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.
PESD releases study of Nigeria's national oil company NNPC
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Nigeria’s national oil company NNPC is at the center of a profoundly dysfunctional oil sector in a country that some argue embodies the “resource curse.” In a new study, PESD Associate Director Mark C. Thurber and PESD affiliated researchers Ifeyinwa Emelife and Patrick Heller find that NNPC’s persistent underperformance stems from its role as the linchpin of a sophisticated and durable system of patronage.
Abstract
Nigeria depends heavily on oil and gas, with hydrocarbon activities providing around 65 percent of total government revenue and 95 percent of export revenues. While Nigeria supplies some LNG to world markets and is starting to export a small amount of gas to Ghana via pipeline, the great majority of the country's hydrocarbon earnings come from oil. In 2008, Nigeria was the 5th largest oil exporter and 10th largest holder of proved oil reserves in the world according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The country's national oil company NNPC (Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation) sits at the nexus between the many interests in Nigeria that seek a stake in the country's oil riches, the government, and the private companies that actually operate the vast majority of oil and gas projects.
Through its many divisions and subsidiaries, NNPC serves as an oil sector regulator, a buyer and seller of oil and petroleum products, a technical operator of hydrocarbon activities on a limited basis, and a service provider to the Nigerian oil sector. With isolated exceptions, NNPC is not very effective at performing its various oil sector jobs. It is neither a competent oil company nor an efficient regulator for the sector. Managers of NNPC's constituent units, lacking the ability to reliably fund themselves, are robbed of business autonomy and the chance to develop capability. There are few incentives for NNPC employees to be entrepreneurial for the company's benefit and many incentives for private action and corruption. It is no accident that NNPC operations are disproportionately concentrated on oil marketing and downstream functions, which offer the best opportunities for private benefit. The few parts of NNPC that actually add value, like engineering design subsidiary NETCO, tend to be removed from large financial flows and the patronage opportunities they bring.
Although NNPC performs poorly as an instrument for maximizing long-term oil revenue for the state, it actually functions well as an instrument of patronage, which helps to explain its durability. Each additional transaction generated by its profuse bureaucracy provides an opportunity for well-connected individuals to profit by being the gatekeepers whose approval must be secured, especially in contracting processes. NNPC's role as distributor of licenses for export of crude oil and import of refined products also helps make it a locus for patronage activities. Corruption, bureaucracy, and non-market pricing regimes for oil sales all reinforce each other in a dysfunctional equilibrium that has proved difficult to dislodge despite repeated efforts at oil sector reform.
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Film: "Fog of War"
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The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara is a 2003 film about the life and times of former U.S. Secretary of
Defense Robert S. McNamara. The film, directed by Errol Morris, won the
Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature (2003) and the Independent
Spirit Award for Best Documentary Feature (2003).
Using archival footage, United States Cabinet conversation recordings,
and an interview of the eighty-five-year-old Robert McNamara, The Fog of War depicts McNamara's life, from his birth during the First World War
remembering the time American troops returned from Europe, to working as
a WWII Whiz Kid military officer, to being the Ford Motor Company's
president, to his being employed as Secretary of Defense and the Cuban
Missile Crisis, to managing the American Vietnam War, as defense
secretary for presidents Kennedy and Johnson — emphasizing the war's
brutality under their regimes, and how he was hired as secretary of
defense, despite limited military experience.
According to Morris, hearing McNamara raise all of these ethical issues and questions about a war which most of us see as morally unambiguous is very, very powerful. What Morris especially liked about the film was that it proved it was possible to make a movie about events – events that are removed from us by 40, 50, 60 years but which are very much about today. Many of the issues that McNamara is talking about in the movie are relevant to what's going on right now, and there's this surreal sense that nothing has changed.
Faculty talk back led by Scott Sagan (Co-Director of Center for International Security and Cooperation / Political Science, Stanford)
Annenberg Auditorium, 435 Lasuen Mall
Stanford University
Scott D. Sagan
CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, E202
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
0
ssagan@stanford.edu
The Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science
The Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Scott D. Sagan is the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, the Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, and a senior fellow based at FSI's Center for International Security and Cooperation, where he previously served as the social science co-director. He also serves as co-chair of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Committee on International Security Studies. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sagan was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University and served as special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon.
