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.
Manana Aslamazyan, a media and television expert who has worked with Russian journalists for more than 15 years, is Executive Director of Internews Europe based in Paris.
Aslamazyan and Alexei K. Simonov launched Russia's first freedom of speech organization in 1991, the Glasnost Defense Foundation (GDF). In 1992, Aslamazyan began to work with Internews Network to organize events for newly formed independent TV stations around the former Soviet Union. She became its first foreign staff person and by 1994, was managing the Russian operation, which in 1997 registered as a fully independent Russian non-commercial organization. In 2006, in response to changing legislation and its increased focus on training, Internews Russia re-organized as the Educated Media Foundation (EMF).
As director, Aslamazyan led Internews Russia/EMF in the creation of numerous innovative and ambitious projects. Aslamazyan's constant drive to respond to the changing needs of Russian media led to the launch of Internews Russia/EMF's month-long Journalism School, the News Factory newsroom automation project, and the Russian-American Media Entrepreneurship Dialogue. Internews Russia/EMF was forced to shut down in 2007 following a raid on its Moscow headquarters and filing of criminal charges against EMF and Aslamazyan that were widely seen as politically motivated. In 2008, the Constitutional Court of Russia ruled that the charges against Aslamayan had no legal basis.
Aslamazyan has served as an expert to the Russian Duma Committee on Information Policy, and from 2000 to 2004, she was one of three representatives of civil society on the influential Federal Competition Commission of Ministry of Press, TV Broadcasting and Mass Media. She is a board member of the prestigious Academy of Russian Television and served for three years as a Vice-President of the National Association of TV and Radio Broadcasters (NAT).
Aslamazyan serves on the boards of several Russian nonprofit organizations, Internews Network, and Internews International, which unites local Internews organizations around the world.
Co-sponsored by CREES and Internews Network
CISAC Conference Room
This program is sponsored jointly by the Forum on Contemporary Europe, International Law Society, and Stanford Law School.
José María Aznar was born in Madrid in 1953. He is:
He became Prime Minister of Spain in 1996, following the electoral victory of the Partido Popular. With the party's subsequent electoral victory in the year 2000, this time with an absolute majority, he led the country again for a new term. His time as Prime Minister lasted up until the elections of 2004, when he voluntarily chose not to run for office again.
Throughout his two terms as Prime Minister of the Government he led an important process of economic and social reform. Thanks to various liberalisation processes and the introduction of measures to promote competition, along with budgetary controls, rationalised public spending and tax reductions, almost 5 million jobs were created in Spain. The Spanish GDP figure grew each year by more than 2%, at an average of 3.4% in fact, featuring an aggregate increase of 64% over eight years. Throughout this period, Spain's average income increased from 78% to 87% of the average income of the European Union. The public deficit decreased from an alarming 6% of GDP to a balanced budget. Furthermore, the first two reductions in income tax that democratic Spain has ever known took place during his two terms in office.
One of José María Aznar's most serious concerns is the battle against terrorism. He is in favour of a firm policy, one that is against any kind of political concession, combined with close international cooperation between democratic countries. He is a strong supporter of the Atlantic Relationship and the European Union's commitment to freedoms and economic reform.
He is the Honorary Chairman of the Partido Popular, a party he chaired between 1990 and 2004. Until the year 2006 he was the President of the Centrist Democrat International (CDI) and Vice-President of the International Democrat Union (IDU), the two international organisations that bring together the parties of the Centre, along with Liberals, Christian Democrats and Conservatives throughout the world.
He forms part of the committees of various organisations, including the committee for the initiative known as "One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)" and the International Committee for Democracy in Cuba (ICDC).
José María Aznar began his political career in the political party known as Alianza Popular, in 1979. In 1982 he was elected a Member of Parliament for Ávila. He then went on to become the Regional Chairman of Alianza Popular in Castile-Leon and the Head of the Regional Government of Castile-Leon between 1987 and 1989. In 1989, following the re-founding of the Partido Popular, he was chosen as a party candidate for Prime Minister in the general elections of 1989. The following year he was elected Chairman of the Party. He led the Partido Popular in the elections of 1993, 1996 and the year 2000. Throughout these four legislatures, he served as a Member of Parliament for Madrid. Between 1989 and 1996 he was the Leader of the Opposition.
