October 2nd, 2008

New York Times editor appointed Stanford scholar, adviser

Philip Taubman, reporter and editor at the New York Times for nearly 30 years and an expert on national security issues, has been appointed as a consulting professor at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation and as an adviser to the campus on university affairs issues. Read more »

September 30th, 2008

Krasner moderates Atherton talk on foreign affairs

Stephen Krasner, senior fellow at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and professor of International Relations, moderated at an event last week discussing foreign affairs form the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the 2001 September 11th attacks of the WTC. Read more »

Diamond book cited in The National

In their book, Hope is Not a Plan, Thomas S Mowle and Larry Diamond said that the US Army's chief intelligence officer in Iraq in 2003, Maj Gen Barbara Fast, established "an intelligence fusion cell manned by Americans, British, and Australians... The fusion cell dealt with targeting, counterterrorism, interrogation support, political-military matters, and the insurgency." Read more »

McFaul discussed in Moscow Times article on US Election

Michael McFaul, Obama's adviser on Russia, said foreign policy was still a secondary issue for most American voters. "After last week's events [on Wall Street], this is even more so," McFaul said in a telephone interview from Stanford University, California, where he is a professor of political science and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Read more »

September 26th, 2008

David Victor delivers keynote lecture at Petro Gas Conference in New Delhi

Victor's keynote lecture, "Regulation and Pricing in the International Gas Market", highlighted some key issues that need particular attention in the rapidly changing Indian gas market.

• » David G. Victor
• » Regulation and Pricing in the International Gas Market
• » Geopolitics of Gas

An Urgent Call for Oral History Project on Modern Korea

David Straub, Associate Director of Korean Studies Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, proposes an oral history project to flesh out the story of U.S-Korean relations. "While books may last forever, one "non-renewable" source of information and wisdom is the oral history of our forerunners. When our elders and predecessors pass away, we bitterly regret that we did not ask them more about their experiences and insights. Thus I was delighted when I recently discovered a treasure trove of oral histories of American diplomats." says Straub. Read more »

Siegfried Hecker awarded 2008 Los Alamos Medal

CISAC Co-Director Siegfried Hecker has been awarded Los Alamos National Laboratory's highest honor, the Los Alamos Medal. Read more »

September 24th, 2008

The Myth of the Authoritarian Model: How Putin's Crackdown Holds Russia Back

The conventional explanation for Vladimir Putin's popularity is straightforward. In the 1990s, under post-Soviet Russia's first president, Boris Yeltsin, the state did not govern, the economy shrank, and the population suffered. Since 2000, under Putin, order has returned, the economy has flourished, and the average Russian is living better than ever before. As political freedom has decreased, economic growth has increased. Putin may have rolled back democratic gains, the story goes, but these were necessary sacrifices on the altar of stability and growth. Read more »

September 23rd, 2008

The Resilience of Authoritarianism

Since the first gulf war, most authoritarian regimes In the Arab world have been able to maintain structures of governance that have endured since the post-World War II process of decolonization. We have not seen the emergence of agents of change capable of mounting effective political challenges. Regimes that often seemed to be losing international and domestic credibility have been able to remake themselves in ways that worked to maintain power and control. Read more »

Ethnicity in Today's Europe

The Forum on Contemporary Europe (FCE) is sponsoring long-term research on questions of European integration. This year FCE has conducted a series of seminars and international conferences to bring European authors and policy leaders together with forum researchers and Stanford centers to investigate the challenges of social integration. The series has combined the study of European Union (EU) policy toward its newest members, East-West and trans-Atlantic relations, crime and social conflict, and European models of universal citizenship. 3 papers available
Read more »

Program on Global Justice: Just Supply Chains, Liberation Technology, and Human Rights

One of Stanford's many remarkable attractions is the Rodin sculpture garden. And perhaps the most extraordinary Rodin sculpture is his Gates of Hell, inspired by Dante's Inferno. In his Divine Comedy, Dante tells us that the inscription over the Gates of Hell is "abandon all hope, ye who enter here." Read more »

Claims, Treaties, and Resolution of Territorial Disputes

Prominent conflicts such as the India-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir and the conflict on the Korean Peninsula highlight the need for peaceful solutions to violent territorial disputes. Although the effectiveness of negotiated legal solutions to such conflicts is often questioned, a new Stanford study suggests that treaties that resolve territorial conflicts "work" -- in the sense that they are associated with a large reduction in the probability of subsequent conflict. Read more »

Why the Peak Oil Debate Misses the Point in an NOC-Dominated World

As oil prices surge through $140/barrel at the time of writing, surely one can at least count on the invisible hand of the market to drive further exploration and production and ultimately bring more supplies on line, right? Or perhaps, more ominously, high oil prices presage a darker future of shortage and conflict as global oil fields pass their geological "peak"? In fact, both positions miss a crucial point about the dynamics of the world oil market -- that it is increasingly animated by the counterintuitive behavior of the state-owned oil and gas giants that now control the vast majority of the world's hydrocarbon resources. Read more »

SPICE Launches 'The Road to Beijing'

The Stanford program on International and Cross-cultural Education (SPICE) has just announced a major new interdisciplinary, interactive initiative for middle school and high school students on the road to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. "The Road to Beijing" initiative includes a new documentary featuring world-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, a new documentary developed by NBC that features Olympians who will participate in the Beijing Olympics, curriculum materials addressing Beijing and issues raised by the Olympics, an interactive website, and teacher professional development.
Read more »

September 22nd, 2008

Former President to Develop 20-Year Social Agenda for Democracy in Latin America

Dr. Alejandro Toledo, former president of Peru, describes his vision as "democracy that delivers." "My colleagues and I who have taken that challenge of public life as a vocation and life commitment," Toledo says, "cannot but feel concerned about the great challenges faced by our continent where half its population lives between poverty and misery and where inequalities and social exclusion are at their highest." Audio transcript available presentation available
Read more »

Program on Food Security and the Environment: A Climate Ripe for High Food Prices?

