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.

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Christopher Blattman is currently completing a PhD in economics at UC Berkeley and holds a master's degree from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. His research focuses on the causes and consequences of conflict and violence, the organization of guerrilla groups, as well as what post-conflict development policies work, for whom, and why. He recently completed a survey of war-affected men and boys in northern Uganda, and is presently conducting a similar survey of women and girls. Two randomized evaluations of post-conflict programs are planned in the same region for 2007, one studying the role of a group-based economic intervention in promoting community reintegration of ex-combatants, and another studying the introduction of a government and an independent press into communities not currently served by newspapers.

James Fearon is the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, a professor of political science and CISAC affiliated faculty member at Stanford University. His research has focused on democracy and international disputes, explanations for interstate wars, and, most recently, the causes of civil and especially ethnic violence. He is presently working on a book manuscript (with David Laitin) on civil war since 1945. Representative publications include "Neotrusteeship and the Problem of Weak States" (International Security, Spring 2004), "Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War" (APSR, February 2003), and "Rationalist Explanations for War" (International Organization, Summer 1995). Fearon won the 1999 Karl Deutsch Award, which is "presented annually to a scholar under the age of forty, or within ten years of the acquisition of his or her doctoral degree, who is judged to have made, through a body publications, the most significant contribution to the study of international relations and peace research." He was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences in 2002.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Christopher Blattman PhD Candidate Speaker Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley

CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

(650) 725-1314
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences
Professor of Political Science
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James Fearon is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, where he is also the social science co-director at its Center for International Security and Cooperation. He is the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and a professor of political science, as well as an affiliate at the institute's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. His research interests include civil and interstate war, ethnic conflict, the international spread of democracy and the evaluation of foreign aid projects promoting improved governance. Fearon was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002. Some of his current research projects include work on the costs of collective and interpersonal violence, democratization and conflict in Myanmar, nuclear weapons and U.S. foreign policy, and the long-run persistence of armed conflict.

Co-director, Center for International Security and Cooperation
Affiliated faculty at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law
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James Fearon Commentator
Seminars
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Dara Kay Cohen is a PhD candidate in political science at Stanford University and was a fellow and research assistant at CISAC in 2004-2005 and 2005-2006. Her research at CISAC involved studying the politics of national security; she examined the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, how security issues have affected congressional elections and co-wrote a paper with Jacob N. Shapiro on the failure of the homeland security alert system. Her current dissertation research focuses on the use of sexual violence during civil wars, and she spend last summer in Sierra Leone conducting initial field work. She previously worked at the Department of Justice as a paralegal in the Outstanding Scholars Program in the Counterterrorism Section and at the u.S. Embassy in London on terrorist financing issues. She received her a.B. in political science and philosophy with honors from Brown University in 2001.

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, with a PhD in political science from Stanford as well as a law degree from Yale, focuses his scholarship on how organizations cope with the legal responsibility for managing complex criminal justice, regulatory, and international security problems. He has published the leading academic paper on the operation of federal money laundering laws, and one of the most exhaustive empirical case studies of public participation in regulatory rulemaking proceedings. Recent projects address the role of criminal enforcement in managing transnational threats, the physical safety of refugee communities in the developing world, legislative and budgetary dynamics affecting the federal Department of Homeland Security, and the impact of bureaucratic structure on how institutions implement legal mandates. Professor Cuéllar is an affiliated faculty member at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation, and a member of the Executive committee for the Stanford International Initiative. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 2001, he served as senior advisor to the u.S. Treasury Department's Undersecretary for Enforcement and clerked for Chief Judge Mary M. Schroeder of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Bary R. Weingast is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution as well as the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University; he served as chair of that department from 1996 to 2001. He is also a professor of economics, by courtesy, at the university. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences from 1993 to 1994. Weingast is an expert in political economy and public policy, the political foundation of markets and economic reform, U.S. politics, and regulation. His current research focuses on the political determinants of public policymaking and the political foundations of markets and democracy. Weingast is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the 2006 recipient of the William H. Riker Prize in Political Science. He received the Heinz Eulau Award for Best paper from the American Political Science Review in 1987. With Charles Stewart, he received the Award for Best Paper n Political History b the American Political Science Association in 1994 and again in 1998. He is also the recipient, along with Kenneth Schultz, of the Franklin L. Burdette Award for Best paper Presented at the 1994 Political Science Association Meeting.