José María Aznar graduated in law at the Complutense University. He qualified as an Inspector of State Finances in 1975.
He has written the following books: Cartas a un Joven Español (2007), Retratos y Perfiles. De Fraga a Bush (2005) ("Portraits and Profiles: From Fraga to Bush"), Ocho años de Gobierno (2004) ("Eight Years in Government"), La España en que yo creo (1995) ("The Spain I Believe in"), España: la segunda transición (1994) ("Spain: The Second Transition") and Libertad y Solidaridad (1991) ("Freedom and Solidarity").
José María Aznar has been awarded honorary doctorates by Sophia University in Tokyo (1997), Florida International University (1998), Bar-Ilan University in Israel (2005) Ciencias Aplicadas University in Perú (2006), Andrés Belló University in Chile (2006), Francisco Marroquín University in Guatemala (2006) and by Università Cattolica Sacro Cuore in Milán (2007).
He is married to Ana Botella, with whom he has
three children and three grandchildren.
A video recording of this event can be viewed at: http://www.law.stanford.edu/calendar/details/2201/#related_information_and_recordings.
Stanford Law School
Room 290
Major international crises often produce tectonic shifts in international relations. Under pressure from key European counterparts, President Bush has agreed to a "new Bretton Woods" summit on Nov. 15.
It would be hard to overstate the potential significance of this meeting. The first Bretton Woods, in 1944, set the rules for monetary relations among nations, and it created the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.
While European leaders are pushing for greater regulation and a major overhaul of the international financial order, US policymakers have been lukewarm, emphasizing the preservation of free-market capitalism. This transatlantic drama has obscured the more fundamental problem—how to accommodate the historic shift of economic power away from the West toward Asia.
Including India, broader East Asia encompasses more than half of the world's population. The region already accounts for about one-third of global economic output, oil consumption, and CO2 emissions, and this is only likely to grow in the future. Over the course of the 21st century, Asia's economic and geopolitical weight in the world will, in all likelihood, come to rival that of Europe in the 19th century. Asian problems will become increasingly indistinguishable from global problems.
In the face of such dramatic change, the IMF and World Bank are becoming relics of a bygone era. At the time of their creation, by US and European negotiators, the major challenge was to get capital flowing from the US to war-ravaged Europe. The days of the US as creditor state are long gone—our massive current account deficit is financed by importing nearly $1 trillion in foreign capital every year. Major US banks are being rescued by sovereign wealth funds and financial institutions from the Middle East and East Asia. China and Japan alone held over $600 billion of securities issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, making the bailout of those institutions a major foreign policy issue.
Despite these changed realities, both Bretton Woods institutions remain dominated by the West. By convention, the IMF is led by a European, the World Bank by a US national. The US is the only country with veto power over important decisions in either body.
My analysis of voting shares in the IMF indicates that the Allied powers of World War II have been consistently overrepresented compared to Axis powers despite the passing of more than 60 years since the end of that war. Studies show that IMF lending is biased in favor of recipients with strong economic and diplomatic ties to the US and key European states at the expense of other members.
This unbalanced representation had real consequences during the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-98, when the IMF, as part of its rescue operation, implemented policies widely viewed as contrary to Asian interests. During the crisis, Japanese financial authorities proposed an Asian Monetary Fund as a potential alternative source of liquidity. This proposal was rejected by US officials, who feared dilution of IMF authority. However, over the past decade, East Asian states have stockpiled foreign currency reserves and developed regional cooperation that may eventually develop into a credible alternative to the IMF.
The IMF and World Bank should be reformed to better reflect the interests and concerns of rising economic powers. Voting shares need to be further redistributed to reflect underlying economic realities. Decisionmaking rules should be modified to give greater weight or agenda-setting authority to regional actors—the US may have a strong interest in loans to Mexico, but Japan may have a greater stake in Indonesia. Assignment of the top positions should be made truly competitive. Core functions should be decentralized—both institutions are headquartered in Washington, impeding employment of top talent from Asia and limiting intellectual exchange.
An international financial architecture that fragments or remains centered on the West as Asia rises will probably prove grossly ineffective. Europe attempted much the same during the turbulent period between the two World Wars, resurrecting a system based on British hegemony even as Britain was in relative decline. Those were scary times, with free riding and beggar-thy-neighbor policies feeding mutual distrust and economic catastrophe.
