While many of her fellow Stanford grads will be taking internships in Washington or high-tech jobs in Silicon Valley, Flora Wang is heading off the beaten path.

The 2013 CISAC honors student who majored in international relations will study gender equality as a Fulbright Research Scholar in the central Chinese city of Xi’an, home of the terracotta warriors and the eastern terminus of the fabled Silk Road.

Wang, who did her honors thesis at the Center for International Security and Cooperation on Chinese cyber nationalism and the Sino-Japanese relationship, will spend the next academic year studying the country’s marriage reform laws and how they impact women and their roles in society.

She will be mentored by Professor Wenhua Shan, founding dean of the School of Law at Xi’an Jiaotong University and an expert in international and comparative law.

Flora is one of 16 Stanford affiliates to be awarded a Fulbright for research and teaching abroad during the coming academic year. Her work will target the 2003 revision of China’s 1950 Marriage Law.

The Taiwanese-American said she turned toward Chinese women’s issues during her last months as a CISAC honors student because she believes the empowerment of women in the world’s most populous country is critical to international security.

“Women’s rights in the PRC really started with Mao, who made that now-iconic statement: `Women hold up half the sky,’” Wang said.

“The topic of marriage legal reform is connected to the state’s stability and security,” she added. “Both gender equality and the development of a fair and just legal system are indicators of a country’s progress and modernization.”

The rights of Chinese women have been evolving dramatically since the early days of modern China. The 1950 Marriage Law, instituted less than a year after Mao Zedong established the communist People’s Republic of China, laid the groundwork for women’s equality in marriage. In theory, it restricted common practices such as concubines, female infanticide and arranged marriages.

A Chinese marriage poster from 1953 that reads, "In marriage, keep an eye on your own interests and return radiant after registration."

A Chinese marriage poster from 1953 that reads, ''In marriage, keep an eye on your own interests and return radiant after registration.'' Photo Credit: Wu Dezu (Landsberger collection)

Amendments to the Marriage Law over the past 60 years – with the last in 2003 – have served as a legal yardstick for measuring progress in women’s rights in the eyes of the Chinese government. Wang will be among the first scholars to bring recent developments to an international audience; she hopes to publish her findings.  

Wang spent her senior year at Stanford working on her honors thesis with Consulting Professor Tom Fingar, an expert on U.S.-China relations and intelligence, and Professor Andrew Walder, a specialist in conflict, stability and change in communist regimes. Both are senior fellows at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, CISAC’s parent organization.

“Through the CISAC honors college and our visits to places like the Pentagon and think tanks, I realized how important the relationship between the U.S. and China – as an emerging global power – is for the future of international security,” she said.

CISAC honors students spend two weeks in Washington, D.C., before their senior year for briefings and consultations with politicians and think tanks, government agencies such as the State Department and Homeland Security, as well as journalists at The New York Times and Washington Post.

Wang’s thesis looked at whether the rise of cyber nationalism accompanied by the rapid development of cyberspace in China has threatened Communist Party rule.

Her in-depth, 146-page document provides a rare analysis of Chinese online nationalism from March 2008 to December 2012.

Wang, whose grandfather was born in China, said that growing up in Taiwan sparked her interest in women’s issues.

“While Taiwan is very advanced, gender inequality is still very prevalent,” she said. “I still remember that our local library had a banner that said, `Boys and girls are just as equal,’ and thinking: If the government thinks it’s necessary to put up such a banner, that’s a powerful testament to the difficulty women face in societies still strongly affected by Confucian values.”

“When I interned at the International Labor Organization in Beijing through a Stanford in Government fellowship, I was able to visit China for the first time,” she said. “I had the opportunity to work on a project relating to maternity law reform in China … so when I was thinking of applying for the Fulbright I naturally turned to studying women’s issues from a legal perspective in China.”

Flora’s project will take advantage of the Marriage Law’s “barometer” effect in marriage reform. Her work will use marriage reform as a case study on the Chinese government’s reaction to the increasingly international character of Chinese society.