Paul Stockton is a senior research scholar at CISAC. He was formerly the associate provost at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and was the former director of its Center for Homeland Defense and Security. His teaching and research focus son how U.S. security institutions respond to changes in the threat (including the rise of terrorism), and the interaction of Congress and the Executive branch in restructuring national security budgets, policies and institutional arrangement.s Stockton joined the faculty of the Naval Postgraduate School in August 1990. From 1995 until 2000, he served as director of NPS's Center for Civil-Military Relations. From 2000-2001, he founded and served as the acting dean of NPS's School of International Graduate Studies. He was appointed associate provost in 2001.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Dara K. Cohen PhD Candidate Speaker Department of Political Science, Stanford University
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar Speaker
Barry R. Weingast Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution and Ward C. Krebs Family Professor Speaker Department of Political Science, Stanford University
Paul Stockton Commentator
Seminars
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Matthew Kroenig is a doctoral candidate in the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, the Herbert York Fellow at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California, and a predoctoral fellow at CISAC. His dissertation explains the strategic incentives that drive states to provide nuclear weapons technology to nonnuclear-weapon states. His other research focuses on international security, nuclear weapons proliferation, homeland security, terrorism, and civil war. His writings have appeared in such publications as Democratization, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Newsday, and Security Studies.

Kroenig has also served as a strategist in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where he was a principal author of key national security strategy and defense review documents and where he led the development of a U.S. government-wide strategy for deterring terrorist networks. For his work, Kroenig received the Department of Defense's Award for Outstanding Achievement.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Matthew Kroenig Predoctoral Fellow Speaker CISAC
Seminars
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The Center for Science, Technology and Security Policy at the American Association for the Advancement of Science has assembled a panel of experts to examine the technical aspects of the Reliable Replacement Warhead program. The speaker will discuss the preliminary findings of this panel.

Benn Tannenbaum is Project Director at the Center for Science, Technology and Security Policy. Tannenbaum works on a variety of projects for CSTSP, including drafting policy briefs, tracking legislation, serving as liaison with MacArthur-funded centers and the security policy community, organizing workshops and other meetings, attending Congressional hearings and conducting topical research. He testified before the House Homeland Security Committee on radiation portal monitors. Tannenbaum also serves on the American Physical Society's Panel on Public Affairs and on the Program Committee for the Forum on Physics and Society. Prior to joining AAAS, Tannenbaum worked as a senior research analyst for the Federation of American Scientists. He worked extensively on the FAS paper "Flying Blind"; this paper explores ways to increase the quality and consistency of science advising to the federal government. Before joining FAS, Tannenbaum served as the 2002-2003 American Physical Society Congressional Science Fellow. During his fellowship, Tannenbaum worked for Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-MA) on nonproliferation issues. Before his fellowship, Tannenbaum worked as a postdoctoral rellow at the University of California, Los Angeles. At UCLA, he was involved in the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland, and the Collider Detector Facility at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago. He received his PhD in particle physics from the University of New Mexico in 1997. His dissertation involved a search for evidence of supersymmetry. None was found.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Benn Tannenbaum Project Director at the Center for Science, Technology and Security Policy Speaker American Association for the Advancement of Science
Seminars
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Nuclear fuel supply assurance is a long-term issue that has been studied in various venues since the beginning of the nuclear area. This topic has recently gained greater urgency with various countries now embarking on their own nuclear power programs and considering construction of their own fuel cycle facilities, including enrichment plants, to provide for their own fuel. Some of these fuel facilities could however be diverted for weapons material production within clandestine military programs. In this context the assured provision of internationally supplied nuclear fuel and fuel supply guarantees are meant to discourage new nuclear countries from developing domestic sensitive fuel cycle facilities. An IAEA initiative on this topic has culminated in a September 2006 IAEA Special Event Seminar held in conjunction with the 50th General Conference. Eleven different proposals for instituting fuel supply assurance arrangements were presented (some prior to and some during) the meeting. Noted among them was the NTI proposal that included a commitment from Warren Buffet to contribute 50 Million Dollars towards the purchase of a Uranium stockpile that would form the basis of a Nuclear Fuel Bank to be managed by the IAEA.

In this presentation I will review and comment on the recent supply assurance proposals made. I will discuss technical and institutional issues I have raised in reviewing these proposals, and I will rank all the proposals based on their ease of implementation and contribution to nonproliferation.

