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International Relations

FSI researchers strive to understand how countries relate to one another, and what policies are needed to achieve global stability and prosperity. International relations experts focus on the challenging U.S.-Russian relationship, the alliance between the U.S. and Japan and the limitations of America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.

Foreign aid is also examined by scholars trying to understand whether money earmarked for health improvements reaches those who need it most. And FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center has published on the need for strong South Korean leadership in dealing with its northern neighbor.

FSI researchers also look at the citizens who drive international relations, studying the effects of migration and how borders shape people’s lives. Meanwhile FSI students are very much involved in this area, working with the United Nations in Ethiopia to rethink refugee communities.

Trade is also a key component of international relations, with FSI approaching the topic from a slew of angles and states. The economy of trade is rife for study, with an APARC event on the implications of more open trade policies in Japan, and FSI researchers making sense of who would benefit from a free trade zone between the European Union and the United States.

Unintended Consequences: The United States at War

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This talk will focus on Ian J. Bickerton's new book entitled Unintended Consequences: The United States at War, co-authored by Kenneth J. Hagan.

Ian J. Bickerton (speaker) is a visiting research fellow and former associate professor of history at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. He has researched and published extensively on United States foreign relations, paying particular attention to China, Israel, and the Middle East. He has also focused much of his work on the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Gulf War. He is the author or co-author of numerous books, including A Concise History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (2007). He received his BA from Adelaide University, his MA from Kansas State University, and his PhD from Claremont Graduate School.

Kenneth Schultz (respondent) is an associate professor of political science at Stanford University and an affiliated faculty member at CISAC. His research examines how domestic political factors such as elections, party competition, and public opinion influence decisions to use force in international disputes and efforts to negotiate the end of international rivalries. He is the author of Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy (Cambridge University Press, 2001), as well as a number of articles in scholarly journals. He is the recipient of several awards, including the 2003 Karl Deutsch Award, given by the International Studies Association to a scholar under the age of 40 who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to the study of international relations and peace research. Schultz received his BA in Russian and Soviet studies from Harvard University and his PhD in political science from Stanford University.

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Ian J. Bickerton Visiting Research Fellow, School of History Speaker University of New South Wales, Australia

Kenneth A. Schultz

Department of Political Science
Stanford University
Encina Hall West
Stanford, CA 94305-6044

(650) 736-1998 (650) 723-1808
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CISAC Core Faculty Member
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Kenneth A. Schultz is professor of political science and a CISAC core faculty member at Stanford University. His research examines international conflict and conflict resolution, with a particular focus on the domestic political influences on foreign policy choices.  He is the author of Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy and World Politics: Interests, Interactions, and Institutions (with David Lake and Jeffry Frieden), as well as numerous articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals. He was the recipient the 2003 Karl Deutsch Award, given by the International Studies Association, and a 2011 Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, awarded by Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences. He received his PhD in political science from Stanford University.

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CISAC scholar leads newly endowed, expanded International Policy Studies program

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Starting next fall, Stanford's 25-year-old International Policy Studies (IPS) master's program will double in length and expand its interdisciplinary scope to train a new generation of graduates prepared for careers in international policy-making and advocacy.

The two-year program is named in honor of Susan Ford Dorsey, president of the Sand Hill Foundation, who has made a gift of $7.5 million, which has been matched by university funds to create a $15 million endowment. According to program Director Stephen J. Stedman, the funding will be used to better integrate the program into the university's international policy research centers, increase access to courses in the law and business schools, use more full-time faculty to teach classes and introduce a practicum that involves solving real-world problems.

Ford Dorsey's endowment fulfills one of the key priorities of Stanford's International Initiative, according to Stedman, which is to address global problems by leveraging the university's cross-disciplinary and collaborative research and teaching. Ford Dorsey and her husband, Mike, serve on volunteer committees of The Stanford Challenge, which is seeking to raise $4.3 billion in a broad effort to expand the university's role in addressing global challenges and educating the next generation of leaders.

Stedman, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), was asked to lead the program because he has experience in both academic and policy work. In 2003, Stedman served as research director of the U.N. High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, which former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan established to analyze global security threats and propose reforms to the international system. Upon completion of the panel's report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, Annan asked Stedman to stay on as a special adviser to help get support in implementing the panel's recommendations. Following the U.N. world leaders' summit in September 2005, during which more than 175 heads of state agreed upon a global security agenda developed from the panel's work, Stedman returned to the Center for International Security and Cooperation at FSI.