This will not be the last financial crisis we face. Next time, ad hoc cooperation by the US and Europe may prove insufficient. Franklin Roosevelt had the foresight to include China on the United Nations Security Council long before that nation became a geopolitical heavyweight. Similar foresight should be brought to bear as world leaders debate the future of the international financial architecture.
Despite early talk of being able to “decouple” itself from the U.S. financial crisis and accompanying credit crunch, the damage has spread to Asia. Collapsing export markets, currency instability and stock market collapses are plaguing all of Asia, not least China, Japan and South Korea. At the same time, China and Japan are major financiers of the United States federal government and newly nationalized financial firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Two leading economic experts on Japan and China will discuss the impact of the U.S. financial crisis on Asia. Does Japan’s experience with banking collapse bear any lessons for the United States today? Will China continue to finance the United States government? How will a U.S. recession affect the prospects for economic growth in Asia?
Richard Katz has taught about Japan’s economy as an Adjunct Associate Professor at the New York University Stern School of Business. Previously, and as a Visiting Lecturer in Economics at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook. Mr. Katz is the author of two books on Japan's economic trvails; The System That Soured--The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Economic Miracle (M.E. Sharpe 1998) and Japanese Phoenix: The Long Road to Economic Revival (M.E. Sharpe 2002). He has twice testified about Japan and Asia before Congress, in 1998 and 2005. Both times the hearings were held by the Asia-Pacific Subcommittee of the House International Relations Committee. In the year 2000, he served on the Council of Foreign Relations' Task Force on the Japanese economy. Having received his B.A. degree in History from Columbia University in 1973, Mr. Katz went on to obtain his M.A. in Economics at New York University (NYU) in 1996.
Mark Spiegel served as an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at New York University. He has served as a visiting professor in the Economics Department of U.C. Berkeley, as well as a lecturer at the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley. He has also served as a consultant at the World Bank, as a visiting scholar at the Bank of Japan, and as Chairman of the Federal Reserve System Committee on International Economic Analysis. Dr. Spiegel received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Los Angeles and his B.A. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Spiegel has published numerous articles in both academic and policy-oriented journals on international financial issues and on economic issues associated
Philippines Conference Room
Abstract: In this age of increasing "Global Transparency," commercial satellite imagery has now made it possible for anyone to remotely peer "over the fence" and view what heretofore had been otherwise impossible...clandestine nuclear facilities (most significantly, those capable of producing fissile material suitable for use in nuclear weapons). The synergistic combination of readily available tools: personal computers, the internet, three-dimensional virtual globe visualization applications such as Google Earth, and high resolution commercial satellite imagery has gone beyond what anyone could have imaged just a few years ago. The downside of all this is that those who want to keep their clandestine nuclear facilities and associated activities from being either detected, identified, and/or monitored, are becoming more adept in their use of camouflage, concealment, and deception.
Iran is one such case where it has followed a steep learning curve of adapting to the threat that overhead observation can pose. After repeated dissident group revelations about Iran's clandestine nuclear facilities, together with confirming media broadcast of commercial satellite images of those facilities followed by verification inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); the government of Iran has become increasingly aware of this threat and gone to greater and greater lengths to try and defeat it. Iran's cover-up tactics have improved with time...from concealed infrastructure and false cover stories (Natanz)...to refurbishment and sanitization of facilities following removal of incriminating equipment (Kalaye Electric and Lashkar Abad), to the wholesale razing of facilities together with the removal of dirt and vegetation to defeat IAEA forensic environmental sampling (Lavizan).
While the international community continues to debate the issue of whether or not Iran's nuclear program is purely peaceful in nature (helping it to stay an "open case"), Iran is defiantly pursuing its goal of fissile material production. Syria, on the other hand (evidently together with North Korea), was also quite aware of the overhead observation threat, taking great pains to conceal its plutonium production reactor at Al-Kibar. Syria disguised the true function of the facility by employing minimal site security (no fences or guard towers), having minimal support infrastructure (with non visible powerlines and only buried water lines), not installing a telltale reactor ventilation stack or cooling tower, hiding the reactor building in a ravine (terrain masking), and finally camouflaging the facility with a false façade to make it appear as a byzantine fortress. Nonetheless, despite all those steps, a leak of ground-level reactor construction and interior photographs, which formed the basis for the subsequent bombing of the facility by Israel, successfully thwarted that effort (the "closed case?"). Rather than confessing the truth about al-Kibar, the Syrian government rushed to remove all traces of the destroyed reactor and supplant it with a new larger footprint building for as yet unknown purposes while continuing to claim it was previously only a disused military warehouse. The IAEA asked d Syria for permission to inspect not only the Al-Kibar site, but reportedly up to three other sites thought to be associated with it. The Syrians refused access to all but the now heavily sanitized Al-Kibar location. We must now all await the IAEA report on the findings of that singular onsite inspection.
