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Kathryn Stoner
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The findings show the Trump Campaign's interactions with Russian intelligence agencies posed what they're calling a "grave" threat to U.S. counterintelligence. For more, KCBS Radio news anchors Dan Mitchinson and Margie Shafer spoke with Kathryn Stoner, Deputy Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford specializing in Russian politics.

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The findings show the Trump Campaign's interactions with Russian intelligence agencies posed what they're calling a "grave" threat to U.S. counterintelligence. For more, KCBS Radio news anchors Dan Mitchinson and Margie Shafer spoke with Kathryn Stoner, Deputy Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford specializing in Russian politics.

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This is a chapter in the second edition of The National Security Enterprise, a book edited by Roger Z. George and Harvey Rishikof that provides practitioners' insights into the operation, missions, and organizational cultures of the principal national security agencies and other institutions that shape the U.S. national security decision-making process. Unlike some textbooks on American foreign policy, it offers analysis from insiders who have worked at the National Security Council, the State and Defense Departments, the intelligence community, and the other critical government entities. The book explains how organizational missions and cultures create the labyrinth in which a coherent national security policy must be fashioned. Understanding and appreciating these organizations and their cultures is essential for formulating and implementing it. Taking into account the changes introduced by the Obama administration, the second edition includes four new or entirely revised chapters (Congress, Department of Homeland Security, Treasury, and USAID) and updates to the text throughout. It covers changes instituted since the first edition was published in 2011, implications of the government campaign to prosecute leaks, and lessons learned from more than a decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. This up-to-date book will appeal to students of U.S. national security and foreign policy as well as career policymakers.

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Georgetown University Press
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Thomas Fingar
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Abstract: In fragile states, regimes must cultivate military forces strong enough to ward off external threats, but loyal enough to resist launching a coup. This requires that leader distinguish the loyal from the untrustworthy, a particularly challenging exercise in post-conflict settings with weak institutions. In this study, I explore how Congolese soldiers operating in North Kivu, the largest operational theater in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the epicenter of one of the most violent conflicts in Africa, solve this crucial task. I argue that leaders use non-payment as a form of trial and tribulation that reveals commitment by driving non-loyal soldiers to defect and loyal soldiers to weather challenging times. Non-payments creates a dual-pronged screening process because unpaid soldiers engage in unit-managed extortion and violence against civilians, which is used to both test and generate loyalty. To detail and assess this argument, I couple thick description based on 100 open-ended qualitative interviews with a fine-grained quantitative analysis of 350 members of the armed forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo. This analysis provides a novel explanation for how leaders overcome classic screening dilemmas in ways that ultimately drives violence against civilians. 

 
About the Speaker: Grant Gordon is a PhD Candidate in international relations and comparative politics at Columbia University. His research examines the political economy of conflict, humanitarian intervention and institutions, and combines field experiments, original survey data, ethnography and unique administrative data.

His dissertation seeks to understand the logic of state violence during conflict. In a complementary set of empirical papers, he analyzes why simple strategies used to solve principal agent problems in states afflicted by war cause civilian abuse.

His work has been supported by the United States Institute for Peace, Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, and Texas A&M Center for Conflict and Development, among others. Grant is a 2015-2016 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow and Resident Fellow at the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation.

 

Grant Gordon Resident Fellow Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation
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This event is offered as a joint sponsorship with the Hoover Institution Library & Archives.

About the Topic: Sarah Chayes's book, "Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security," presents an explosive argument: many of today's major world crises -- the ISIS takeover of much of Iraq and Syria, the robust Afghan and Nigerian insurgencies, the Arab Spring and Ukrainian revolutions and their aftermaths -- have their roots in systemic corruption. If this is the case, then the policy priority of addressing corruption must be raised. Rather than a marginal concern to be passed off to development agencies or specialized bureaus, anti-corruption must pervade the conduct of foreign policy. Thieves of State is a riveting book; Chayes will provide a few short readings and reflections on its implications before engaging a conversation with the public. 