Chaim Braun is a CISAC science fellow working on issues of nuclear power and nonproliferation. Prior to his Stanford position, Braun worked in various technical and management positions in Altos Management Partners, Bechtel Power Corporation, United Engineers and Constructors, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), and Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). While at CISAC Chaim authored papers with Chris Chyba on "Proliferation Rings" and with Mike May on "International Regime for Fresh Fuel Supply and Spent Fuel Disposal." He also co-authored two chapters in the CISAC book , U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy: Confronting Today's Threats, made numerous technical presentations, and was instrumental in bringing to CISAC the research project on U.N. Security Council Resolution 1540.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Chaim Braun Speaker
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Bioterrorism is a growing threat. While the U.S. government has spent considerable sums on programs designed to protect the United States from a biological attack, no clear strategy has been articulated to guide planning and expenditures. This talk will present the outlines of a coherent strategy for coping with bioterrorism that includes diplomacy, deterrence and defense, with the emphasis on defense.

Dean Wilkening directs the Science Program at CISAC. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University and spent 13 years at the RAND Corporation prior to coming to Stanford in 1996. His major research interests have been nuclear strategy and policy, arms control, the proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, ballistic missile defense, and conventional force modernization. His most recent research focuses on ballistic missile defense and biological terrorism. His work on missile defense focuses on the broad strategic and political implications of deploying national and theater missile defenses, in particular, the impact of theater missile defense in Northeast Asia, and the technical feasibility of boost-phase interceptors for national and theater missile defense. His work on biological weapons focuses on understanding the scientific and technical uncertainties associated with predicting the outcome of hypothetical airborne biological weapon attacks, with the aim of devising more effective civil defenses, and a reanalysis of the accidental anthrax release in 1979 from a Russian military compound in Sverdlovsk with the aim of improving our understanding of the human effects of inhalation anthrax.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Dean Wilkening Speaker
Seminars
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National Security Consequences of U.S. Oil Dependency, a report by the Council on Foreign Relations Independent Task Force on Energy, concludes that the “lack of sustained attention to energy issues is undercutting U.S. foreign policy and U.S. national security.” The report goes on to examine how America’s dependence on imported oil—which currently comprises 60 percent of consumption— increasingly puts it into competition with other energy importers, notably the rapidly growing economies of China and India.

The task force was chaired jointly by James R. Schlesinger, a former secretary of defense and secretary of energy, and John Deutch, former director of Central Intelligence and undersecretary of energy, and drew from industry, academia, government, and NGOs. PESD Director David Victor directed the task force and FSI senior fellow by courtesy James Sweeney, director of Stanford’s new Precourt Institute for Energy Efficiency, served as a member.

The task force unanimously concluded that incentives are needed to slow and eventually reverse the growth in petroleum consumption, particularly in the transportation sector, but was unable to agree on which specific incentives—such as gasoline tax-funded energy technology R&D, more stringent and broadly applied Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency (CAFE) standards, and a cap-and-trade permit system for gasoline—would most effectively achieve this result.

The task force report included additional recommendations regarding the supply and consumption of energy including the following:

  • Encourage oil supply from all sources
  • Promote better management and governance of oil revenues
  • Remove the protectionist tariff on imported ethanol
  • Increase the efficiency of oil and gas consumption in the United States and elsewhere
  • Switch from oil-derived products to alternatives such as biofuels
  • Make the oil and gas infrastructure more efficient and secure
  • Increase investment in energy technology R&D
  • Promote the proper functioning and efficiency of energy markets
  • Revitalize international institutions such as the International Energy Agency (IEA)

The report stressed that the U.S. government must reorganize to integrate energy issues with foreign policy to address the threats to national security created by energy dependence. The task force offered a number of recommendations to better promote energy issues in foreign policy deliberations as follows:

  • Establish an energy security directorate at the National Security Council to lead an interagency process to influence the discussion and thinking of the NSC principals
  • Fully inform and engage the secretary of energy on all foreign policy matters with an important energy aspect
  • Include energy security issues in the terms of reference of all planning studies at the NSC, Defense, State, and the intelligence community

The task force restricted its inquiry to the challenges of managing U.S. and global dependence on imported oil and gas and did not address other important energy security issues such as nuclear proliferation and global warming.

