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.

Forum on Akbar Ganji's Road to Democracy in Iran

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The FSI Program on Global Justice and the Iranian Studies Program present A Forum on Akbar Ganji's Road to Democracy in Iran.

Ganji is an Iranian journalist and dissident who was imprisoned in Tehran from 2000 to 2006 and whose writings are currently banned in Iran. He has won numerous prestigious awards in Europe and North America. His 56-day hunger strike turned him into a figure of international fame, with many heads of states and hundreds of the world's most renowned public intellectuals demanding his safety and freedom. Ganji first gained prominence in Iran as an investigative journalist when he helped uncover a government conspiracy to murder Iranian intellectuals. In response, the regime put him in prison for six years. Behind bars, Ganji continued to write and produced his famous Republican Manifesto where he argued in favor of a secular liberal democracy for Iran. In April 2008, Ganji's first English language  book appeared from Boston Review Books/MIT Press: The Road to Democracy in Iran, with an introduction by Joshua Cohen and Abbas Milani. 

Ganji will speak in Farsi with consecutive translation in English, and will be joined on the panel by Abbas Milani, director of the Hamid & Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies at Stanford University, and Martha Nussbaum, Ernst Freud Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. Program on Global Justice Director Joshua Cohen will moderate the discussion.

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Joshua Cohen

Program on Global Justice
Encina Hall West, Room 404
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

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Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society, and Professor of Political Science, Philosophy, and Law
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Joshua Cohen is a professor of law, political science, and philosophy at Stanford University, where he also teaches at the d.school and helps to coordinate the Program on Liberation Technology. A political theorist trained in philosophy, Cohen has written extensively on issues of democratic theory—particularly deliberative democracy and the implications for personal liberty, freedom of expression, and campaign finance—and global justice. Cohen is author of On Democracy (1983, with Joel Rogers); Associations and Democracy (1995, with Joel Rogers); Philosophy, Politics, Democracy (2010); The Arc of the Moral Universe and Other Essays (2011); and Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals (2011). Since 1991, he has been editor of Boston Review, a bi-monthly magazine of political, cultural, and literary ideas. Cohen is currently a member of the faculty of Apple University.

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Joshua Cohen Director, Program on Global Justice Moderator Stanford University

Abbas Milani

615 Crothers Way,
Encina Commons, Room 128A
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 721-4052
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Research Fellow, Hoover Institution
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Abbas Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University and a visiting professor in the department of political science. In addition, Dr. Milani is a research fellow and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution.

Prior to coming to Stanford, Milani was a professor of history and political science and chair of the department at Notre Dame de Namur University and a research fellow at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Milani was an assistant professor in the faculty of law and political science at Tehran University and a member of the board of directors of Tehran University's Center for International Studies from 1979 to 1987. He was a research fellow at the Iranian Center for Social Research from 1977 to 1978 and an assistant professor at the National University of Iran from 1975 to 1977.

Dr. Milani is the author of Eminent Persians: Men and Women Who Made Modern Iran, 1941-1979, (Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY, 2 volumes, November, 2008); King of Shadows: Essays on Iran's Encounter with Modernity, Persian text published in the U.S. (Ketab Corp., Spring 2005); Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Persian Modernity in Iran, (Mage 2004); The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution (Mage, 2000); Modernity and Its Foes in Iran (Gardon Press, 1998); Tales of Two Cities: A Persian Memoir (Mage 1996); On Democracy and Socialism, a collection of articles coauthored with Faramarz Tabrizi (Pars Press, 1987); and Malraux and the Tragic Vision (Agah Press, 1982). Milani has also translated numerous books and articles into Persian and English.

Milani received his BA in political science and economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970 and his PhD in political science from the University of Hawaii in 1974.

Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies
Co-director of the Iran Democracy Project
CDDRL Affiliated Scholar
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Abbas Milani Director, Hamid & Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies Panelist Stanford University
Martha Nussbaum Ernst Freud Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics Panelist University of Chicago
Akbar Ganji Iranian dissident journalist and author Keynote Speaker
Workshops

PESD Annual Meeting

» Annual Meeting 2008 Materials (password protected)

PESD's 2008 Annual Review Meeting, Reconciling Coal and Energy Security, will be held October 29-30, 2008 at Stanford University. The meeting is PESD's annual forum in which to create a wide-ranging conversation around our research and obtain feedback to shape our research agenda going forward.

PESD is a growing international research program that works on the political economy of energy. We study the political, legal, and institutional factors that affect outcomes in global energy markets. Much of our research has been based on field studies in developing countries including China, India, Brazil, South Africa, and Mexico.

At present, PESD is active in four major areas: climate change policy, energy and development, the global coal market, and the role of national oil companies.

The workshop will begin on Wednesday, October 29 at 8:30 am with registration and breakfast followed by a welcome and an overview of PESD's research activities. This year's Annual Meeting will have a concerted focus on carbon markets, regulation, and carbon capture and storage models. There will be a session in the morning that will discuss and explore ways to engage developing countries on climate change. New to this year's meeting will be a reception and poster session at the conclusion of the first day. We also anticipate discussion of areas where PESD can better collaborate with other institutions. The meeting ends at 1pm on Thursday, October 30.

Annual Meeting invitees can access the complete agenda and subsequent presentation files by logging on with your password.

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Conferences

Thomas Isaacs

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Tom is Co-Principal Investigator for the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) Developing Spent Fuel Strategies (DSFS) project coordinating international cooperation on issues at the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle with emphasis on spent fuel management and disposal in Pacific Rim countries. Participants include senior nuclear officials from Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Canada, and the United States.