About the Speaker: A senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Sarah Chayes served as special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2010 and 2011. She is an expert on kleptocracy and anti-corruption, civil-military relations, and South Asia policy. Chayes joined the Pentagon after 8 years living and working in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and advising the command of the international forces in Afghanistan. Since leaving government, she has been conducting in-depth research on the security implications of acute corruption in such contexts as the insurgencies in Iraq, Syria, South and Central Asia, and Nigeria, and the revolutions of the Arab Spring and Ukraine. Her work has been dubbed "revolutionary" and "a paradigm shift" by senior professionals in foreign and security policy.

More information on the author and on the book can be found here: http://www.thievesofstate.com/. A basic statement of the argument can be found in this June 6 Carnegie paper, "Corruption: The Unrecognized Threat to International Security." For Sarah's thoughts on the implications for the intelligence community, please read "Corruption: The Priority Intelligence Requirements" in this September 9, 2014 Carnegie publication.

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Sarah Chayes Senior Associate, Democracy and Rule of Law and South Asia Programs Speaker Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Rachel Gillum is a PhD student in Political Science at Stanford University, and joined CISAC as a predoctoral fellow in September of 2013. She is also a fellow at the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS) and is affiliated with Stanford’s Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies. Rachel’s research focuses on the Muslim-American community and examines the determinants of a variety of political beliefs and behaviors towards the American government, from full integration and identification with the United States, to support for violent extremism.

Rachel previously served as a graduate associate researcher at the RAND Corporation’s International Policy Center, where she conducted in-depth analysis on terrorist recruitment strategies and presented policy suggestions to U.S. government clients. From 2010-2012, she served as the chief editor and head research assistant under Prof. Martha Crenshaw on the Mapping Militants Project, where she oversaw and helped devise the design of an online tool for the analysis of terrorist networks. Rachel has also worked as a consultant for the Gallup Organization and a research assistant at the Department of Defense’s Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies.

ABOUT THE TOPIC: How do Muslim-Americans form beliefs about the treatment they expect to receive from US law enforcement? The results of an original, nationally-representative survey of Muslim-Americans suggest two key findings. First, expectations of fairness on the part of Muslim immigrants are shaped, in part, by the level of institutional corruption in their country of origin. Immigrants coming from less corrupt countries hold more optimistic views about expected treatment by US law enforcement. Second, Muslim immigrants who have been naturalized are less trusting in the government than newcomers, and Muslims who were born and raised in the United States are least likely to believe that law enforcement will deal with Muslims fairly. These results are robust to the inclusion of a variety of control variables. Ethnographic evidence drawn from interviews with Muslims-Americans suggests that Muslims update their expectations through interactions and familiarity with American institutions. US-born Muslims expect violations of their rights by the government and are politically concerned about such issues. Foreign-born Muslims, while aware of the controversies regarding US government surveillance and profiling of Muslim communities, tend to be less focused on issues related to citizen rights and more focused on the day-to-day concerns common to immigrants everywhere.

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Rachel Gillum Predoctoral Fellow, CISAC; PhD Candidate, Department of Political Science, Stanford University Speaker
Shirin Sinnar Assistant Professor of Law, Stanford Law School Commentator
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With the American government shut down over congressional budget battles, it seems like a particularly opportune time for scholars to talk about the challenges of governance and the rule of law.

But the political scientists and legal experts who gathered this week for a rule of law workshop organized by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Law School probably didn’t see this crisis coming.

Photo Credit: Rod Searcey

“When we first began talking, Gerhard said the rule of law and governance are not peculiar only to developing counties,” Paul Brest, a professor and former dean of the law school, said as he recalled discussing such a workshop with Gerhard Casper, a constitutional law expert and FSI senior fellow. “I don’t think he predicted where the United States would be today.”

The half-day workshop brought together 20 scholars associated with FSI and the law school who discussed their individual research and explored possibilities for collaboration.

Their wide-ranging discussions covered the definitions and measurement of rule of law, governance in developed and developing countries, political participation, partisanship, and policy implementation.

“How do you implement what sounds like a thoughtful, abstract idea?” asked Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, FSI’s director and law school professor, in discussing the complexity of the concept of rule of law. “There is something about the rule of law that has to go beyond whether a statute is complied with. A society also has to think smartly about how to manage discretion.”

