Stanford University

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Spotlight on the 2026 Summer Fellows

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Nora Sulots
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This summer, the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) welcomed 26 democracy leaders from 19 countries across the developing world to its Fisher Family Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development Program for an intensive three-week training focused on democracy, good governance, and rule of law reform. Chosen from a highly competitive applicant pool, the fellows represent a diverse range of professional backgrounds and geographical regions, spanning civil society, public service, social enterprise, media, and technology. Launched in 2005, the program was previously known as the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program. It was renamed in 2023 in recognition of a gift from the Fisher family — Sakurako (Sako), ‘82, and William (Bill), MBA ‘84 — that endowed the program and secured its future.

Fellows were instructed by a leading Stanford faculty team composed of CDDRL Mosbacher Director and FSI Satre Family Senior Fellow Kathryn Stoner; Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow Francis Fukuyama; Senior Fellow in Global Democracy Larry Diamond; Michael McFaul, FSI Senior Fellow, Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies, and former U.S. Ambassador to Russia; and Erik Jensen, Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School, on new institutional models and frameworks to enhance their ability to promote good governance, accountable politics, and find new ways to achieve economic development in their home countries.

The program opened with foundational sessions on the dimensions of development, the meaning of democracy, and the role of rule of law, led by faculty including Fukuyama, Diamond, Stoner, and Jensen. Fellows then explored comparative case studies in autocratic governance — from the Middle East to China's global information ecosystem — alongside a fireside discussion on the geopolitics of energy. The second week turned to questions of migration, gender and political development, and the causes of democratization, including a session with the Human Rights Foundation on global patterns of authoritarianism. Additional sessions covered conflict and leadership, transitional justice, and anti-corruption reform, closing with discussions of sharp power, deliberative democracy, and propaganda in autocratic states. In its third and final week, the program addressed some of today's most consequential global issues, including the future of NATO, the geopolitics of artificial intelligence, and democratic backsliding worldwide. The week also covered inequality in Latin America, political corruption, and the challenges facing American democracy ahead of the midterm elections, concluding with sessions on protecting vulnerable populations in conflict and the relationship between land power and democracy.

This year's cohort now joins a global network of more than 500 alumni from over 100 countries, whose professional backgrounds are as diverse as the challenges they confront in their home countries — reflecting a shared dedication to building sound structures of democracy and development.

During the program, the fellows delivered "TED"-style talks in our Fellow Spotlight Series, sharing personal stories about the struggles in their home countries, stories of their fight for justice, equality, and democracy, and stories of optimism and endurance. You can watch their talks in the playlist below:

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2026 Fisher Family Summer Fellows
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The Fellow Spotlight Series is an inspiring and moving series of "TED"-style talks given by each of our 2026 Fisher Family Summer Fellows to share their backstories and discuss their work.

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2026 Shorenstein Journalism Award: Shibani Mahtani on Attacks Against the Free Press and Democratic Backsliding in Southeast Asia 

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Flyer for the 2026 Shorenstein Jouranlism Award. Abstract red background with geometric pattern and headshots of award winner Shibani Mahtani and panelists Anna Fifield, Oren Samet, and James Hamilton.

“What’s Your Agenda?”: Attacks Against the Free Press and Democratic Backsliding in Southeast Asia

 

The 2026 Shorenstein Journalism Award Honors Singapore-Based Investigative Journalist Shibani Mahtani


In her 15 years reporting on Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, Shibani Mahtani has witnessed the region’s once-vibrant press corps dwindle in size, as journalists are jailed, harassed, and sued by governments. This pressure, along with an industry-wide strain on the business of journalism, has forced many outlets to shutter. In her keynote address, she will discuss how this diminished media environment has had a profound impact on regional democracy at a time of seismic global instability and consider the challenges of navigating this reality.

Join APARC as we recognize Mahtani, winner of the 2026 Shorenstein Journalism Award, for her exemplary reporting that has brought critical attention to the erosion of democracy and human rights across Asia, particularly in Southeast Asia.

Mahtani's keynote will be followed by a conversation with two experts: Anna Fifield, a New Zealand journalist, foreign affairs analyst, and winner of the 2018 Shorenstein Journalism Award, and Oren Samet, assistant professor of political science at Rice University. The event will conclude with an audience Q&A session.