Tom advises national nuclear waste programs on facility siting, communications, stakeholder engagement, and public trust and confidence. He has worked with the Canadian Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) for 15 years.

Tom was recently named as the Chair of the recently formed Experts Team to support Southern California Edison  at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.

Previously Tom was a Consulting Professor at CISAC, lead advisor to the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, Member of the National Academy of Sciences Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board, Director of Planning at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and long time senior executive at the Department of Energy where he led the siting of Yucca Mountain as the nation’s candidate site for a geologic repository.

He has degrees in Engineering, Applied Physics, and Chemical Engineering from Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania.

 

Philip Taubman

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Philip Taubman is affiliated with the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Before joining CISAC in 2008, Mr. Taubman worked at the New York Times as a reporter and editor for nearly 30 years, specializing in national security issues, including United States diplomacy, and intelligence and defense policy and operations. He served as Moscow bureau chief and Washington bureau chief, among other posts. He is author of Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America's Space Espionage (2003), The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb (2012),  In the Nation's Service: The Life and Times of George P. Shultz (2023), as well as co-author (with his brother, William Taubman) of McNamara at War: A New History (2025).

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Asian Regional Cooperation and Global Reform after the Financial Crisis

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The world economy is entering a period of instability unseen since the 1930s, with important consequences for international peace and security. Banking crises increase in frequency with global capital flows, and such flows have recently exceeded the previous peak attained in the early twentieth century.

Furthermore, the international financial system faces new, destabilizing challenges. The Japanese-style economic crisis has called into doubt the efficacy of conventional economic policy tools. In addition, the economic balance of power is shifting decisively away from the United States and toward broader East Asia. In the past, such power transitions have proved destabilizing to the world economy and international peace.

Existing international institutions and arrangements are ill-equipped to handle these monumental shifts, and international cooperation within the G-20 has thus far failed to produce effective solutions. This article by Phillip Lipscy considers innovative reforms.

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Journal of Korean Studies, volume 13

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Between 1979 and 1992, the Journal of Korean Studies became a leading academic forum for the publication of innovative in-depth research on Korea. Now under the editorial guidance of Gi-Wook Shin and John Duncan, this journal continues to be dedicated to quality articles, in all disciplines, on a broad range of topics concerning Korea, both historical and contemporary.

This edition's contents are as follows:

Articles

  1. "Peripheral Influence: The Sinuiju Student Incident of 1945 and the Impact of Soviet Occupation in North Korea" by Adam Cathcart and Charles Kraus
  2. "The Martyr Syndrome: North Korean Literature in the later 1990s to 2000s" by Tatiana Gabroussenko
  3. "Pak Ch’anghwa and the Hwarang segi Manuscripts" by Richard D. McBride II
  4. "The Chinese Ancestors in a Korean Descent Group’s Genealogies" by Kenneth R. Robinson

Book reviews

  1. Domesticating the Dharma: Buddhist Cults and the Hwaom Synthesis in Silla Korea by Richard D. McBride II. Reviewed by Jörg Plassen
  2. 20th Century Korean Art by Youngna Kim, and Modern Korean Ink Painting by Chung Hyung-Min Chung. Reviewed by Frank Hoffmann
  3. Beyond Birth: Social Status in the Emergence of Modern Korea by Kyung Moon Hwang. Reviewed by Gari Ledyard
  4. The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea by Namhee Lee. Reviewed by Kirk W. Larsen
  5. Everlasting Flower: A History of Korea by Keith Pratt, and A Concise History of Korea: From the Neolithic Period through the Nineteenth Century by Michael J. Seth. Reviewed by James B. Lewis
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Reducing Proliferation Risk

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PESD senior fellow and Nobel laureate in Physics, Burton Richter, explains why an inclusive internationalization policy of both ends of the nuclear fuel-cycle can provide much needed carbon-free energy while limiting the potential for the proliferation of nuclear weapons. He insists that the nuclear proliferation problem can be remedied by a tightly monitored program through international policy and diplomacy where incentives to tame proliferation are increased, inspections are more rigorous, and a sanctions program is agreed upon and adhered to.

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Soft Power, the War of Ideas, and the Next U.S. President

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Jeffrey Gedmin is President of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Inc. and in that capacity directs Broadcasting and Internet operations in 28 languages to countries stretching from Belarus to Bosnia and from the Arctic Sea to the Persian Gulf. Dr. Gedmin is author of the book "The Hidden Hand: Gorbachev and the Collapse of East Germany" (1992) and editor of a collection of essays titled "European Integration and the American Interest" (1997). He was also executive editor and producer of the award-winning PBS television program, "The Germans, Portrait of a New Nation" (1995) and co-executive producer of the documentary film titled "Spain's 9/11 and the Challenge of Radical Islam in Europe," aired on PBS in the spring of 2007. Jeffrey Gedmin has taught at Georgetown University and is an honorary professor at the University of Konstanz in Germany. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the board of the Council for a Community of Democracies (Washington, D.C.) and the Program of Atlantic Security Studies (Prague, Czech Republic), Gedmin holds a PhD. in German Area Studies and Linguistics from Georgetown University.

Dr. Gedmin's piece "Reporting Among Gangsters" on human rights violations perpetrated against journalists in Central Asia, appeared in the July 2, 2008 edition of the Washington Post.

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Jeffrey Gedmin President, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Speaker
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