Most of the academic work on the 2003 revision to the Marriage Law has been closed to international scholars. Wang’s Fulbright project will use an array of research methods to open up these issues to an English-speaking audience.

Her affiliation with Professor Shan at Xi’an Jiaotong University will permit her to take law school classes and work in the university’s archives. Her association with Shan also will allow her to observe divorce court proceedings, giving her a rare, first-hand look at how today’s courts interpret the 2003 marriage reform.

She will conduct interviews with family lawyers and observe the outreach programs of the Shaanxi Women’s Federation, a government organization dedicated to family and marriage counseling in the province.

“I’m not sure where the Fulbright will take me, but in a perfect world I would love to attend law school,” Wang said. “And I definitely plan to continue being involved with women’s rights and promoting further understanding between China and the U.S.”

Many resource dependent states have to varying degrees, failed to provide for the welfare of their own populations, could threaten global energy markets, and could pose security risks for the United States and other countries.  Many are in Africa, but also Central Asia (Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan), Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Burma, East Timor), and South America (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador) Some have only recently become – or are about to become – significant resource exporters.  Many have histories of conflict and poor governance.  The recent boom and decline in commodity prices – the largest price shock since the 1970s – will almost certainly cause them special difficulties.  The growing role of India and China, as commodity importers and investors, makes the policy landscape even more challenging.

We believe there is much the new administration can learn from both academic research, and recent global initiatives, about how to address the challenge of poorly governed states that are dependent on oil, gas, and mineral exports.  Over the last eight years there has been a wealth of new research on the special problems that resource dependence can cause in low-income countries – including violent conflict, authoritarian rule, economic volatility, and disappointing growth.  The better we understand the causes of these problems, the more we can learn about how to mitigate them.

There has also been a new set of policy initiatives to address these issues: the Kimberley Process, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, the World Bank’s new “EITI plus plus,” Norway’s Oil for Development initiative, and the incipient Resource Charter.  NGOs have played an important role in most of these initiatives; key players include Global Witness, the Publish What You Pay campaign, the Revenue Watch Institute, Oxfam America, and an extensive network of civil society organizations in the resource-rich countries themselves.

Some of these initiatives have been remarkably successful.  The campaign against ‘blood diamonds,’ through the Kimberley Process, has reduced the trade in illicit diamonds to a fraction of its former level, and may have helped curtail conflicts in Angola, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.  Many other initiatives are so new they have not been have not been carefully evaluated.

This workshop is designed to bring together people in the academic and policy worlds to identify lessons from this research, and from these policy initiatives, that can inform US policy towards resource-dependent poorly states in the new administration.

Amy Zegart, one of the nation’s leading experts on national security, intelligence and foreign policy, has been appointed the next co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

Zegart, a CISAC faculty member and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, will take up her new role July 1. She succeeds Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, who was named director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, CISAC’s parent organization.

“Amy Zegart is an award-winning scholar, an accomplished professional with public and private sector experience, and a trusted voice on national security and foreign policy,” said Cuéllar. “Her multi-disciplinary scholarship, diverse experiences, and commitment to getting it right will complement the Freeman Spogli Institute's growing focus on governance problems, and will make her a dynamic leader for CISAC as the center continues its vital work on international cooperation and security.”

Zegart, once named one of the 10 most influential experts in intelligence reform by the National Journal, said she intends to continue expanding the center’s focus on emerging security issues, such as cybersecurity, drones and challenges to governance while building on CISAC’s distinguished reputation in nuclear security.

“The international threat environment is changing faster and in more profound ways than anyone could have imagined 10 or 20 years ago,” said Zegart, who is also a professor of political economy (by courtesy) at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she co-teaches a course on managing political risk with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

“CISAC will continue to be at the forefront of addressing these new challenges with the same secret sauce it’s had since its founding in 1983: world class talent; a commitment to teaching the next generation; and a deep belief that bridging the natural and social sciences is vital to solving the world’s most dangerous problems,” she said.

 CISAC, more than any other institution, provided a scholarly environment that was intellectually challenging and personally supportive at the same time. That’s quite a rare cultural combination."