But bending the rules without breaking the rule of law “is a difficult matter," said law school Professor Jenny Martinez – and one worthy of academic attention.

“Most well-functioning legal systems … involve a certain amount of discretion,” she said. “But that’s something we can explore.”

Discussion sessions were led by Martinez and Cuéllar, as well as Erik Jensen and Bernadette Meyler; Bruce Cain, Larry Diamond and Nathaniel Persily; Francis Fukuyama and Avner Greif.

“There’s a lot of work going on across campus focusing on governance and the rule of law,” Brest said. “Getting together to begin discussing that could create some sort of networks and a whole that is greater than the individual parts.”

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Sadaf H. Minapara
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Jeremy M. Weinstein, an associate professor of political science and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, received the Karl Deutsch Award from the International Studies Association (ISA).

The award recognizes scholars younger than 40 - or within 10 years of defending their dissertation - who have made the most significant contributions to the study of international relations and peace research.

Weinstein, 37, focuses his research on civil wars and political violence; ethnic politics and the political economy of development; and democracy, accountability, and political change. He is the Ford Dorsey Director of Stanford’s Center for African Studies and is also an affiliated faculty member at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law and the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

He was presented with the award on April 4 by ISA, which promotes research and education in international affairs.

Other Stanford researchers who received the award include Michael Tomz (2011), Kenneth A. Schultz (2003), and James D. Fearon (1999).

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Adam Gorlick
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Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, a Stanford law professor and expert on administrative law and governance, public organizations, and transnational security, will lead the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

The announcement was made in Feb. 11 by Provost John Etchemendy and Ann Arvin, Stanford’s vice provost and dean of research.

“Professor Cuéllar brings a remarkable breadth of experience to his new role as FSI director, which is reflected in his many achievements as a legal scholar and his work on diverse federal policy initiatives over the past decade,” Arvin said. “He is deeply committed to enhancing FSI’s academic programs and ensuring that it remains an intellectually rich environment where faculty and students can pursue important interdisciplinary and policy-relevant research.”

Known to colleagues as “Tino,” Cuéllar starts his role as FSI director on July 1.

Cuéllar has been co-director of FSI’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) since 2011, and has served in the Clinton and Obama administrations. In his role as FSI director, he’ll oversee 11 research centers and programs – including CISAC – along with a variety of undergraduate and graduate education initiatives on international affairs.  His move to the institute's helm will be marked by a commitment to build on FSI’s interdisciplinary approach to solving some of the world’s biggest problems.

“I am deeply honored to have been asked to lead FSI. The institute is in a unique position to help address some of our most pressing international challenges, in areas such as governance and development, health, technology, and security,” Cuéllar said. “FSI’s culture embodies the best of Stanford – a commitment to rigorous research, training leaders and engaging with the world – and excels at bringing together accomplished scholars from different disciplines.”

Cuéllar, 40, is a senior fellow at FSI and the Stanley Morrison Professor of Law at the law school, where he will continue to teach and conduct research. He succeeds Gerhard Casper, Stanford’s ninth president and a senior fellow at FSI.

“We are deeply indebted to former President Casper for accomplishing so much as FSI director this year and for overseeing the transition to new leadership so effectively,” Arvin said.

Casper was appointed to direct the institute for one year following the departure of Coit D. Blacker, who led FSI from 2003 to 2012 and oversaw significant growth in faculty appointments and research.

Casper, who chaired the search for a new director, said Cuéllar has a “profound understanding of institutions and policy issues, both nationally and internationally.”

“Stanford is very fortunate to have persuaded Tino to become director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies,” Casper said. “He will not only be an outstanding fiduciary of the institute, but with his considerable imagination, energy, and tenacity will develop collaborative and multidisciplinary approaches to problem-solving.”

Cuéllar – who did undergraduate work at Harvard, earned his law degree from Yale and received his PhD in political science at Stanford in 2000 – has had an extensive public service record since he began teaching at Stanford Law School in 2001.

Taking a leave of absence from Stanford during 2009 and 2010, he worked as special assistant to the president for justice and regulatory policy at the White House, where his responsibilities included justice and public safety, public health policy, borders and immigration, and regulatory reform.  Earlier, he co-chaired the presidential transition team responsible for immigration.