Sagan is the author of Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton University Press, 1989); The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton University Press, 1993); and, with co-author Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate (W.W. Norton, 2012). He is the co-editor of Insider Threats (Cornell University Press, 2017) with Matthew Bunn; and co-editor of The Fragile Balance of Terror (Cornell University Press, 2022) with Vipin Narang. Sagan was also the guest editor of a two-volume special issue of Daedalus: Ethics, Technology, and War (Fall 2016) and The Changing Rules of War (Winter 2017).
Recent publications include “Creeds and Contestation: How US Nuclear and Legal Doctrine Influence Each Other,” with Janina Dill, in a special issue of Security Studies (December 2025); “Kettles of Hawks: Public Opinion on the Nuclear Taboo and Noncombatant Immunity in the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Israel”, with Janina Dill and Benjamin A. Valentino in Security Studies (February 2022); “The Rule of Law and the Role of Strategy in U.S. Nuclear Doctrine” with Allen S. Weiner in International Security (Spring 2021); “Does the Noncombatant Immunity Norm Have Stopping Power?” with Benjamin A. Valentino in International Security (Fall 2020); and “Just War and Unjust Soldiers: American Public Opinion on the Moral Equality of Combatants” and “On Reciprocity, Revenge, and Replication: A Rejoinder to Walzer, McMahan, and Keohane” with Benjamin A. Valentino in Ethics & International Affairs (Winter 2019).
In 2022, Sagan was awarded Thérèse Delpech Memorial Award from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace at their International Nuclear Policy Conference. In 2017, he received the International Studies Association’s Susan Strange Award which recognizes the scholar whose “singular intellect, assertiveness, and insight most challenge conventional wisdom and intellectual and organizational complacency" in the international studies community. Sagan was also the recipient of the National Academy of Sciences William and Katherine Estes Award in 2015, for his work addressing the risks of nuclear weapons and the causes of nuclear proliferation. The award, which is granted triennially, recognizes “research in any field of cognitive or behavioral science that advances understanding of issues relating to the risk of nuclear war.” In 2013, Sagan received the International Studies Association's International Security Studies Section Distinguished Scholar Award. He has also won four teaching awards: Stanford’s 1998-99 Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching; Stanford's 1996 Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching; the International Studies Association’s 2008 Innovative Teaching Award; and the Monterey Institute for International Studies’ Nonproliferation Education Award in 2009.
Former co-director, Center for International Security and Cooperation
CV
Document
sagan_cv_july_2026_1.pdf
(273.77 KB)
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Seminars
Who Should Fight? The Ethics of the Draft
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- Should citizens be required to serve their country by fighting for it?
- Do we think differently about the decision to go to war when only a small number of citizens will fight it?
- Do volunteer armies and draft armies fight differently in combat?
This panel discussion focuses on the draft versus the volunteer army in the U.S. Our distinguished panelists examine "who should fight" in a democracy, focusing on the ethical dimension of a state's system of military service.
Panelists are:
David Kennedy (History, Emeritus, Stanford). Kennedy's scholarly focus is on the integration of economic and cultural analysis with social and political history. A prolific historian, he won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in History for Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, which recounts the history of the United States in the two great crises of the Great Depression and World War II, and was a 1981 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in History for Over Here: The First World War and American Society, which uses the history of American involvement in World War I to analyze the American political system.
Eliot Cohen (Strategic Studies, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies). Cohen's work focuses on diplomacy, international relations, irregular warfare, military history, military power and strategy, as well as strategic and security issues. He has served as Counselor of the U.S. Department of State, a member of the Policy Planning Staff of the Secretary of Defense, and a member of the Defense Policy Board. He also directed the U.S. Air Force's Gulf War Air Power Survey.
Jean Bethke Elshtain (Social and Political Ethics, Divinity School, The University of Chicago). Regularly named as one of America's foremost public intellectuals, Elshtain writes frequently for journals of civic opinion and lectures widely in the United States and abroad on themes of democracy, ethical dilemmas, religion and politics, and international relations. Elshtain has authored many books including Women and War; Democracy on Trial (a New York Times' notable book for 1995); and Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (named one of the best nonfiction books of 2003 by Publishers Weekly.
Oak Lounge
David Kennedy
History, Emeritus
Speaker
Stanford
Eliot Cohen
Strategic Studies
Speaker
Johns Hopkins
Jean Bethke Elshtain
Social and Political Ethics
Speaker
University of Chicago Divinity School
Scott D. Sagan
CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, E202
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
0
ssagan@stanford.edu
The Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science
The Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Scott D. Sagan is the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, the Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, and a senior fellow based at FSI's Center for International Security and Cooperation, where he previously served as the social science co-director. He also serves as co-chair of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Committee on International Security Studies. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sagan was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University and served as special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon.
Sagan is the author of Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton University Press, 1989); The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton University Press, 1993); and, with co-author Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate (W.W. Norton, 2012). He is the co-editor of Insider Threats (Cornell University Press, 2017) with Matthew Bunn; and co-editor of The Fragile Balance of Terror (Cornell University Press, 2022) with Vipin Narang. Sagan was also the guest editor of a two-volume special issue of Daedalus: Ethics, Technology, and War (Fall 2016) and The Changing Rules of War (Winter 2017).
Recent publications include “Creeds and Contestation: How US Nuclear and Legal Doctrine Influence Each Other,” with Janina Dill, in a special issue of Security Studies (December 2025); “Kettles of Hawks: Public Opinion on the Nuclear Taboo and Noncombatant Immunity in the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Israel”, with Janina Dill and Benjamin A. Valentino in Security Studies (February 2022); “The Rule of Law and the Role of Strategy in U.S. Nuclear Doctrine” with Allen S. Weiner in International Security (Spring 2021); “Does the Noncombatant Immunity Norm Have Stopping Power?” with Benjamin A. Valentino in International Security (Fall 2020); and “Just War and Unjust Soldiers: American Public Opinion on the Moral Equality of Combatants” and “On Reciprocity, Revenge, and Replication: A Rejoinder to Walzer, McMahan, and Keohane” with Benjamin A. Valentino in Ethics & International Affairs (Winter 2019).
In 2022, Sagan was awarded Thérèse Delpech Memorial Award from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace at their International Nuclear Policy Conference. In 2017, he received the International Studies Association’s Susan Strange Award which recognizes the scholar whose “singular intellect, assertiveness, and insight most challenge conventional wisdom and intellectual and organizational complacency" in the international studies community. Sagan was also the recipient of the National Academy of Sciences William and Katherine Estes Award in 2015, for his work addressing the risks of nuclear weapons and the causes of nuclear proliferation. The award, which is granted triennially, recognizes “research in any field of cognitive or behavioral science that advances understanding of issues relating to the risk of nuclear war.” In 2013, Sagan received the International Studies Association's International Security Studies Section Distinguished Scholar Award. He has also won four teaching awards: Stanford’s 1998-99 Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching; Stanford's 1996 Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching; the International Studies Association’s 2008 Innovative Teaching Award; and the Monterey Institute for International Studies’ Nonproliferation Education Award in 2009.
Former co-director, Center for International Security and Cooperation
CV
Document
sagan_cv_july_2026_1.pdf
(273.77 KB)
Hide publication sections
Off
Seminars
Stanford Ethics & War Series (2010-2011)
The Bowen H. McCoy Center for Ethics in Society ran a year-long symposium series over the 2010-11 academic year entitled Ethics and War. The symposium series featured philosophers, writers, lawyers, historians, social scientists, human rights activists, and policy makers who have grappled with the hard moral questions raised by war.
Erik Jensen's Afghan Legal Education Project wins new grant
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An Afghan legal education project led by CDDRL affiliated faculty Erik Jensen, co-director of Stanford Law School's Rule of Law Program, and former Stanford law students Alexander Benard and Eli Sugerman has won adherents among Afghan students eager to learn the country's new laws and top Afghan officials, including the chief justice of the Supreme Court. The group's three online text books, with a fourth to be published this fall, have been so successful that the U.S. State Department has just awarded Stanford $1.3 million to continue the work.
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Democratic Politics and Labor Activism in Korea
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Professor Lee will examine why South Korean labor unions have engaged in militant activism since the country's transition to democracy in 1987. This situation contrasts with Taiwan, to which Korea's economic and political development is otherwise very similar. Professor Lee will argue that the militant unionism reflects the weakness of Korea's democratic institutions, particularly its political parties.