Panel Chair: James Hamilton, vice provost for undergraduate education, Hearst Professor of Communication, and director of the Stanford Journalism Program.

Lunch is included for registered attendees.

 

 

Speakers   
 

Portrait of Shibani Mahtani.

Shibani Mahtani is a Singapore-based investigative journalist. Until February 2026, she was an international investigative correspondent for the Washington Post. She focuses on accountability-driven investigations across the Asia-Pacific region. She joined The Post's foreign desk in 2018 as the Southeast Asia and Hong Kong Bureau Chief, and was honored with awards including a Human Rights Press Award for her reporting on the 2019 Hong Kong protests. Prior to joining The Post, Shibani was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal based in Singapore, Myanmar, and Chicago. She is an author of Among the Braves, a narrative non-fiction history of Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement.

Portrait of Anna Fifield.

Anna Fifield, a New Zealand journalist and foreign affairs analyst, writes a newsletter on New Zealand’s role in global affairs. She is also a non-resident fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, contributing to their work on New Zealand geopolitics and the U.S.-New Zealand partnership. She spent more than 20 years as a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post and Financial Times, reporting from Asia, the Middle East, and the United States, and later served as the Washington Post’s Asia-Pacific editor, overseeing coverage of China and the wider region. From 2020 to 2022, she was editor of the Dominion Post in Wellington, New Zealand’s capital city. Fifield was a Nieman Journalism Fellow at Harvard University, where she studied political change in closed societies, and won Stanford University’s 2018 Shorenstein Journalism Award for excellence in reporting on Asia. Her book on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, The Great Successor, has been translated into 24 languages.

Fifield serves on the Shorenstein Journalism Award judging committee.

Portrait of Oren Samet.

Oren Samet is an assistant professor of political science at Rice University. His research centers on the international dimensions of authoritarian politics and democratization, with a particular emphasis on how opposition actors engage both at home and abroad. Bridging international relations and comparative politics, his work explores the dynamics of autocratization, how opposition parties compete in unfair elections, and how non-state actors shape foreign policy across borders. Further research examines innovations to confront democratic backsliding and the challenges of external support for democratic governance. Samet’s research draws on extensive fieldwork in Southeast Asia, his primary regional focus, complemented by analysis spanning a broad range of autocratic and backsliding contexts. His academic work has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and Political Communication, and his other writing has been published in outlets including Foreign Policy, Slate, and World Politics Review. Before entering academia, Samet was based in Bangkok, Thailand, and worked on democracy and human rights initiatives across Southeast Asia, engaging with politicians and civil society. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

Panel Chair
 

James Hamilton

James Hamilton is the Freeman-Thornton Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Hearst Professor of Communication, and director of the Stanford Journalism Program. His most recent book is You Got In! Now What? 100 Insights into Finding Your Best Life in College (Radius Book Group, 2025). His books on media markets and information provision include All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News (Princeton, 2004), Regulation Through Revelation: The Origin, Politics, and Impacts of the Toxics Release Inventory Program (Cambridge, 2005), and Channeling Violence: The Economic Market for Violent Television Programming (Princeton, 1998). His book Democracy's Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism (Harvard, 2016) focuses on the market for investigative reporting. Through research in the field of computational journalism, he is exploring how the costs of story discovery can be lowered through better use of data and algorithms. He is co-founder of the Stanford Computational Journalism Lab, Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, affiliated faculty at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, and member of the JSK Fellowships Board of Visitors.

Hamilton serves on the Shorenstein Journalism Award judging committee.

James Hamilton

 

Bechtel Conference Center
Encina Hall Central (First Floor)
616 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305

Shibani Mahtani
Anna Fifield
Oren Samet
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Chris Dann

Encina Hall, E109
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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CDDRL Predoctoral Fellow, 2026-27
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Chris Dann is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Stanford University and is a current pre-doctoral fellow with the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). Before graduate school, he received a BSc from the London School of Economics and an MSc at the University of Oxford. He then returned to LSE for two years as a pre-doctoral fellow, working for economist Professor Sir Tim Besley. His research interests lie in the political economy of large-scale infrastructure investments and how these shape the social contract. 