According to Stedman, the revamped curriculum will give students the skills to understand the complex connections between poverty, deadly infectious disease, environmental degradation, resource depletion, food insecurity, interstate conflict, civil war, nuclear proliferation and terrorism.

"In a world where problems cross borders and disciplines, where threats that were previously thought to be independent are found to be interconnected, where distinctions between what is domestic policy and what is foreign policy are becoming more and more tenuous, students need training and perspective to break down disciplinary silos," Stedman says in a statement on the program's website. "They need the tools and dexterity to work across issue areas and in diverse policy arenas. They need to see connections that others miss, and be able to describe and explain those connections so that others will then see them too."

The program, which will be jointly administered by the School of Humanities and Sciences and FSI, will continue to admit about 30 students a year, with up to half coming from outside the United States. Students are required to have taken prerequisite courses in economics and statistics, and to speak a foreign language.

At a Feb. 7 dinner celebrating the newly endowed program, Gareth Evans, president of the International Crisis Group and a member of the U.N. High-Level Panel, talked about the need to "make idealism realistic" and discussed the concept of a state's "responsibility to protect" civilians as a new international norm. "In just five years, which is short in the history of ideas, a brand new historical norm" was introduced and recognized by much of the international community, he said. "This was a historic breakthrough. It should reinvigorate our belief in the art of the possible." Concerning the Ford Dorsey IPS program, Evans said, "When it comes to making idealism realistic  there really could be no better place anywhere in the world that this new master's program at Stanford."

The incoming fall cohort of IPS students will study writing and rhetoric and international economics. They will take core courses in Issues in International Policies, which introduces Stanford's policy research centers and provides analyses of current global issues, and Managing Global Complexity, which teaches concepts and theories of international relations while focusing on issues with competing policy concerns. "The goal is to understand that much of what we study today is marked by trade-offs among various goods that we seek to promote," Stedman says in the statement. "Globalization and interdependence creates opportunities for creative solutions to problems, while sometimes creating negative unintended consequences for policy solutions."

IPS students will take a "gateway" course before selecting a concentration during the second year. These specialized fields include democracy, development and the rule of law; energy, environment and natural resources; global health; global justice; international negotiation and conflict management; international political economy; and international security and cooperation. Finally, students will complete a small group practicum in which they will be required to develop solutions to current global problems.

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Barriers and Bridges: An Overview of Legal Reform in China

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Co-Sponsored by The Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law;

the Stanford Project on Human Rights Diplomacy, the Project on Peace and Cooperation in the Asian-Pacific Region, and the Center for International Security and Cooperation

Dr. Dan Wei will give an overview of the present state of legal reform in China, and will cover such topics as the death penalty and other criminal procedure reforms, and measures to insure the rights of detainees and prisoners.

He is a professor at the Institute for Procuratorial Theory of the Supreme People's Procuratorate of China, one of the four principal branches of the Chinese judicial system. He was a Fellow of the Danish Institute of Human Rights in 2002, and he travels and speaks widely in China and overseas on topics related to the development of Chinese law and practice.

Since receiving a PhD from Wuhan University in 1999, he has published 5 books and more than 40 articles in the field of criminal justice. His book, Comparative Studies on the Crimes of Trafficking in Persons, published by The Law Press of China in June 2004, is the first specialized Chinese publication on the topic of human trafficking.

As the deputy editor in chief of Chinese Criminal Science, he has transformed the journal into the most authoritative publication in the field of criminology in China. The journal now boasts more than 20,000 readers. The State Council granted him a Special Award for Distinguished Service in 2004.

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Dan Wei Professor Speaker Institute for Procuratorial Theory of the Supreme People's Procuratorate of China
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Nuclear Attribution as Deterrence

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Recently, post-explosion nuclear forensics, or nuclear attribution, has gained a new spotlight within the scientific and policymaking community working on nuclear weapons. Academics are beginning to ask whether post-explosion forensics might create a replacement for an international nonproliferation regime or at least offer a fallback option to deter states and individuals from selling nuclear materials. This paper examines current attribution technology from unclassified literature and finds the technology to be well developed but not foolproof, such that nuclear attribution currently provides little deterrent value. If current capabilities were publicized more thoroughly, and if the post-explosion process of assessing the evidence were internationalized, states and intermediate actors might be deterred more effectively. This paper also discusses the development of a nuclear fingerprint database; while useful, its impact on deterrence would be minimal.

