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.

Work on the complex and evolving nature of sovereignty has been underway at Stanford IIS since the mid-1990s. The Center will build on this foundation of knowledge by taking up the issues of intervention, or efforts by external actors to alter domestic authority structures in other states. While influencing domestic authority structures of target states has been central to statecraft for centuries, it has been all but ignored by most international relations theorists.

Today, it is widely recognized that the absence of the rule of law constitutes a critical barrier to economic growth and democractic political development. Increasingly, scholars and policy makers alike are turning their attention toward the concept of economic rights - ranging from broad affirmations of the importance of secure property rights to more particular descriptions of modes of corporate governance - to inform their thinking about growth and development.

In the past three decades, the number of democracies in the world has tripled, and democracy has become the only broadly legitimate form of government. But many of the regimes that have replaced dictatorships themselves suffer from many illiberal practices, or hold multiparty elections only as a façade to mask continuing authoritarian domination.

CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall, Room C144
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 724-7985 (650) 724-2996
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Visiting Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Business
milogram.jpg PhD

Eva Meyersson Milgrom is a senior research scholar at CDDRL and a visiting associate professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and the Public Policy Program. She is also an associate professor and senior research fellow at the School of Business at Stockholm University in Sweden.

Her current research focuses on the following topics: (1) implications of social behavioral theories on economic growth, in conjunction with Guillermina Jasso of New York University; (2) institutional change and its effects on promotion and demotion in Swedish private companies; inter-firm wage mobility in Sweden from 1979-1990; labor markets segregation (firm and individual characteristics) in collaboration with Illong Kwon of the University of Michigan along with Mike Gibbs and Kathy Lerulli; (3) equity considerations and the trade-offs between complementarities and influence costs within organizations; and (4) the structure of inequality and extremism. At Stanford, she has taught courses on international corporate governance and on managing diversity.

Her previous interdisciplinary work includes the following: In the summer of 2002, she organized a laboratory to provide an institutional analysis of economic growth based on firm-matched data from four Scandinavian countries. In fall 2002, she organized a conference that brought together scholars from diverse fields to analyze the phenomenon of suicide bombing and to discuss how this phenomenon affects current social science thinking and research. A book is in the works on this topic. Meyersson Milgrom also organized sessions on rational choice at the August 2002 meeting of the American Sociological Association.

Meyersson Milgrom previously served as a visiting scholar in the sociology departments at Stanford University (1998-2000) and Harvard University (2000-2001), and also served as a visiting associate professor at the Sloan School of Management, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2001-2002).

Her recent books published in Sweden include: The State as a Corporate Owner (1998, with Susannah Lindh) and Compensation Contracts in Swedish Publicly Traded Firms (1994). Her recently published articles include: "An Evaluation of the Swedish Corporate System" in Hans T:son Soderstom (January 2003); "Pay, Risk and Productivity" in Finnish Economic Papers (with Trond Petersen and Rita Asplund); "Equal Pay for Equal Work? Evidence from Sweden, Norway and the United States" in the Scandinavian Journal of Economics (vol. 4, 2001, with Trond Petersen and Vermund Snartland); and "More Glory and Less Injustice: The Glass-Ceiling in Sweden 1970-1990" in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility (Kevin T. Leicht, editor, with Trond Petersen).

Meyersson Milgrom was born in Sweden and received a PhD in sociology from Stockholm University.

CDDRL Senior Research Scholar

CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C147
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 724-6448 (650) 723-1928
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Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and Sociology
diamond_encina_hall.png MA, PhD

Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford, where he lectures and teaches courses on democracy (including an online course on EdX). At the Hoover Institution, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Project on the U.S., China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for six and a half years. He leads FSI’s Israel Studies Program and is a member of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. He also co-leads the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He served for 32 years as founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.

Diamond’s research focuses on global trends affecting freedom and democracy and on U.S. and international policies to defend and advance democracy. His book, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, analyzes the challenges confronting liberal democracy in the United States and around the world at this potential “hinge in history,” and offers an agenda for strengthening and defending democracy at home and abroad.  A paperback edition with a new preface was released by Penguin in April 2020. His other books include: In Search of Democracy (2016), The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (1999), Promoting Democracy in the 1990s (1995), and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria (1989). He has edited or coedited more than fifty books, including China’s Influence and American Interests (2019, with Orville Schell), Silicon Triangle: The United States, China, Taiwan the Global Semiconductor Security (2023, with James O. Ellis Jr. and Orville Schell), and The Troubling State of India’s Democracy (2024, with Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha Mistree).

During 2002–03, Diamond served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other organizations dealing with governance and development. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. His 2005 book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, was one of the first books to critically analyze America's postwar engagement in Iraq.

Among Diamond’s other edited books are Democracy in Decline?; Democratization and Authoritarianism in the Arab World; Will China Democratize?; and Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, all edited with Marc F. Plattner; and Politics and Culture in Contemporary Iran, with Abbas Milani. With Juan J. Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset, he edited the series, Democracy in Developing Countries, which helped to shape a new generation of comparative study of democratic development.

Download full-resolution headshot; photo credit: Rod Searcey.

Former Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Faculty Chair, Jan Koum Israel Studies Program
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Using firsthand personal accounts and focusing on the experiences of women, Katherine R. Jolluck relates and examines the experiences of thousands of civilians deported to the USSR following the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland in 1939. Upon arrival in remote areas of the Soviet Union, they were deposited in prisons, labor camps, special settlements, and collective farms, and subjected to tremendous hardships and oppressive conditions. In 1942, some 115,000 Polish citizens - only a portion of those initially exiled from their homeland - were evacuated to Iran. There they were asked to complete extensive questionnaires about their experiences. Having read and reviewed hundreds of these documents, Jolluck reveals not only the harsh treatment these women experienced, but also how they maintained their identities as respectable women and patriotic Poles. She finds that for those exiled, the ways in which they strove to recreate home in a foreign and hostile environment became a key means of their survival. Both a harrowing account of brutality and suffering and a clear analysis of civilian experiences in wartime, Exile and Identity expands the history of war far beyond the military battlefield.

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University of Pittsburgh Press
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Katherine Jolluck
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9780822941859
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Khaled Abou El Fadl is one of the leading authorities in Islamic law in the United States and Europe who has frequently criticized contemporary Islamic legal interpretation as deviating from its original diversity and moderation. He teaches Islamic Law, Middle Eastern Investment Law, Immigration Law, and courses related to human rights and terrorism. Professor Abou El Fadl's books include: Conference of the Books: The Search for Beauty in Islam (2001); Rebellion and Violence in Islamic Law (2001); Speaking in God's Name: Islamic Law, Authority and Women (2001); And God Knows the Soldiers: The Authoritative and Authoritarian in Islamic Discourse (2nd ed. revised and expanded, 2001) and The Place of Tolerance in Islam (2002).

Oksenberg, 3rd Floor, Encina Hall South

Khaled Abou Al Fadl Professor of Law Speaker University of California, Los Angeles
Lectures
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