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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Please join our partners at APSIA for their 2021 online grad school fair. Representatives from across the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and other top-line graduate programs in international studies at leading universities will be online to answer your questions and provide resources on the application process.

Whether you are an undergrad student trying to decide what comes next in your academic journey or a professional looking to advance your career, this is an excellent opportunity to network and gain insight into reaching your goals.

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POLITICO has announced their annual ranking of the 28 power players behind Europe’s tech revolution. In addition to an overall No. 1, the list is divided into three categories — rulemakers, rulebreakers and visionaries — each representing a different type of power. The Cyber Policy Center's Marietje Schaake is included on the list as a visionary and "voice to listen to on both sides of the Atlantic."

From the announcement:

The 42-year-old Dutch native has become a leading voice of European philosophy on how to regulate technology, especially in the U.S., where she’s been teaching at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center since leaving European politics.

Her message — that the internet’s early leaders have grown into all-too-dominant behemoths unable to subdue their own vices and are violating human rights — might have seemed out of whack in the U.S. a few years ago. But it has since become mainstream, in part thanks to Schaake’s work to reshape the American conversation on technology and inject some of Europe’s criticism on the sector.

In Europe, too, Schaake’s star keeps rising and rising. Once one of Brussels’ most visible politicians, she has now turned her attention to taming algorithms and the growing issue of cyber threats. In 2019, she launched the CyberPeace Institute in Geneva, a group focused on getting European policymakers to care about the human victims of cyberattack.

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Marietje Schaake

Marietje Schaake

International Policy Director at the Cyber Policy Center
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The Cyber Policy Center Turns Two

A look back at the launch of the CPC and the work of our programs
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POLITICO’s annual ranking of the 28 power players behind Europe’s tech revolution includes the Cyber Policy Center's Marietje Schaake. The list is divided into three categories — rulemakers, rulebreakers and visionaries — each representing a different type of power.

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The first COVID-19-related death in the United States was announced on February 29, 2020, the day of the South Carolina primary. International news about the early spread of the coronavirus and the initial reaction from American public health professionals to its quick spread in this country made it clear that the presidential election was facing an existential threat. Election officials who held primaries in early- and mid-March found themselves increasingly making public health decisions to guard both their voters and their staff. The larger societal challenges quickly overwhelmed the ability of states to hold primaries at all, leading to hastily canceled and postponed elections. The one early primary that was not postponed, Wisconsin, provided cautionary tales in the form of closed polling places, poll worker shortages, and massive transitions to mail balloting.

 

Nate Persily

Nathaniel Persily

James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School | Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute | Professor, by courtesy, Political Science | Professor, by courtesy, Communication | Co-director, Cyber Policy Center
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A Compendium of Research from the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project
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Nathaniel Persily
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Today, the Healthy Elections Project, a joint effort of Stanford and MIT, released a new 800 page report based on their research and findings on the administration of the 2020 election. The Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project was developed to ensure that the 2020 election could proceed with integrity, safety, and equal access. The Project aimed to do this by bringing together academics, civic organizations, election administrators, and election administration experts to assess and promote best practices. 

The first COVID-19-related death in the United States was announced on February 29, 2020, the day of the South Carolina primary. International news about the early spread of the coronavirus and the initial reaction from American public health professionals to its quick spread in this country made it clear that the presidential election was facing an existential threat. Election officials who held primaries in early- and mid-March found themselves increasingly making public health decisions to guard both their voters and their staff. The larger societal challenges quickly overwhelmed the ability of states to hold primaries at all, leading to hastily canceled and postponed elections. The one early primary that was not postponed, Wisconsin, provided cautionary tales in the form of closed polling places, poll worker shortages, and massive transitions to mail balloting.

Nate Persily

Nathaniel Persily

James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School | Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute | Professor, by courtesy, Political Science | Professor, by courtesy, Communication | Co-director, Cyber Policy Center
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A Compendium of Research from the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project

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Please join us in congratulating Beatriz Magaloni, professor of political science, FSI senior fellow, and faculty director of the Program on Poverty, Violence & Governance, winner of the 2021 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in American Political Science Review!