Frank Pabian is a Senior Nonproliferation Infrastructure Analyst at Los Alamos National Laboratory who has over 35 years experience in the nuclear nonproliferation field including six years with the Office of Imagery Analysis and 18 years with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's "Z" Division. Frank also served as a Chief Inspector for the IAEA during UN inspections in Iraq from 1996-1998 focusing on "Capable Sites." In December 2002, Frank served as one of the first US nuclear inspectors back in Iraq with UN/IAEA. While at Los Alamos, Frank has developed and presented commercial satellite imagery based briefings on foreign clandestine nuclear facilities to the International Nuclear Suppliers Group, the IAEA, NATO, and the Foreign Ministries of China and India on behalf of the NNSA and STATE.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Lawrence M. Wein, CISAC faculty member, has been awarded the 2008 Frederick W. Lanchester Prize by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). The prize is given for the best written contribution to operations research and the management sciences published in English in the last three years.
Wein, a professor at the Graduate School of Business, was awarded the prize for a series of papers, including, "The Last Line of Defense: Designing Radiation Detection-Interdiction Systems to Protect Cities from a Nuclear Attack."
Wein's work opened up an important new area, homeland security, for the application of Operations Research. The work analyzes risks associated with four main national threats: border security, nuclear weapons at ports and large cities, anthrax- and smallpox-based attacks and food supply attacks, and it offers important policy recommendations for dealing with these risks. According to the award citation, Wein's research developed creative, original and detailed models for evaluating alternative methods of protection in these four areas. "The analysis used a range of methods including optimization, game theory, stochastic models, statistics and differential equations. Wein's research sets a high standard for future work on not only problems of security but public problems in general, and in communicating results of operations research to the general public," the citation stated."
Somewhere on the long list of problems that President Barack Obama will inherit next January will be the ongoing negotiations to roll back North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. The announcement on October 11, removing North Korea from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism in exchange for a verification mechanism, has the virtue of keeping the diplomatic
avenue open. But if we look carefully at what it took even to get to this interim point,
there should be no illusions about the difficulties of finishing the job.
The latest deal merely closes the second phase of an agreement that was originally signed in February 2007. This phase was supposed to be completed in 60 days. Instead it has taken 19 months. This 19-month saga of negotiation over what may be the easiest step in the process—freezing the status quo—should caution against any expectation that the next administration can easily step in and pick up the negotiating reins.
There are three options it can reasonably consider come January. One would be to try to regain what has been given away in these talks—the inclusion of undeclared sites and proliferation activities—by returning to tactics of international sanctions and Chinese pressure. Japan, which is unhappy with the deal, may be ready for this but there is no evidence that Beijing or even the conservative Lee Myung-Bak government in South Korea is interested in returning to confrontation. At the other end of the spectrum would be an effort to leapfrog the drawn-out phases by offering Pyongyang most of what they claim to want—normalization of relations, economic aid, security assurances, a formal peace treaty to end the Korean war—in a "grand bargain."
Finally, there is the least attractive but most likely course: to lock in the gains of plutonium containment and to continue the diplomatic slog into the dismantling phase, albeit with a more rigorous approach. The U.S. could also try to encourage regime transformation in the North through both engagement and pressure. Given the uncertainties over the health of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, this may be the only viable path to ending the North Korean nuclear threat.
Lisa Lee received an MA in human resources management from Hawai'i Pacific University in Honolulu and a BA in civil law (Sarjana Hukum) from Tarumanagara University in Jakarta. Prior to joining the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, she held managerial and administrative positions at ISS International School in Singapore; Bank of Japan and Panasonic Finance America in New York City; and at Media Indonesia in Jakarta. She worked at APARC through March 2025.