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Frances Cayton

Encina Hall, E106
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Einstein Moos Postdoctoral Fellow, 2026-27
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Frances Cayton is a scholar of democracy and civil society. For the 2026-27 academic year, she is the Einstein Moos Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). In 2027, she will join the University of South Carolina as an Assistant Professor of Political Science.

Frances' book project, "How Civic Consciousness Shapes Democratic Resilience," examines how, why, and under what conditions civil society encourages individuals to depolarize and resist democratic erosion. Combining extensive organizational and bureaucratic data, elite and mass surveys, experiments, and interview evidence, she demonstrates how informal and apolitical subsets of civic life retain critical latent democratic potential. The project primarily focuses on Poland and Hungary, though it also draws comparisons with cases across East-Central Europe and globally.

More broadly, Frances works on questions about the drivers and consequences of democratic engagement, particularly concerning conspiracy theories, opposition media, and the challenges of post-backsliding redemocratization. Her research is published or forthcoming in numerous outlets, including the American Journal of Political Science and Perspectives on Politics. Her work has been supported by the US Departments of State and Education, as well as the American Political Science Association. She is also the co-founder of EEPGW, a monthly online workshop on East European politics.

Frances holds a Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University. She earned her AM from Harvard University's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and a BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Benjamin Yoel

Encina Hall, E105
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Jan Koum Israel Studies Program Postdoctoral Fellow, 2026-27
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Benjamin Yoel is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University. Previously, he was a Predoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University's SNF Agora Institute and a visiting PhD student at the University of Chicago's Center on Democracy.

Benjamin studies democratic backsliding, nonviolent resistance, international pressure, opposition politics, and public opinion. His main research agenda focuses on the nexus of foreign pressure and opposition to democratic backsliding. Other work focuses on the broader causes and consequences of democratic backsliding as well as making different types of data more accessible to researchers and practitioners alike. His academic work has been published in Nature: Scientific Data, The International Journal of Public Opinion Research, International Affairs, and American Politics Research.

In addition to his academic research, Benjamin has consulted on projects related to democratic backsliding that have been supported by the US Department of State's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Michigan State University and a B.A. and M.A. in Government from Reichman University.

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Israel Insights Webinar with Donna Divine & Asaf Romirowsky — Teaching and Researching Israel in 2026

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What defines Israel Studies as an academic discipline today, and where might the field be heading in view of the profound changes shaping Israel, diaspora Jewry, and Israel's international standing? How has the aftermath of October 7 impacted academic research and university teaching about modern Israel in American academia? Join Amichai Magen and Ori Rabinowitz in conversation with Professor Donna Robinson Divine, former President of the Association for Israel Studies (2017-2019), and Dr. Asaf Romirowsky, executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Donna Robinson Divine is the Morningstar Family Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Government, Emerita at Smith College, where she taught a variety of courses on Middle East Politics. Her writing includes Women Living Change:  Cross-Cultural Perspectives; essays from the Smith College Research Project on Women and Social Change; Politics and Society in Ottoman Palestine: The Arab Struggle for Survival and Power; Postcolonial Theory and The Arab-Israeli Conflict; Exiled in the Homeland: Zionism and the Return to Mandate Palestine; Word Crimes: Reclaiming the Language of the Israel-Palestinian Conflict; and October 7: The Wars Over Words and Deeds. Named the Katharine Asher Engel lecturer at Smith College for the 2012-2013 academic year in recognition of her scholarly achievements, she was also designated as Smith's Honored Professor for the excellence of her teaching. She was president of the Association for Israel Studies from 2017-2019, is an affiliate professor at Israel's University of Haifa, and was named to Algemeiner’s 2019 list of the top 100 people “positively influencing Jewish life."

Asaf Romirowsky, PhD, is the Executive Director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) and the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA). Romirowsky is also a senior nonresident research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA)  and a Professor [Affiliate] at the University of Haifa. Trained as a Middle East historian, he holds a PhD in Middle East and Mediterranean Studies from King's College London, UK, and has published widely on various aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict and American foreign policy in the Middle East, as well as on Israeli and Zionist history. Romirowsky is co-author of Religion, Politics, and the Origins of Palestine Refugee Relief and a contributor to The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel. His latest book is entitled, October 7: The Wars Over Words and Deeds. Romirowsky’s publicly-engaged scholarship has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The National Interest, The American Interest, The New Republic, The Times of Israel, Jerusalem Post, Ynet, and Tablet, among other online and print media outlets.

