every day between civilian and enemy combatants. Indeed, he says, only the ethical and legal limitations put on soldiers, and enforced by their superiors in the chain of command, can protect them from becoming malevolently violent. Failing to maintain these restrictions has dire consequences. As Rhodes and many others before him have said, "as we sow, so shall we reap."
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Trends and Prospects in Taiwan's Party Politics: Implications of the Recent Special Municipality Elections
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Taiwan’s special municipality elections have been viewed by many as the “mid-term” for the Ma Ying-jeou presidency, bearing important political significance for the 2012 presidential election. In this special seminar, Professor Yun-han Chu, one of the leading political scientists in Taiwan and also President of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, will analyze the recent special municipality elections and their implications for Taiwan’s future political trends. Professor Chu will provide firsthand information about these recent election campaigns and what they reveal about the state of democracy in Taiwan. In analyzing the election results, he will also shed light on how the race for the presidency in 2012 is shaping up.
Yun-han Chu is Distinguished Research Fellow of the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica and Professor of Political Science at National Taiwan University. He serves concurrently as president of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. Professor Chu received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Minnesota and joined the faculty of National Taiwan University in 1987. He specializes in politics of Greater China, East Asian political economy and democratization. He is a three-time recipient of the Outstanding Research Award from Taiwan’s National Science Council. He currently serves on the editorial board of International Studies Quarterly, Pacific Affairs, China Review, Journal of Contemporary China, Journal of East Asian Studies and Journal of Democracy. He is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of eleven books. Among his recent English publications are Crafting Democracy in Taiwan (Institute for National Policy Research, 1992), Consolidating Third-Wave Democracies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), China Under Jiang Zemin (Lynne Reinner, 2000), and The New Chinese Leadership (Cambridge University Press, 2004). His works have also appeared in some leading journals including World Politics, International Organization, China Quarterly, Journal of Democracy, and Asian Survey.
Philippines Conference Room
Yun-han Chu
Distinguished Research Fellow
Speaker
Institute of Political Science, Academia Sinica
Seminars
Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives
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Join the editors of Hope Deferred and Stanford faculty members as they explore the power of narration to make human rights claims.
The editors will recount true stories told by Zimbabweans about losing their homes, land, livelihoods, and families as a direct result of political violence. Panelists will discuss the editors' goals in publishing the book and the role of story-telling in raising awareness and improving human rights.
Hope Deferred is the first public event of Human Well-Being and Human Rights, a 2010/2011 series that will expore humanistic conceptions of human well-being that underlie definitions of, and policy responses to, human rights.
This event is co-sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center.
Levinthal Hall
Peter Orner
Writer, Assistant Professor of Creative Writing
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San Francisco University
Annie Holmes
Zimbabwean writer, editor, filmmaker, and trainer
Speaker
Conferences
Designing Technology to Combat Corruption
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The right to information is the most promising tool to combat corruption in the world today, inspired by which more than 80 countries now have right to information laws and 50 more are considering proposals. Based on his experience with India's right to information movement, Vivek will discuss ways in which ICT tools could be designed in ways that could strengthen people's movements to combat corruption.
Vivek Srinivasan recently graduated from Maxwell School of Syracuse University. His work seeks to understand why there is a high political commitment to delivering public services in Tamil Nadu, a southern Indian state. Prior to this, he worked with the Right to Food Campaign and with the National Alliance for the Fundamental Right to Education in India. He has recently started a project with Intel create online tools to monitor the implementation of India's new right to education law.
He will be starting the position of Program Manager for the Program on Liberation Technology at Stanford University in late January 2011.