After returning to Stanford, he accepted a presidential appointment to the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States, a nonpartisan agency charged with recommending improvements in the efficiency and fairness of federal regulatory programs.

Cuéllar also worked in the Treasury Department during the Clinton administration, focusing on fighting financial crime, improving border coordination and enhancing anti-corruption measures.

Since his appointment as co-director of CISAC, Cuéllar worked to expand the center’s agenda while continuing its strong focus on arms control, nuclear security and counterterrorism. During Cuéllar’s tenure, the center launched new projects on cybsersecurity, migration and refugees, as well as violence and governance in Latin America. CISAC also added six fellowships; recruited new faculty affiliates from engineering, medicine, and the social sciences; and forged ties with academic units across campus.

He said his focus as FSI’s director will be to strengthen the institute’s centers and programs and enhance its contributions to graduate education while fostering collaboration among faculty with varying academic backgrounds.

“FSI has much to contribute through its existing research centers and education programs,” he said. “But we will also need to forge new initiatives cutting across existing programs in order to understand more fully the complex risks and relationships shaping our world.”

In addition to Casper, the members of the search committee were Michael H. Armacost, Francis Fukuyama, Philip W. Halperin, David Holloway, Rosamond L. Naylor, Douglas K. Owens, and Elisabeth Paté-Cornell.

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Anupma Kulkarni is currently a Fellow of the Stanford Center for International Conflict and Negotiation (SCICN) and Co-director of the West Africa Transitional Justice (WATJ) Project, a cross-national study on the impact of truth commissions and international criminal tribunals from the perspective of victims of human rights violations in Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.  Dr. Kulkarni received her PhD in Political Science from Stanford University and was Assistant Professor at Arizona State University from 2007-2009.  She has been a MacArthur International Peace and Cooperation Fellow at CISAC and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Democracy, Development and Rule of Law.  Her research specializes in transitional justice, the ways in which post-war and post-authoritarian societies address matters of memory and accountability for human rights violations as part of the larger project of effecting democratic change and political and social reconciliation.  Her book manuscript, Demons and Demos: Truth, Accountability and Democracy in Post-Apartheid South Africa, is based on her award-winning fieldwork in South Africa.  She is also co-authoring, with David Backer, The Arc of Transitional Justice: Violent Conflict, Its Victims & Pursuing Redress in Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone, a book based on primary research conducted under the auspices of the WATJ Project, made possible through generous support from the National Science Foundation.

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Anupma Kulkarni Fellow Speaker Stanford Center for International Conflict and Negotiation (SCICN)
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Shiri Krebs is a Professor of Law at Deakin University and Director of the Centre for Law as Protection. She is also the Chair of the Lieber Society on the Law of Armed Conflict, an affiliate scholar at Stanford University Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), and co-lead of the Australian Government Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre (CSCRC) Law and Policy Theme. In 2024, she was appointed as a Visiting Legal Fellow at the Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). Her research on drone warfare and predictive technologies in counterterrorism and armed conflict is currently funded by a 3-year Australian Research Council (ARC) DECRA fellowship and an Alexander von Humboldt Experienced Researcher Fellowship at the University of Hamburg.

Prof Krebs’ research projects on international fact-finding, biases in counterterrorism decision-making, and human-machine interaction in drone warfare, have influenced decision-making processes through invitations to brief high-level decision-makers, including at the United Nations (CTED, Office of the Secretary-General), the United States Department of Defense, and the Australian Defence Force.

Her recent research awards include the David Caron Prize (American Society of International Law, 2021), the ‘Researcher of the Year’ Award (Australian Women in Law Awards, 2022), the Australian Legal Research Awards (finalist, Article/Chapter (ECR), 2022), and the Vice-Chancellor’s Researcher Award for Career Excellence (Deakin, 2022).

Before joining Deakin University, Prof Krebs has taught in several law schools, including at Stanford University, University of Santa Clara, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she won the Dean’s award recognizing exceptional junior faculty members.

She earned her Doctorate and Master Degrees from Stanford Law School, as well as LL.B. and M.A., both magna cum laude, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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