In this award-winning article entitled “Killing in the Slums: Social Order, Criminal Governance and Police Violence in Rio de Janeiro," Professor Magaloni, Edgar Franco-Vivanco, and Vanessa Melo explore the conditions that allow criminal organizations to establish local governance structures and the mechanisms that enable the police to regain territorial control and legitimacy.

The article finds that in territories reigned by criminal orders, police have to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the community and emerge as the sole embodiment of coercive force and emerge as the legitimate embodiment of physical force. But this is not always easy. For instance, when criminal rule effectively provides local security and public goods, the state will have a hard time gaining territorial control. Why? Because residents often feel safer under the authority of drug lords than with the police presence. However, where criminal orders cannot restrain their forces from fighting among themselves and victimizing residents, it is significantly easier for the government to regain territorial control and create a legitimate state order. To do so, the state has to constrain violence, monitor and sanction police officers’ abusive behaviors, and bring public justice systems to the poor. Otherwise, the state will likely fail to retake territorial control, allowing criminal orders to prevail.

To read more, check out the article here.

Congratulations, Professor Magaloni, on this high honor!

Beatriz Magaloni

Beatriz Magaloni

Professor of political science, FSI senior fellow, and faculty director of the Program on Poverty, Violence & Governance
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Police Reform in Brazil and Mexico: What Works, What Doesn’t, and What the U.S. Can Learn

On the World Class Podcast, Beatriz Magaloni discusses how community-oriented policing and constitutional reform can impact violence committed by police.
Police Reform in Brazil and Mexico: What Works, What Doesn’t, and What the U.S. Can Learn
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New Research from the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab Examines Police Brutality

For the last 10 years, a team of social scientists at the Poverty, Violence, and Governance (PovGov) lab at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) have been developing action-oriented research to support human rights and inform policy on the root causes and devastating consequences of violence.
New Research from the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab Examines Police Brutality
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The award-winning article is entitled “Killing in the Slums: Social Order, Criminal Governance and Police Violence in Rio de Janeiro.” Professor Magaloni coauthored the article with Edgar Franco-Vivanco, who earned his Ph.D. from Stanford and is now at the University of Michigan; and with Vanessa Melo, a graduate student in Anthropology at UCLA.

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In January, President Donald Trump’s supporters rampaged through the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to derail Congress’s certification of the 2020 presidential election results. Only a handful were arrested immediately. But many posted photos and videos on social media platforms. Amateur sleuths immediately took to Twitter, self-organizing to help law enforcement agencies identify and charge the rioters.

Read the rest at Foreign Affairs

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In January, President Donald Trump’s supporters rampaged through the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to derail Congress’s certification of the 2020 presidential election results.

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Technological cooperation is one of the key topics of the transatlantic agenda. The capacity of nations to innovate and to regulate will define impact their future relevancy. Beyond setting incentives to enhance innovation, Regulation and setting standards is at the forefront of the geopolitical dimension of tech policy.
 
On June 24 from 12:00 to 1:00 pm Pacific Time, Germany’s Ambassador to the United States, Dr. Emily Haber, International Policy Director at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center, Marietje Schaake, and Chris Riley, Senior Fellow for Internet Governance at the R Street Institute, will discuss the opportunities and challenges of the digital transformation for the US and the EU with respect to strategies to strengthen democratic public spheres, restore digital trust and promote liberal liberal-democratic values through a global digital order. Nathanial Persily, co-director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, will introduce and moderate the event.
 
This event is part of the series “Meeting America,” virtual talks with the German Ambassador and American stakeholders across the United States.
 
This event is co-sponsored by the German Consulate General San Francisco and the American Council on Germany.

REGISTER

 

About the Speakers

 

Dr. Emily Margarethe Haber has been German Ambassador to the United States since June 2018.   Prior to her transfer to Washington, DC, she served in various leadership functions at the Foreign Office in Berlin. In 2009, she was appointed Political Director and, in 2011, State Secretary, the first woman to hold either post. Thereafter, she was deployed to the Federal Ministry of the Interior, serving as State Secretary in charge of homeland security and migration policy from 2014 until 2018.   Emily Haber has many years of experience with Russia and the former Soviet Union. She held various posts at the German Embassy in Moscow, including Head of the Political Department. At the Foreign Office in Berlin, she served as Head of the OSCE Division and as Deputy Director-General for the Western Balkans, among other positions.   Emily Haber holds a PhD in history and is married to former diplomat Hansjörg Haber. The couple has two sons.

Chris Riley is R Street’s senior fellow of Internet Governance. He will be leading the Knight Foundation-funded project on content moderation, running convenings of a broad range of stakeholders to develop a framework for platforms managing user-generated content. Chris will also be doing policy analysis around content regulatory issues related to that project, including work on Section 230 in the United States and the Digital Services Act in the European Union.

Prior to joining R Street, Chris led global public policy work for the Mozilla Corporation, managing their work on the ground in Washington, D.C., Brussels, Delhi and Nairobi from Mozilla’s San Francisco office, and worked with government policymakers, stakeholders in industry and civil society, and internal teams at Mozilla to advance their mission. Prior to that, he worked in the U.S. Department of State to help manage the Internet Freedom grants portfolio designated by Congress to support technology development, digital safety training, research and related work as a part of advancing the expression of human rights online in internet-repressive countries.

Chris received his bachelor’s in computer science from Wheeling Jesuit University, his PhD in computer science from Johns Hopkins University and his JD from Yale Law School.

Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and FSI.

Marietje Schaake is the International Policy Director at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center and international policy fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. 

 

Stanford Law School Neukom Building, Room N230 Stanford, CA 94305
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James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute
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Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and FSI.  Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.  He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. In addition to dozens of articles (many of which have been cited by the Supreme Court) on the legal regulation of political parties, issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, voting rights, and campaign finance reform, Professor Persily is coauthor of the leading election law casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 5th ed., 2016), with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, and Richard Pildes. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration.  He is codirector of the Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and Social Science One, a project to make available to the world’s research community privacy-protected Facebook data to study the impact of social media on democracy.  He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age.  Along with Professor Charles Stewart III, he recently founded HealthyElections.Org (the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project) which aims to support local election officials in taking the necessary steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide safe voting options for the 2020 election. He received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Yale (1992); a J.D. from Stanford (1998) where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002.   

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Marietje Schaake is a non-resident Fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and at the Institute for Human-Centered AI. She is a columnist for the Financial Times and serves on a number of not-for-profit Boards as well as the UN's High Level Advisory Body on AI. Between 2009-2019 she served as a Member of European Parliament where she worked on trade-, foreign- and tech policy. She is the author of The Tech Coup.


 

Non-Resident Fellow, Cyber Policy Center
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With the rise of national digital identity systems (Digital ID) across the world, there is a growing need to examine their impact on human rights. While these systems offer accountability and efficiency gains, they also pose risks for surveillance, exclusion, and discrimination. In several instances, national Digital ID programmes started with a specific scope of use, but have since been deployed for different applications, and in different sectors. This raises the question of how to determine appropriate and inappropriate uses of Digital ID programs, which create an inherent power imbalance between the State and its residents given the personal data they collect.

On Wednesday, June 23rd @ 10:00 am Pacific Time, join Amber Sinha of India’s Center for Internet and Society (CIS), Anri van der Spuy of Research ICT Africa (RIA) and Dr. Tom Fischer of Privacy International in conversation with Kelly Born, Director of the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative and fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, to discuss the challenges and opportunities posed by digital identity systems, a proposed framework for assessing trade-offs and ensuring that human rights are adequately protected, and a discussion of experiences in translating and adapting new digital ID assessment framework by CIS and RIA to different contexts and geographies.

Amber Sinha 
Anri van der Spuy
Dr. Tom Fischer 
Kelly Born
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In collaboration with Global:SF and the State of California Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development, the China Program at Shorenstein APARC presented session five of the New Economy Conference, "Navigating Chinese Investment, Trade, and Technology," on May 19. The program featured distinguished speakers Ambassador Craig Allen, President of the US-China Business Council; David K. Cheng, Chair and Managing Partner of China & Asia Pacific Practice at Nixon Peabody LLPJames Green, Senior Research Fellow at the Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues at Georgetown University; and Anja Manuel, Co-Founder and Principal of Rice, Hadley, Gates & Manuel LLC. The session was opened by Darlene Chiu Bryant, Executive Director of GlobalSF, and moderated by Professor Jean Oi, William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics and director of the APARC China Program.