Zegart’s research examines the organization of American national security agencies and their effectiveness. She served on the Clinton administration's National Security Council staff and as a foreign policy adviser to the 2000 presidential campaign of George W. Bush. She has testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee, provided training to the Marine Corps, and advised officials on intelligence and homeland security matters. From 2009 to 2011 she served on the National Academies of Science Panel to Improve Intelligence Analysis. Her commentary has been featured on national television and radio shows and in The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times.

Zegart writes  regular commentary for Foreign Policy about national security issues. In this excerpt from one of those posts about the privatization of American intelligence and the growing businesses of political risk management, her approach accentuates her ability to bring complex issues to a general audience:

In the old days, the ‘free world’ and ‘Soviet bloc’ were two different universes. Not anymore. Now everything is connected. Sweden’s Ikea has stores in Russia. My CIA alarm clock was made in China. Unrest in Cairo can cause legging shortages in California. And communications happen everywhere. Wifi can be found in Bedouin tents, on the top of Mount Everest, and on buses in rural Rwanda. Kenyan fisherman may lack electricity, but they can check weather conditions and fish market prices on their cell phones. All of this connectedness means that political risks – civil strife, instability, insurgency, coups, weak legal standards, corruption – have more spillover effects. What happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas.

Zegart recalls being fascinated with politics since she was a kid. She spent her childhood tracking election night tallies and writing her congressman. When she was 13, she followed on TV the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s historic visit to the United States in 1979 and was thrilled when he donned a cowboy hat at a Texas rodeo.

“I was enthralled,” Zegart said. “My mother, an antique dealer who can find anyone and anything, tracked down a local Taiwanese graduate student and convinced her to teach me Mandarin after school.”

She would continue studying Chinese at Andover, majored in East Asian Studies at Harvard, and would win a Fulbright Scholarship to travel to China and study the 1989 Chinese democracy movement and Tiananmen Square tragedy. Zegart then earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Stanford and became a full professor of public policy at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs as well as a fellow at the Burkle Center for International Relations.

Zegart notes she’s been connected to CISAC for more than two decades. She first showed up at the center’s former Galvez House headquarters during her first quarter as a Stanford graduate student. She kept coming back even after she got her Ph.D.; both of her award-winning books were germinated in presentations she gave to CISAC seminars.

“CISAC, more than any other institution, provided a scholarly environment that was intellectually challenging and personally supportive at the same time,” Zegart said. “That’s quite a rare cultural combination.”

This academic year, she co-taught with Martha Crenshaw the popular CISAC-sponsored class International Security in a Changing World, which culminates in a U.N. Security Council simulation in which students debate a pressing global issue.

CISAC has a tradition of appointing co-directors – one from the social sciences and the other from the natural sciences – to advance the center’s interdisciplinary mission to conduct and promote cutting-edge research to make the world a safer place.

“Amy brings to CISAC a wealth of expertise in international security issues, a deep commitment to scholarship and a sincere desire to strengthen and expand the center’s activities and impact,” said David Relman, CISAC’s other co-director, a Stanford microbiologist and professor of infectious diseases, as well as expert on emerging biological threats. “We share an interest in emerging technologies and the effective international mechanisms that address 21^st century challenges and threats.”

Zegart is the author of two award-winning books. Flawed by Design, which chronicles the development of the Central Intelligence Agency, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and National Security Council, won the highest national dissertation award in political science. Spying Blind, which examines why American intelligence agencies failed to adapt to the terrorist threat before 9/11, won the National Academy of Public Administration’s Brownlow Book Award. She has also published in International Security, Political Science Quarterly, and other leading academic journals. She serves on the editorial boards of Terrorism and Political Violence and Intelligence and National Security. Her most recent book is Eyes on Spies: Congress and the United States Intelligence Community.

Before her academic career, Zegart spent three years at McKinsey & Company advising Fortune 100 companies about strategy and organizational effectiveness.

She serves on the FBI Intelligence Analysts Association National Advisory Board and the Los Angeles Police Department’s Counter-terrorism and Community Police Advisory Board and is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations.