Stanford University

Can the NPT fulfill its promise to eliminate nuclear weapons?

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J. Luis Rodriguez
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The United Nations kicks off the 10th Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) on Monday, gathering 191 treaty members in New York. It’s an NPT review that typically takes place every five years, though the pandemic pushed the date back two years.

Read more at The Washington Post.

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Latin American countries will push again for nuclear disarmament at this month’s review conference

Explaining Latin America's Contradictory Reactions to the War in Ukraine

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J. Luis Rodriguez
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Nearly every Latin American country opposed the U.S. war in Afghanistan in 2001. Most also opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Why is the region more divided on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine today? Despite the Latin American consensus opposing unilateral uses of force against weaker states, governments across the region have refused to impose sanctions on Russia to respond to its invasion of Ukraine. There are even some countries, like Brazil, whose diplomats in U.N. forums have condemned Russia while the executive ponders whether to help Vladimir Putin’s administration economically. Does Latin America solidly condemn interventions only when the United States is the intervener?

Read the rest at War on the Rocks

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Nearly every Latin American country opposed the U.S. war in Afghanistan in 2001. Most also opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Why is the region more divided on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine today?

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Contemporary humanitarians: Latin America and the ordering of responses to humanitarian crises

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J. Luis Rodriguez
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Latin American foreign-policy elites defend the principle of non-intervention to shield their countries’ autonomy. By 2005, however, most Latin American foreign policy elites accepted the easing of limits on the use of force in international law. They supported the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), which regulates the use of force to protect populations from mass atrocities. The paper presents a comparison of the Brazilian, Chilean, and Mexican positions in the R2P debates to understand why they supported this norm. During the debates leading to the emergence of R2P, these elites questioned a central premise of liberal internationalism: the idea that great powers would restrain their use of military force as part of their commitment to a liberal international order (LIO). Using Republican international political theory, I argue that these Latin American foreign-policy elites viewed a restricted humanitarian-intervention norm as a new defence against great powers interfering in developing countries. Instead of trusting that great powers would restrain their actions, these elites advocated for a humanitarian-intervention norm that would prevent uncontrolled humanitarian interventions.

Read the rest at Cambridge Review of International Affairs 

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The paper looks at how Brazil, Chile, and Mexico approached debates on humanitarian intervention norms in the early 2000s. These countries attempted to simultaneously address humanitarian crises collectively and prevent abuses of humanitarian norms by great powers.

Venezuela’s Bolivarian Armed Force: Fear and Interest in the Face of Political Change

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In a new report for the Latin American Program, Stanford University scholar Harold Trinkunas explains the role of the armed forces in Venezuela’s current regime and why they have thus far resisted democratization efforts. He argues that the armed forces have benefited greatly during the current regime from greater access to power, responsibility, and revenues. Moreover, the regime’s successful politicization and ‘coup proofing’ efforts have made dissent unworkable, even deadly, for members of the military. Democratization is seen as a risky alternative, particularly by senior leaders, who fear accountability for human rights abuses, illicit trafficking, and corruption under Maduro. Under these conditions, the armed forces prefer to support the status quo.

Read the rest at Wilson Center

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In a new report for the Latin American Program, CISAC Interim Co-Director Harold Trinkunas explains the role of the armed forces in Venezuela’s current regime and why they have thus far resisted democratization efforts. He argues that the armed forces have benefited greatly during the current regime from greater access to power, responsibility, and revenues.

Testing the limits of China and Brazil’s partnership

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Brazil is China’s most important economic and political partner in South America, as well as a key participant in the Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) grouping of emerging powers that China increasingly leads. When it comes to global aspirations, China and Brazil have historically been in sync on their critiques of the liberal international order, if not on their preferred remedies. Historically, their prescriptions for foreign policy differ in important ways. China would prefer a world order that better accommodates its interests, and it is becoming less reluctant to use the threat of force in foreign policy to maintain its ascendancy in its geopolitical neighborhood. Brazil traditionally has preferred a rules-bound liberal international order that applies to everyone, especially superpowers. Unlike China, it foreswears the use of coercion in international affairs, even to protect its interests in its immediate neighborhood, South America.

Read the rest at Brookings

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During the periods when it sought international autonomy, Brazil has found in China an attractive partner in criticizing the liberal international order fostered by the United States in the wake of World War II.

Bill Phillips

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Bill Phillips has vast experience in the US Intelligence Community with over 36 years as a professional intelligence officer, over 25 of which were as a CIA clandestine service officer. Among his many accomplishments, Bill served as CIA Chief of Station (COS) in Latin America and the Near East, and developed specialized Counterintelligence expertise. Bill has nationally recognized prowess in HUMINT and extensive knowledge of multiple foreign environments and cultures. He managed and led complex global, HUMINT, counterintelligence, counterterrorism and counternarcotics operations. He worked closely with senior US government officials, Congressional elements, FBI, and elements of the US military, and has substantive expertise in South Asia, the Caribbean and certain remote areas of Latin America. Bill was awarded CIA’s Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal, the National HUMINT Collector Award, the CIA’s Latin America Division Medal, Two Meritorious Unit Citations and numerous CIA Exceptional Performance Awards.