U.S.-China economic relations have grown increasingly fraught and competitive. Even amidst intensifying tensions, however, our two major economies remain intertwined. While keeping alert to national security concerns, the economic strength of the United States will depend on brokering a productive competition with China, the world’s fastest growing economy. Precipitous decoupling of trade, investment, and human talent flows between the two nations will inflict unnecessary harm to U.S. economic interests--and those of California.  

Chinese trade and investments into California have grown exponentially over the last decade. But they have come under increasing pressure following geopolitical and economic tensions between the two nations, particularly in the science and technology sectors. Ambassador Craig Allen, David Cheng, James Green, and Anja Manuel explored the role of Chinese economic activity in California in the context of the greater US-Chinese relationship. Watch now: 

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U.S.-China Relations in the Biden Era

Dr. Thomas Wright examines the recent history of US-China relations and what that might mean for the new administration.
U.S.-China Relations in the Biden Era
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Ambassador Craig Allen, David Cheng, James Green, and Anja Manuel explore the role of Chinese economic activity in California in the context of the greater US-Chinese relationship.

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* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

 

Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/Mip2dRr2w7o

 

About the Event: With the rapid rise of China, power transitions and the possibility of great power conflict are the focus of popular and scholarly attention. The discipline of International Relations offers many insights on why violent power transition conflicts occur, yet few substantive treatments exist on why and how peaceful change happen in world politics. The Oxford Handbook of Peaceful Change in International Relations (co-edited by T.V. Paul, Deborah Larson, Harold Trinkunas, Anders Wivel and Ralf Emmers) is the first comprehensive treatment of the subject of peaceful change in the field. It contains some 41 chapters, written by scholars from different theoretical and conceptual backgrounds examining the multi-faceted dimensions of this subject. Chapters in the volume examine this issue through the lens of different approaches in international relations theory, through a focus on key challenges in the international system, and from regional and state-level perspectives on the prospects for peaceful change. This panel with Handbook editors and contributors will discuss the conceptual framework, substantive contributions, and key findings of the project.

 

About the Speakers:

 

T.V. Paul is James McGill Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science at McGill University, Montreal, Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He served as the President of International Studies Association (ISA) for 2016-17. He is the Founding Director of the Global Research Network on Peaceful Change (GRENPEC). Paul is the author or editor of 21 books and over 80 scholarly articles/book chapters including: Restraining Great Powers: Soft Balancing from Empires to the Global Era (Yale University Press, 2018); The Warrior State: Pakistan in the Contemporary World (Oxford University Press, 2013); Globalization and the National Security State (with N. Ripsman, Oxford University Press, 2010); The Tradition of Non-use of Nuclear Weapons (Stanford University Press, 2009); India in the World Order: Searching for Major Power Status (with B.R. Nayar Cambridge University Press, 2002). Paul currently serves as the editor of the Georgetown University Press book series: South Asia in World Affairs.

 

Deborah Welch Larson is professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her Ph.D. at Stanford University. Her publications include Origins of Containment: A Psychological Explanation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Anatomy of Mistrust: US-Soviet Relations during the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); and “Status Seekers: Chinese and Russian Responses to U.S. Primacy,” International Security 34, no. 4 (Spring 2010): 63-95 (with Alexei Shevchenko). She has most recently published Quest for Status: Chinese and Russian Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), with Alexei Shevchenko.

 

Alexandra Gheciu is a Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, and Associate Director of the Centre for International Policy Studies. Her research interests are in the fields of international security, international institutions, Euro-Atlantic relations, global governance and the liberal order, the Global Right, state (re)building, and International Relations theory.

Alexandra's publications include, in addition to articles in leading academic journals, several books: NATO in the ‘'New Europe': The Politics of International Socialization After the Cold War: (Stanford University Press, 2005); Securing Civilization? (Oxford University Press, 2008),  The Return of the Public in Global Governance (co-edited with Jacqueline Best, Cambridge University Press, 2014 and 2015);  and, more recently, Security Entrepreneurs: Performing Protection in Post-Cold War Europe (Oxford University Press, 2018); and  The Oxford Handbook of International Security (co-edited with William Wohlforth, Oxford University Press, 2018).

 

Virtual Seminar

T.V. Paul Professor McGill University
Deborah Welch Larson Professor UCLA
Alexandra Gheciu Professor Centre for International Policy Studies
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