Professor Lee received her doctoral degree in political science from Duke University and has been teaching at the State University of New York at Binghamton since 2006. Her research has appeared in Studies in Comparative International Studies, Critical Asian Studies, Asian Survey, Korean Observer, and Asia-Pacific Forum. Her book, tentatively entitled Democratic Politics and Labor Activism in East Asia, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press in 2011.
Philippines Conference Room
Yoonkyung Lee
Assistant Professor, Sociology and Department of Asian and Asian-American Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton
Speaker
Seminars
NNPC and Nigeria's Oil Patronage Ecosystem
Paragraphs
Nigeria depends heavily on oil and gas, with hydrocarbon activities providing around 65 percent of total government revenue and 95 percent of export revenues. While Nigeria supplies some LNG to world markets and is starting to export a small amount of gas to Ghana via pipeline, the great majority of the country's hydrocarbon earnings come from oil. In 2008, Nigeria was the 5th largest oil exporter and 10th largest holder of proved oil reserves in the world according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The country's national oil company NNPC (Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation) sits at the nexus between the many interests in Nigeria that seek a stake in the country's oil riches, the government, and the private companies that actually operate the vast majority of oil and gas projects.
Through its many divisions and subsidiaries, NNPC serves as an oil sector regulator, a buyer and seller of oil and petroleum products, a technical operator of hydrocarbon activities on a limited basis, and a service provider to the Nigerian oil sector. With isolated exceptions, NNPC is not very effective at performing its various oil sector jobs. It is neither a competent oil company nor an efficient regulator for the sector. Managers of NNPC's constituent units, lacking the ability to reliably fund themselves, are robbed of business autonomy and the chance to develop capability. There are few incentives for NNPC employees to be entrepreneurial for the company's benefit and many incentives for private action and corruption. It is no accident that NNPC operations are disproportionately concentrated on oil marketing and downstream functions, which offer the best opportunities for private benefit. The few parts of NNPC that actually add value, like engineering design subsidiary NETCO, tend to be removed from large financial flows and the patronage opportunities they bring.
Although NNPC performs poorly as an instrument for maximizing long-term oil revenue for the state, it actually functions well as an instrument of patronage, which helps to explain its durability. Each additional transaction generated by its profuse bureaucracy provides an opportunity for well-connected individuals to profit by being the gatekeepers whose approval must be secured, especially in contracting processes. NNPC's role as distributor of licenses for export of crude oil and import of refined products also helps make it a locus for patronage activities. Corruption, bureaucracy, and non-market pricing regimes for oil sales all reinforce each other in a dysfunctional equilibrium that has proved difficult to dislodge despite repeated efforts at oil sector reform.
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Program on Energy and Sustainable Development
Development and Democratization -- the Case for Principled Agnosticism
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Brian Levy currently is Head of the Bank's Governance and Anti-Corruption Secretariat in the World Bank - from where co-ordinates implementation of the Bank Group's GAC strategy. He is the author of Governance Reform: Bridging Monitoring and Action (World Bank, 2007), which builds on his 2006 work on governance monitoring featured in the 2006 Global Monitoring Report, Mutual Accountability: Aid, Trade and Governance . He worked in the World Bank's Africa Vice Presidency from 1991 to 2003 on the challenges of strengthening the institutional underpinnings of African development, for the last four years as sector manager of the Africa Public Sector Reform and Capacity Building Unit. He was a member of the core team which produced the World Bank's 1997 World Development Report, The State in a Changing World. He has published numerous books and articles on the interactions between public institutions, the private sector and development in Africa, East Asia, and elsewhere, most recently editing (jointly with Sahr Kpundeh) the volume, Building State Capacity in Africa (World Bank Institute, 2004) Prior to joining the Bank he was assistant professor in development economics at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He completed his Ph.D in economics at Harvard University in 1983.
CISAC Conference Room
Brian Levy
Adviser, Public Sector Governance
Speaker
The World Bank
Seminars
Human Rights Education
In partnership with the Division of International, Comparative and Area Studies (ICA) and the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE), the Program on Human Rights (PHR) offers the Stanford Human Rights Education Initiative (SHREI), which promotes human rights education in California community colleges.