Wallenberg Theater
Vivek Srinivasan
Speaker
Seminars
A Tale of Two Blogospheres
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Drawing on data from summer 2008, I will compare top U.S. political blogs on the left and right. The comparison shows significant cross-ideological variations. Sites on the left adopt different, and more participatory technical platforms; comprise significantly fewer sole-authored sites; include user blogs; maintain more fluid boundaries between secondary and primary content; include longer narrative and discussion posts; and (among the top half of the blogs in our sample) more often use blogs as platforms for mobilization. The news producer/consumer relationship is more attenuated on the left wing of the political blogosphere than the right. The practices of the left are more consistent with the prediction that the networked public sphere offers new pathways for discursive participation by a wider array of individuals; meanwhile, the practices of the right suggest that a small group of elites may retain more exclusive agenda-setting authority online. The cross-ideological divergence indicates that the Internet can equally be adopted to undermine or to replicate the traditional distinction between the production and consumption of political information. Moreover, the findings imply that the prevailing techniques of domain-based link analysis used to study the political blogosphere are misleading. These findings have significant implications for the study of prosumption and for the mechanisms by which the networked public sphere may or may not alter democratic participation relative to the mass mediated public sphere.
Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Before joining the faculty at Harvard Law School, he was Joseph M. Field '55 Professor of Law at Yale. He writes about the Internet and the emergence of networked economy and society, as well as the organization of infrastructure, such as wireless communications. In the 1990s he played a role in characterizing the centrality of information commons to innovation, information production, and freedom in both its autonomy and democracy senses. In the 2000s, he worked more on the sources and economic and political significance of radically decentralized individual action and collaboration in the production of information, knowledge and culture. His work traverses a wide range of disciplines and sectors, and is taught in a variety of professional schools and academic departments. In real world applications, his work has been widely discussed in both the business sector and civil society.
Wallenberg Theater
Yochai Benkler
Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies
Speaker
Harvard Law School
Seminars
Law professor noted for public service to be appointed CISAC co-director
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Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar (MA ’96, PhD ’00), a lawyer, scholar, and former official in the Clinton and Obama administrations, will assume the position of co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at the conclusion of the current academic year, FSI Director Coit D. Blacker and Law School Dean Larry Kramer have announced.
An expert in administrative law, international security, and public health and safety, Cuéllar is Professor and the Deane F. Johnson Faculty Scholar at Stanford Law School, and is also professor (by courtesy) of political science in the School of Humanities and Sciences. He is a longtime affiliated faculty member at CISAC, where he currently serves on the executive committee. He has collaborated with or served on the boards of several civil society organizations, including the Haas Center for Public Service, Asylum Access, and the American Constitution Society.
“I’m delighted that Tino has agreed to serve as co-director of FSI’s Center for International Security and Cooperation,” says Coit D. Blacker, FSI’s director and the Olivier Nomellini Professor in International Studies. “He will bring to the job just the right combination of skills, talents, and sensibilities to assure the Center’s continuing relevance and future success. Tino is an acclaimed scholar, an outstanding teacher, and an experienced policymaker who thinks hard and very creatively about the most pressing national and international security issues of our time – including problems of executive power and accountability, public health, and migration. Finding someone to take the reins at CISAC following Scott D. Sagan’s long and successful tenure as co-director was never going to be easy. But with Siegfried S. Hecker and now Tino Cuéllar at the helm, I think we’ve put together a winning team.”
Cuéllar has had an extensive record of public service since joining Stanford Law School faculty in 2001. Recently, he served in the Obama Administration as Special Assistant to the President for Justice and Regulatory Policy at the White House. In that role, he led the Domestic Policy Council’s work on criminal justice and drug policy, public health and food safety, regulatory reform, borders and immigration, civil rights, and rural and agricultural policy. Among other responsibilities, he represented the Domestic Policy Council in the development of the first-ever Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, and coordinated the President’s Food Safety Working Group.
"Tino's decision to become co-director of CISAC is good for everyone,” said Larry Kramer, Richard E. Lang Professor and Dean of Stanford Law School. “It's a great opportunity for him to pursue and build on his expertise in national security. It adds an innovative and forward-thinking mind and voice to CISAC. And it will generate tremendous new opportunities for collaboration between the Law School and CISAC, to the great benefit of our students and faculty."