Bill also served as Director of the Office of Counterintelligence (CI) at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 2005-2010. Bill enhanced that program by focusing CI efforts on educating LANL’sstaff to the risks and threats posed by adversarial governments, criminal enterprises and terrorist organizations. Bill integrated disparate disciplines (collection, analysis, investigations, and cyber) to strengthen the lab’s CI program. A trusted member of the LANL leadership team, Bill collaborated with elements of the US Intelligence Community and FBI on highly sensitive CI investigations.

Currently, Bill is an independent consultant and has created intelligence related training programs, taught and advised clients in the IC. He especially enjoys mentoring and guiding individuals new to the intelligence field.

Bill received a B.A. in History from Howard University in 1972 and a J.D. from Rutgers University in 1975.

A longtime student of Ki Aikido and Zen, Bill has used aspects of these disciplines in his work as an intelligence professional, leader, teacher and mentor. While at CIA, Bill helped create a pilot course introducing intelligence officers to the stress relieving benefits and resilience potential of meditation. Bill is member of the Northern CaliforniaKi Society and on the Board of Directors of the Ki Research Institute.

Topics: Counterintelligence, Intelligence, National Security, U.S. Intra-agency communication, Race Relations, Leadership, Ki in Daily Life.

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Conditions of military contestation in populist Latin America

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Latin America experienced recurring episodes of populism, and of military reaction against populists, during the twentieth century, frequently ending in coups d’état. In the twenty-first century, military coups appear to have died out even as populist regimes returned during the third wave of democracy. This paper examines military contestation in populist regimes, both left and right, and how it has changed in the contemporary period. Combining fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of Latin American presidencies (1982–2012) and four focused case analyses, we find that military contestation in contemporary populist regimes is driven by radical presidential policies that threaten or actually violate the institutional interests of key elites, among them the military, which in turn is facilitated by the interplay of political, social, economic, and international conditions. Counterintuitively, two of these conditions, the presence of rents and regime capacity for mass mobilization, operate in theoretically unexpected ways, contributing to military contestation.

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Democratization
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Harold Trinkunas
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Harold Trinkunas

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Stanford University
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Harold Trinkunas is the Deputy Director and a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Prior to arriving at Stanford, Dr. Trinkunas served as the Charles W. Robinson Chair and senior fellow and director of the Latin America Initiative in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. His research focuses on issues related to foreign policy, governance, and security, particularly in Latin America. Trinkunas has written on emerging powers and the international order, ungoverned spaces, terrorism financing, borders, and information operations. 

Trinkunas has co-authored Militants, Criminals and Warlords: The Challenge of Local Governance in an Age of Disorder (Brookings Institution Press, 2017), Aspirational Power: Brazil’s Long Road to Global Influence (Brookings Institution Press, 2016) and authored Crafting Civilian Control of the Military in Venezuela (University of North Carolina Press, 2005). He co-edited and contributed to Oxford Handbook of Peaceful Change in International Relations (Oxford University Press, 2021), Three Tweets to Midnight: The Effect of the Global Information Ecosystem on the Risk of Nuclear Conflict  (Hoover Institution Press, 2020), American Crossings: Border Politics in the Western Hemisphere (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), Ungoverned Spaces: Alternatives to State Authority in an Era of Softened Sovereignty (Stanford University Press, 2010), Global Politics of Defense Reform (Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), and Terrorism Financing and State Responses (Stanford University Press, 2007).

Dr. Trinkunas also previously served as an associate professor and chair of the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He received his doctorate in political science from Stanford University in 1999. He was born in Maracaibo, Venezuela. 

 

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World Order Politics: The Carter Administration’s Bid for a New U.S. Foreign Policy (and What We Can Learn From It)

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Reuben Hills Conference Room ("East" Conference Room)

Encina Hall, 2nd floor

Abstract: In 1977, the Carter administration began working to implement a new guiding strategy for US foreign policy, oriented toward the promotion of human rights and the management of economic interdependence among the advanced industrialized countries. Carter’s world order politics reflected both the oversights of the Nixon years and the influence of the Trilateral Commission. To manage economic globalization, the Carter administration promoted policy cooperation, its efforts culminating in the Bonn summit of the G-7 in 1978. To promote human rights, the Carter administration devised guidelines for tethering military and financial aid to foreign nations to human rights standards, and applied them with particular rigor in Latin America. By late 1978, however, Carter’s world order politics was already encountering difficulties: the administration’s human rights policy lacked consistency; policy coordination failed to stabilize the liberal world economy; and Iran, a longtime US ally, was imploding.

About the Speaker: Daniel Sargent is assistant professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his BA from Christ’s College, Cambridge in 2001 and his PhD from Harvard University in 2008. He has held fellowships at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University and at International Security Studies at Yale University. He is the author of A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (Oxford University Press, 2015) and a co-editor of The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Harvard University Press, 2010). He is now working on two book-length projects: a history of international economic governance in the modern era and a study on the uses of history and historical thinking in U.S. foreign policy. To purchase A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s, please follow this link to Oxford University Press.