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Amichai Magen
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Donna Divine
Asaf Romirowsky
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Wednesday, November 18. Click for details and registration.

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Israel Insights Webinar with Dahlia Scheindlin — To Bibi or Not to Bibi? Scenarios for Israel's Crucial Elections

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Six days before Israelis head to the polls—for what is perhaps the most dramatic and consequential national election in the country's history—what do the latest public opinion surveys tell us about the contending parties and possible outcomes of the elections? Is the Netanyahu bloc likely to win or lose the elections, or are we heading towards a possible stalemate or some new political constellation in Israel? Join Amichai Magen and Ori Rabinowitz for a conversation about the upcoming elections with expert public opinion researcher and political strategist Dr. Dahlia Scheindlin. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr. Dahlia Scheindlin is a political strategist and public opinion researcher who has advised on nine electoral campaigns in Israel and worked in 15 other countries over 25 years. She is a columnist at Haaretz newspaper and a policy fellow at Century International. Dahlia conducts public opinion research for civil society organizations, including joint Israeli-Palestinian surveys. She holds a PhD in political science from Tel Aviv University, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Financial Times, The Guardian, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy, among other publications. She is the author of The Crooked Timber of Democracy in Israel: Promise Unfulfilled (2023), and in 2025, she was a Distinguished Middle East fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Amichai Magen
Amichai Magen
Or (Ori) Rabinowitz
Or (Ori) Rabinowitz

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Dahlia Scheindlin
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Wednesday, October 21. Click for details and registration.

Israel Studies
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Israel Insights Webinar with Amos Harel — Three Years Since October 7: Causes and Consequences

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Three years after the October 7, 2023, invasion and massacre, the questions and consequences surrounding the worst security failure in Israel's modern history continue to reverberate. With no National Commission of Inquiry established by the Netanyahu government to investigate how Israel was caught off-guard and no definite end to the multi-front war that followed the Hamas attack (in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and Yemen), how can we make sense of October 7 and its aftermath? Join Amichai Magen and Or Rabinowitz in conversation with Amos Harel as, three years on, they seek to understand the causes and consequences of the day that forever changed Israel, the Middle East, and the world.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Amos Harel is one of Israel's most accomplished and respected journalists and authors in military and defense affairs. As the military correspondent and then senior defense analyst for Haaretz for nearly three decades, Harel has covered Israeli security and published four books including, most recently, 06:29 - Anatomy of a Failure (published in Hebrew in May 2026), which examines the intelligence misses, military responses, and political context surrounding the October 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks. Previously, he coauthored, with journalist and screenwriter Avi Issacharoff, The Seventh War (2004), about the second Intifada, and 34 Days (2008), about Israel's second Lebanon War. Both books received the Chechic Award, given annually by the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel-Aviv. Harel's The New Face of the IDF, was published in Hebrew in 2013. In 2015, Amos Harel won the Sokolov Award, Israel's most prestigious prize for excellence in journalism.

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Amichai Magen
Amichai Magen
Or (Ori) Rabinowitz
Or (Ori) Rabinowitz

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Amos Harel
Seminars

Wednesday, October 7. Click for details and registration.

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An unexpected boost for democracy

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Critics have warned that Chinese projects could chip away at democracy in Latin America. Our research suggests the opposite may be happening.

This article is based on Ibáñez and Schläpfer's working paper on how exposure to Chinese development projects shapes democratic attitudes in Latin America.

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Alain Schläpfer
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pp. 54-56

NextGen Roundtable: Decision 2026 Demonstrates the Promise of Deliberative Democracy

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People, Politics, and Places Student Fellow Caroline Zhang (‘29) attended the event and served as a moderator.
People, Politics, and Places Student Fellow Caroline Zhang (‘29) attended the event and served as a moderator.
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Hosted by the Close Up Foundation in partnership with the Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab, Generation Lab, and the Hoover Institution’s Center for Revitalizing American Institutions, the program challenged participants to deliberate — not debate — some of the nation’s most pressing policy questions ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

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