In July 2010, when Cuéllar left the Obama administration to return to Stanford, he also accepted an appointment from the President of the United States to the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States, a non-partisan agency charged with recommending improvements in the efficiency and fairness of federal regulatory programs. Before joining the White House staff, Cuéllar co-chaired the Obama-Biden Transition’s Immigration Policy Working Group. Earlier in his career, during the second term of the Clinton Administration, Cuéllar worked at the U.S. Department of the Treasury as Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary for Enforcement, focusing on countering financial crime, improving border coordination, and enhancing anti-corruption measures.
Cuéllar graduated from Calexico High School in rural Southern California, going on to receive a BA magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1993, a JD from Yale Law School in 1997, and a PhD in political science from Stanford University in 2000. Cuéllar clerked for Chief Judge Mary M. Schroeder of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit from 2000 to 2001.
Cuéllar will join current CISAC co-director Siegfried Hecker, professor (research) of management science and engineering and FSI senior fellow, in leading one of the country’s preeminent university-based research centers on international security and cooperation. He will succeed longtime co-director Scott Sagan, who has been leading the Center since 1998. “I am extremely pleased that Tino Cuéllar will be joining me,” said Hecker. “He will build on the extraordinary leadership that Scott Sagan has provided over the last 12 years, and his outstanding academic credentials and deep experience in Washington crafting security policy will be a tremendous asset to CISAC."
Sagan, the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science and FSI senior fellow, will continue as an important presence at CISAC and FSI, with plans to focus on policy-related research for the American Academy of Arts and Science's Global Nuclear Future Initiative, where he serves as the co-chair with Harvard’s Steven Miller. Sagan has been instrumental in building CISAC’s capacity as an international leader in interdisciplinary university-based research and training aimed at tackling some of the world's most difficult security problems. “CISAC is a small national treasure inside this great university: a multidisciplinary research institution that consistently produces rigorous policy-relevant scholarship and creatively trains the next generation of international security specialists,” said Sagan. “I am proud to have helped lead the Center for the past 12 years, and am equally excited to be staying on at CISAC as a faculty member in residence."
"Tino Cuéllar will be a spectacular co-director for CISAC,” he added. “His joint legal and political science training brings new perspectives to international and national problems and his research on the security implications of U.S. immigration law, on efforts to combat terrorist financing, and on the politics of transnational law enforcement places new and important subjects directly onto the CISAC global policy agenda."
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Nancy Ruttenburg
Building 460, Room 418
Main Quad
Stanford University
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ruttenburg@stanford.edu
William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature
Professor of English
Professor, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature
Professor, by courtesy, of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Nancy Ruttenburg is the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature in the English Department at Stanford. She also holds courtesy appointments in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. She received the PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford (1988) and taught at Harvard, Berkeley, and most recently at NYU, where she was chair of the Department of Comparative Literature from 2002-2008. Her research interests lie at the intersection of political, religious, and literary expression in colonial through antebellum America and nineteenth-century Russia, with a particular focus on the development of liberal and non-liberal forms of democratic subjectivity. Related interests include history of the novel, novel theory, and the global novel; philosophy of religion and ethics; and problems of comparative method, especially as they pertain to North American literature and history.
Prof. Ruttenburg is the author of Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship (Stanford UP, 1998) and Dostoevsky's Democracy (Princeton UP, 2008), and she has recently written on the work of J. M. Coetzee and on Melville’s “Bartleby.” Books in progress include a study of secularization in the postrevolutionary United States arising out of the naturalization of “conscience” as inalienable right, entitled Conscience, Rights, and 'The Delirium of Democracy'; and a comparative work entitled Dostoevsky And for which the Russian writer serves as a lens on the historical development of a set of intercalated themes in the literature of American modernity. These encompass self-making and self-loss (beginning with Frederick Douglass's serial autobiographies); sentimentalism and sadism (in abolitionist fiction); crime and masculinity (including Mailer's The Executioner's Song); and the intersection of race, religious fundamentalism, and radical politics (focusing on the works of James Baldwin and Marilynne Robinson). Her courses will draw from both these projects.
Prof. Ruttenburg is past president of the Charles Brockden Brown Society and has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Humanities Center Fellowship, a University of California President's Research Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the Social Science Research Council for Russian and East European Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council for Learned Societies.
Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