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Council on Foreign Relations
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David G. Victor
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0876093659
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Roger Errera is a graduate of the Paris Institut d'etudes politiques, the Paris Law School and the ENA, Ecole nationale d'administration. Mr Errera is a former senior member of the Conseil d'Etat, France's Supreme Court for administrative law. He also sat on the Conseil superieur de la magistrature. After having taught extensively in France and abroad, he is presently a Visiting Professor at the Central European University in Budapest.

A former member of the UN Human Rights Committee, Mr. Errera has worked in Central and Eastern Europe as an expert and a consultant for the European Commission of the Council of Europe on legal and judicial issues.

Mr. Errera is the founder and editor of the "Diaspora" series, a collection of essays on Judaica and Jewish affairs published in Paris by Calmann-Levy (33 books published so far). He is the author of a number of articles and essays on judicial review, public law, free speech, freedom of religion, refugee law, judicial independence and accountability, nazism and communism.

Sponsored by the Mediterranean Studies Forum, the Stanford Law School, the History Department, and the Forum on Contemporary Europe.

Lane History Corner
450 Serra Mall, Bldg. 200-307
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

Roger Errera Former Member of the Conseil d'Etat, France's Supreme Court for Administrative Law Speaker
Lectures

"Ethnicity in Today's Europe" will commence with a Related Presidential Lecture featuring Partha Chatterjee.

Conference Statement

Headlines today blaze with stories about the fate of Europe. There is a sense, both in Europe and around the world, that a sort of "tipping point" has been reached. A recurrent theme is the question of demographics. For instance, how are European social welfare systems going to cope with an aging population? What role will immigrants from outside Europe's borders, both recent and less recent, play in European society? What will be the impact of immigration between the member states of the European Union? What place will Europe's growing population of Muslims have in twenty-first century Europe?

As the ongoing process of unification redraws Europe's borders, as the populations of major European cities become more and more diverse, the question of ethnicity is at the forefront of many of the most important debates on the continent. On the one hand the long history of European national and ethnic identities is at play, as is the legacy of colonialism. On the other, a significant recent upswing in the movement of peoples around the globe has changed the face of Europe, often literally. Movement, of course, from outside Europe's borders into European states. But also, and crucially, movement within the space between Portugal and the Urals. Such movement certainly responds to a number of economic and social needs. At the same time, European conceptions of citizenship, equity, and nationhood often exist in tension with the realities of changing ethnic populations.

The conference "Ethnicity in Today's Europe" at Stanford will address this topic in an interdisciplinary manner. Participants will focus on the question: "What's new about the situation in Europe today?" Bringing together scholars from different disciplines, the conference will provide a historical perspective together with contributions addressing economic, social, cultural, and political issues. Some themes that may be discussed include: how the current situation mirrors or departs from the past; the role of the media in portraying the interaction between different groups; the different perspectives of specific populations within Europe; whether Europe's diversity is best described under the rubric of ethnicity, nationality, race, or some other term; similarities and differences between European nation-states with regard to diversity within their borders. Above all, participants will use their own disciplinary perspective to assess what is at stake in the interaction between peoples in Europe as the twenty-first century gets underway.

"Ethnicity in Today's Europe" is jointly presented by the Forum on Contemporary Europe and the Stanford Humanities Center.

November 7 - Related Presidential Lecture:
Bechtel Conference Center
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street

November 8-9 - Conference Panels:
Stanford Humanities Center
424 Santa Teresa Avenue
Stanford University

Rogers Brubaker Sociology, UCLA Panelist
Leslie Adelson German Studies, Cornell University Panelist
Partha Chatterjee Related Presidential Lecture; Director and Professor of Political Science, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta; Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University, New York Keynote Speaker
Salvador Cardús Ros Sociology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Panelist
Carole Fink History, Ohio State University Panelist
Alec Hargreaves French, Florida State University Panelist
Kader Konuk Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan Panelist
Saskia Sassen Sociology, Columbia University Panelist
Bassam Tibi International Relations, University of Göttingen, Germany Panelist
Zelimir Zilnik filmmaker Speaker
Conferences
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Explaining the apathetic response of the U.S. administration towards the military coup in Thailand, Michael A. McFaul noted that "nobody wants to go to bat for Thaksin. He's just an odious figure." The problem with this approach, he added, is that "democracy's not about picking winners and losers, it's about defending institutions."
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