 


Chapter 8, "World Order Politics"
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World Order Politics: The Carter Administration’s Bid for a New U.S. Foreign Policy (and What We Can Learn From It)
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Daniel Sargent Assistant Professor of History Speaker University of California - Berkeley
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Stanford Global Development and Poverty initiative awards $4.6 million for research aimed at alleviating poverty

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Fourteen Stanford researchers addressing global poverty through a range of academic disciplines are receiving a total of $4.6 million in awards from the university-wide Global Development and Poverty (GDP) initiative.

Their projects, which are the first to be funded by the GDP, deal with challenges of health, violence, economics, governance and education in the developing world.

“GDP seeks to transform scholarly activity and dialogue at Stanford around the topic of global poverty, so that the university may have a greater impact on poverty alleviation in developing economies,” said GDP faculty co-chair Jesper B. Sørensen. “By focusing on placing a small number of big bets, GDP encourages researchers to think big, and to move beyond the conventional way of doing things. We are thrilled by the inaugural set of awardees, as they demonstrate the creative, inter-disciplinary approaches that will make Stanford a leader in this area.”

The GDP initiative is part of the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies (SEED) and is administered in partnership with Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). The GDP is co-chaired by Sørensen, the faculty director for SEED and the Robert A. and Elizabeth R. Jeffe Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Graduate School of Business; and Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, senior fellow and director of FSI and the Stanley Morrison Professor at Stanford Law School.

SEED, which seeks to alleviate poverty by stimulating the creation of economic opportunities through innovation, entrepreneurship and the growth of businesses, was established in 2011 through a generous gift from Robert King, MBA '60, and his wife, Dorothy.

Through complementary areas of focus, GDP funding and other SEED research initiatives will stimulate research, novel interdisciplinary collaborations and solutions to problems of global poverty and development. GDP research aims to pursue answers to crucial questions that are essential to an understanding of how to reduce global poverty and promote economic development. That includes governance and the rule of law, education, health, and food security – all of which are essential for entrepreneurship to thrive. By contrast, other SEED research focuses on innovation, entrepreneurship, and the growth of businesses in developing economies.

Since 2012, SEED’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Developing Economies Award program also has doled out 22 awards and seven PhD fellowships to help support and scale businesses in developing economies. Among the $1 million in funded projects were studies of how to improve the livelihoods of small-holder cacao farmers throughout the tropics; how to identify startups with high job- and wealth-creating potential in Chile; how political accountability affects the ability to attract investment in Sierra Leone; and how managerial practices affect trade entrepreneurship in China.

First GDP Awards

The first 14 GDP award recipients are professors of economics, political science, law, medicine, pediatrics, education and biology, and senior fellows from FSI, the Woods Institute, and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR).

“Each of these projects cuts across disciplines, reflects innovative thinking, and has the potential to generate crucial knowledge about how to improve the lives of the poor around the world,” Cuéllar said. “These projects, along with a variety of workshops engaging the university and external stakeholders, will help us strengthen Stanford’s long-term capacity to address issues of global poverty through research, education and outreach.”

Among the award recipients is Pascaline Dupas, an associate professor of economics and senior fellow at SIEPR. Dupas, along with faculty from the Center for Health Policy and Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, will launch the Stanford Economic Development Research Initiative using GDP funds.  This initiative will focus on collecting high-quality institutional and individual-level data on economic activity in a number of developing countries over the long term, and making these data available to scholars around the world.

Beatriz Magaloni, an associate professor of political science and senior fellow at FSI, is receiving an award to lead a team focused on criminal violence and its effects on the poor in developing economies, and the practical solutions for increasing security in those regions.

Douglas K. Owens, a professor of medicine and FSI senior fellow, was awarded an award to help him lead a team that will develop models to estimate how alternative resource allocations for health interventions among the poor will influence health and economic outcomes.

Stephen Haber, a professor of political science and history and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, received an award to bring together Stanford researchers interested in examining the long-term institutional constraints on economic development. Their goal will be to provide policymakers with a framework for determining the conditions under which particular innovations are likely to have positive payoffs, and the conditions under which resources will likely be wasted.

Other projects will address the educational impacts of solar lighting systems in poor communities; identifying interventions to improve the profits and safety among poor, smallholder pig farmers in Bangladesh and China; the role of law and institutions in economic development and poverty reduction; and how to rethink worldwide refugee problems. Awards are also being provided to researchers focused on microfinance, online education and teacher training.

The project proposals were reviewed by an interdisciplinary faculty advisory council chaired by Cuéllar and Sørensen. 

“We were very encouraged by the impressive number of project proposals from a wide range of areas and are looking forward to introducing several new capacity and community-building activities in the fall,” Sørensen said.. “This wide range of research initiatives will form a vibrant nucleus for Stanford’s growing community of scholars of global development and poverty.”

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