This article is based on the author's undergraduate honors thesis, completed during 2005-2006 in CISAC's Interschool Honors Program in International Security.

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Terrorist Organizations' Vulnerabilities and Inefficiencies: A Rational Choice Perspective

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Chapter 4 in Terrorism Financing and State Responses: A Comparative Perspective (Stanford 2007), edited by Harold Trinkunas and Jeanne K. Giraldo.

This chapter uses a rational choice approach to examine the political economy of terrorist financing. To date, much of the theoretical literature and almost all government-sponsored reports discuss terrorist organizations as though they are made up of ideologically driven purists who share a uniform commitment to the cause. This assumption is needed to explain how these organizations can both (1) efficiently distribute funds and (2) operate covertly without the checks and balances most organizations require. However, upon closer inspection, one often sees substantial differences in the preferences of key players in terrorist networks. Two selection processes explain why these differences exist, and a principal-agent framework shows how these differences lead to inefficiencies in terrorist financial systems. Terrorist organizations face a trade-offbetween enduring the inefficiency or employing corrective strategies that create vulnerabilities. Governments can undertake specific actions to make this trade-offmore problematic.

The book examines financial and material resources, correctly perceived as the life blood of terrorist operations. Governments have determined that fighting the financial infrastructure of terrorist organizations is the key to their defeat. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, a good deal has been learned about sources and mechanisms used to finance the "new" terrorism, which is religiously motivated and exponentially more deadly than previous generations of terrorist organizations. New policies have been devised to combat the threat and existing policies have been enacted with greater vigor than ever before. Five years into the battle against terrorist financing, it is time to take stock of the emerging literature on terrorist financing, cut through a number of myths that have developed around the issue, and assess the current policy debates.

Through a series of thematic chapters and organizational and regional case studies--examining terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and regions such as East Africa, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and South East Asia--the authors provide a comprehensive assessment of the state of our knowledge about the nature of terrorism financing, and the evolution and effectiveness of terrorist strategies and government responses. This volume focuses on the preferences of major actors within terrorist networks and government agencies and the domestic and international contexts in which they make decisions and execute their strategies. It argues that both terrorism financing and government responses face problems of coordination, oversight, and information asymmetries that render them vulnerable to disruption.

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FSI announces new Ford Dorsey International Policy Studies program

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A generous gift from Susan Ford Dorsey has allowed FSI and the School of the Humanities and Sciences to establish the Ford Dorsey International Policy Studies program (Ford Dorsey IPS). The gift, which has been matched by the university to give the program a multi-million dollar endowment, will expand the longstanding International Policy Studies program from a one-year to a two-year course of study, with more full-time faculty, new seminars, training in policy advocacy, and new policy specializations. These new changes to the program will link IPS students more closely with Stanford's international policy research centers and programs in FSI.

Dedicated to the study and analysis of the international system, the Ford Dorsey IPS program seeks to expose students to the full range of complex policy issues they will face in the 21st century and to develop the knowledge and analytical capabilities they will need to address those issues successfully. The program provides a group-based practicum involving real-world problem solving, allowing students to focus on the expansion of the global economy, problems of developing and transitioning societies, security issues, and the global environment. Stephen J. Stedman, Ford Dorsey IPS director and FSI and CISAC senior fellow, notes that "these changes will further enhance the quality of the program while maintaining a dynamic, intimate student learning experience."

A private dinner was held on Feb. 7 to celebrate Susan Ford Dorsey's magnificent gift. Gareth Evans, president and CEO of the International Crisis Group, addressed Ford Dorsey supporters, faculty, and students with a talk on "Making Idealism Realistic: The Responsibility to Protect as a New Global Norm."

Ford Dorsey's enduring investment in training future policymakers at Stanford fulfills one of the key priorities of the International Initiative of the Stanford Challenge, to address global international problems by leveraging Stanford's cross-disciplinary and collaborative research and teaching.

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