The Program on Social Entrepreneurship at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law seeks to actively integrate the on-the-ground experience of social entrepreneurs from around the world with cutting-edge academic research at Stanford University. Building a tangible bridge between academia and practice, the Program exposes students to new models of social change through innovative courses and provides practitioners the opportunity to build their individual and personal capacities as social change leaders.

Human trafficking is a global phenomenon that each year forces millions into lives as prostitutes, laborers, child soldiers, and domestic servants. Traffickers prey on the weak and vulnerable, targeting young victims with promises of a better life. This modern form of slavery impacts every continent and type of economy, while the industry continues to grow with global profits reaching nearly $32 billion annually. In spite of these mounting figures, prosecution and conviction rates are not increasing relative to the surge in these crimes. According to the U.S. State Department, for every 800 people trafficked in 2006, only one person was convicted.

As the size and scope of human trafficking increase, less is known about the root causes of human trafficking on this new scale. A better understanding of the conditions that give rise to human trafficking – income inequality, rural poor populations, cultural norms, and gender disparities – will bring the international community closer to curbing the growth of this criminal industry. Understanding how multi-lateral institutions – from the World Bank to the United Nations – may unwittingly encourage the industry will lead to more informed policies for its eradication.

The Program on Human Rights (PHR) at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law is launching a new research initiative on human trafficking to address these challenges and generate new knowledge on this issue of international concern. Working in collaboration with Stanford faculty and students, this project will draw on research underway across the university to create a forum on human trafficking. The goal is to produce collaborative research and policy recommendations to better address the multiple dimensions of human trafficking.

"This research collaborative will shift the agenda on human trafficking from one that has adopted a criminal-legal paradigm to one that focuses on all the pre-conditions for trafficking," said Helen Stacy, director of the Program on Human Rights. "Interdisciplinary tools drawing on law, health, gender, and psychology will introduce an integrated approach to this critical area of study."

The speaker series will begin Dec. 12 at a private research workshop featuring Madeleine Rees, the United Nation's representative in post-genocide Bosnia, and Laryssa Kondracki, director of The Whistleblower. Rees is known for her efforts to expose the U.N. for its failure to shut down brothels in Bosnia where they were actively used for human trafficking. The Whistleblower documents this story and helped ignite a debate at the U.N. over this problem.

The Dec. 12 workshop will bring together a multidisciplinary group of Stanford faculty, researchers, and students working on aspects of human trafficking in preparation for the launch of the 2012 speakers series offered in the winter quarter. The 2012 roster of speakers represent a diverse group of those advancing research, policy and activism on human trafficking.

Participants include: Rosi Orozco, Mexican congressional representative and anti-trafficking leader; Bradley Myles, executive director and CEO of Polaris-USA; and Dr. Mohammed Mattar, executive director of the Protection project at Johns Hopkins Univeristy. Stanford researchers will be paired with speakers to pursue original research on the causal factors impacting this field of study. 

The 2012 Human Trafficking is Global Slavery speakers series is funded by Diana Jenkins, founder of the Sanela Diana Jenkins Foundation for Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The series is free and open to the public. It will meet on Tuesdays from Jan. 10 to Mar. 13 at the Bechtel Conference Center at Encina Hall, Stanford. It is available to Stanford students as a 1-unit course cross-listed under INTNLREL 110, IPS 271, and POLISCI204.

Despite an increase in food production and incomes worldwide, one in seven of the world’s 7 billion people is hungry.

Upheavals in food prices and the global economy, combined with a growing population’s demands for food and energy, are widening the gap between rich and poor. And that rift is creating new challenges to feed the hungry – most of whom live in remote, rural areas – without depleting the planet’s natural resources.

Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) is dedicated to addressing these challenges. Started as a research program in 2006, FSE is celebrating its launch today as a full-scale research center. The celebration is part of a larger conference hosted by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) focused on links between international security, food and health care. The institutional elevation signifies the growing importance of food security issues at Stanford and worldwide. And it positions FSE to become the leading academic institution in the field of food security.

“Food security has quickly risen as a critical global issue comparable to international security, global health, and democratization, and will remain a pressing issue in the years head,” said Rosamond L. Naylor, director of FSE. “We’re looking at how to raise people out of poverty so they can afford more food, how to stabilize prices so food isn’t too expensive, and how to grow more food without destroying the environment.”

In an introduction given at FSE’s Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series last winter, Stanford President John Hennessy remarked, “Stanford was founded on the idea that its teaching and research could have a broader impact on society, and the area of food security certainly has that kind of possibility.”

“Our work on hunger, rural poverty, and the environmental impact of food production is critical not only to the future of our lives here in the United States but to the lives of people around the world,” said Hennessey. “We will need to bring together teams of experts from different disciplines if we are going to make important contributions to this work.”

FSE’s dual affiliation with the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Woods Institute for the Environment supports these collaborations, and is a key factor to the center’s expansion. The center is led by Naylor and its deputy director, Walter P. Falcon. Both share a long history at Stanford studying international agricultural economics.

Naylor received her PhD from Stanford’s Food Research Institute in 1989, and is now a professor in the department of Environmental Earth System Science. Her interdisciplinary approach to teaching has resulted in popular courses such as the World Food Economy (which she co-teaches with Falcon,) and Human Society and Environmental Change. Naylor was appointed the William Wrigley Senior Fellowship in 2008 in recognition of her multidisciplinary, cutting-edge research and long-term commitment to combating global hunger and environmental degradation.