The recent run-up in global food prices is wreaking well-documented havoc throughout the developing world. As prices for major food staples have doubled or tripled over the past 12-18 months, food riots have broken out in more than a dozen countries, and the president of the World Bank has suggested that the rise in food prices will push 100 million people below the poverty line, undoing decades of economic growth almost overnight. FSE's Peter Timmer calculates that high rice prices alone could cause the premature death of 10 million people in Asia. It is difficult to imagine an issue of more pressing global importance today.
Read more »

The Russian Mortality Crisis: A Case of Economic Transition or an Anti-Alcohol Campaign Gone Wrong?

In the mid-1980s, life expectancy in Russia suddenly improved and then took a drop downward for the worse in the 1990s, leading many to believe that economic transition "kills people." But researchers at the Center for Health Policy/Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research (CHP/PCOR) are studying a little-examined phenomenon in that decade when Mikhail Gorbachev -- then the general secretary of the Communist Party in Russia -- launched a large public health campaign against alcohol abuse, which reduced alcohol production and imposed strict measures to limit its distribution. Read more »

CISAC Physicist Returns to Mongolia to Bolster Nonproliferation

CISAC science fellow Undraa Agvaanluvsan faces no small task this summer: She has returned to her native Mongolia to help draft first-time legal and security protocols to ensure that the country's uranium-based nuclear industry develops safely while also attracting international investment. "Our government needs to be prepared to move ahead," the nuclear physicist said. "Mining needs to be regulated, there need to be laws specific to uranium so that extraction won't cause a risk to security." Read more »

"New Beginnings" in the U.S.-South Korean Alliance

Over more than six decades, the partnership between the United States and the Republic of Korea has been subject to many stresses and strains, from the Korean War to coping with the challenge of North Korea's nuclear ambitions. More recently, the democratization of South Korea has opened the alliance to much greater public scrutiny and pressures from an active and mobilized Korean public. Managing this strategic alliance in an era of democracy has been a focus of the research work on Korea conducted by FSI's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. 2 papers available
Read more »

FSI Faculty Address 21st Century Issues in Leading Matters Global Tour

Leading matters is an inspirational Stanford tour that reveals how the university is changing and reinventing itself. Designed exclusively for Stanford alumni, family, and friends, Leading Matters is being held in 17 locations that stretch from London to Hong Kong. Speakers include Stanford President John Hennessy, distinguished deans, and faculty. Each event features thought-provoking faculty panels, stimulating seminars, and a state-of-the-art media presentation. Audio transcript available
Read more »

Stemming the Democratic Recession

If the big global story of the 1980s and 1990s was the remarkable expansion of democracy, the bad news of this decade is that democracy is slipping into recession. In the two decades following the Portuguese revolution in 1974, the number of democracies tripled (from 40 to 120) and the percentage of the world's states that are at least electoral democracies more than doubled (to about 60 percent). Since the late 1990s however, there has been little if any net progress in democracy. Read more »

September 19th, 2008

PESD Affiliates review history and application of standard model for power sector reform

University of Cape Town and PESD affiliates, Katharine Nawaal and Anton Eberhard, examine how and why the standard model for power sector reform failed to be widely adopted by developing countries. The authors use Tanzania as a case study. They conclude by characterizing the emergence of hybrid power markets.

• » Demise of the Standard Model for Power Sector Reform and the Emergence of Hybrid Power Markets

September 18th, 2008

Without public investment, the food crisis will only get worse, Naylor, Falcon say in Boston Review

FSE director Rosamond Naylor and deputy director Walter Falcon discuss the food crisis in a lead article in the September/October 2008 issue of Boston Review. The food system is indeed global, Naylor and Falcon say, yet the principal actors are national governments, not international agencies. The latter can help with solutions, but fundamental improvements require more enlightened national policies.
Read more »

September 17th, 2008

Wara reviews performance of the Clean Development Mechanism

Michael Wara reviews the UN's Clean Development Mechanism's (CDM) performance, using empirical analysis, to illustrate its successes and failures in using a carbon credit market to reduce greenhouse gases. He concludes by suggesting possible reforms to the CDM in anticipation of the Kyoto Protocol's expiration in 2012.

• » Measuring the Clean Development Mechanism's Performance and Potential
• » Climate Change Policy

September 16th, 2008

Lecture on health care policy at Stanford

Peter Orszag, Director of the Congressional Budget Office, presented a federal perspective on health care policy and costs at the 10th Anniversary Conference and Celebration for the Center for Health Policy and Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research on September 16, 2008. In his presentation and recent post, Orszag discusses how research on behavioral economics can inform efforts to improve efficiency in health care delivery.

• » Congressional Budget Office, Director's Blog