Falcon, the Helen Farnsworth Professor of Agricultural Policy, Emeritus, served as the director of Stanford’s Food Research Institute from 1972 to 1991. Falcon’s leadership role continued as FSI’s director from 1991 to 1998. Between 1998 and 2007, he co-directed the Center for Environmental Science and Policy out of which grew the Program on Food Security and the Environment.

FSE is now engaged in over 15 major projects with $11.5 million in grant and program funding under management. Productive food systems and their environmental consequences comprise the core of the Center’s research portfolio.

“Roz Naylor and Wally Falcon have worked tirelessly to promote the center’s mission and to secure the funding needed to support the center’s growth,” said FSI Director Coit D. Blacker. “It is gratifying to see FSE’s research and scholarly agendas receiving a resounding vote of confidence from the University as well as some of the world’s leading foundations, agencies and individual donors.” 

Gerhard Casper, Stanford’s ninth president and a senior fellow at the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, has been appointed to lead the institute for a year. The announcement was made Wednesday by Ann Arvin, vice provost and dean of research.

Casper will become director on Sept. 1, 2012. He succeeds Coit D. Blacker, an FSI senior fellow, the Olivier Nomellini Professor in International Studies, and the Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. Blacker, whose affiliation with Stanford began in 1977, will be on sabbatical leave next year.

“Chip has provided truly remarkable leadership for FSI,” Arvin said.

Among his priorities at the helm of FSI, Casper will spearhead a search for a director who will take his place in 2013.

“As a senior fellow at FSI since 2000, President Casper brings a deep knowledge of the institute and his own unparalleled experience with academic leadership to the launch of the next phase of the institute’s development,” Arvin said. “His willingness to make this commitment to FSI assures that its many dynamic research and educational programs will be maintained and that new opportunities can be pursued vigorously.”

Casper’s work has primarily focused on constitutional law, constitutional history, comparative law, and legal theory. He has also worked on rule of law issues, teaching in the Draper Hills Summer Fellowship program at FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law.

“My main interests in life have been issues of governance as reflected in United States constitutional history and law,” Casper said. “Apart from such global problems as hunger, disease and security, governability itself has become a substantive concern for nation states, regional organizations – such as the European Union – and for the world. Hardly any substantive matter can any longer be addressed and solved parochially. Because of that, institutions like FSI are worth our attention and support. Because of that I have agreed to make my own modest contribution.

“That decision has been made much easier by the great leadership which Chip Blacker has provided over the last nine years,” he said.

Blacker, who has led FSI since 2003, called Casper the “perfect choice” to lead FSI.

"President Casper brings a deep knowledge of the institute and his own unparalleled experience with academic leadership to the launch of the next phase of the institute’s development," – Ann Arvin, vice provost and dean of research

“I’m delighted that Gerhard Casper has agreed to take the reins of FSI after I step down in August,” Blacker said. “Gerhard’s willingness to serve in this capacity guarantees strong leadership for the institute at a critically important moment in its history.”

Before starting his tenure as Stanford’s president in 1992, Casper spent 26 years at the University of Chicago where he taught law before serving as dean of the law school. He was Chicago’s provost from 1989 to 1992.

Casper, who is the Peter and Helen Bing Professor in Undergraduate Studies, Emeritus, and a professor emeritus at Stanford Law School, began his teaching career in 1964 as an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Born in Hamburg, Germany in 1937, Casper studied law at the universities of Freiburg and Hamburg. He earned his first law degree in 1961 and received his master of laws degree from Yale Law School a year later. He then returned to Freiburg, where he received his doctorate in 1964. He immigrated to the United States in 1964.

He has been elected to membership in the American Law Institute, the International Academy of Comparative Law, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Orden Pour le mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste (Order Pour le mérite for the Sciences and Arts), and the American Philosophical Society. He has held the Kluge Chair in American Law and Governance at the Library of Congress, and has been awarded several honorary doctorates.

Casper is a member of the board of trustees of the Central European University in Budapest and additional not-for-profit boards. From 2000 to 2008, he served as a successor trustee of Yale University.

He is married to Regina Casper, professor emerita (on recall) of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford. 

The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is currently accepting applications from pre-doctoral students at the write-up stage and from new postdoctoral scholars working in any of the four program areas of democracy, development, evaluating the efficacy of democracy promotion, and rule of law. Applicants working at the intersection of two or more of these issue areas will receive preferential consideration. The Center expects to award three to four fellowships for the 2012-13 academic year.

For additional information about the program and application procedures, please visit our fellowship page at: http://cddrl.stanford.edu/fellowships/cddrl_fellowships

Applications are due by January 31, 2012.

Visiting Scholar Ahmed Benchemsi discusses the seemingly paradoxic relationship between the independent media and the Moroccan government in two pieces for Harvard's Nieman Reports. Editor of two best-selling weekly magazines in Morocco - TelQuel and Nishan - Benchemsi brought controversial and taboo subjects to the public's attention, often incriminating the king himself. In these revealing articles, Benchemsi shares the details of how the regime bankrupted his publications and drove a generation of avant-garde journalists out of Morocco.