FSI's research on the origins, character and consequences of government institutions spans continents and academic disciplines. The institute’s senior fellows and their colleagues across Stanford examine the principles of public administration and implementation. Their work focuses on how maternal health care is delivered in rural China, how public action can create wealth and eliminate poverty, and why U.S. immigration reform keeps stalling.
FSI’s work includes comparative studies of how institutions help resolve policy and societal issues. Scholars aim to clearly define and make sense of the rule of law, examining how it is invoked and applied around the world.
FSI researchers also investigate government services – trying to understand and measure how they work, whom they serve and how good they are. They assess energy services aimed at helping the poorest people around the world and explore public opinion on torture policies. The Children in Crisis project addresses how child health interventions interact with political reform. Specific research on governance, organizations and security capitalizes on FSI's longstanding interests and looks at how governance and organizational issues affect a nation’s ability to address security and international cooperation.
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George W. Bush and his administration came into office with a self-consciously realist orientation in foreign policy. The president and his advisers derided the Clinton administration's multilateralism as mere form without national security substance. They viewed Russia and China as the main potential threats or sources of danger, and regarded Bill Clinton as a naïve idealist for neglecting these great powers in favor of "foreign policy as social work"--humanitarian ventures in areas peripheral to U.S. national security concerns. Consistent with a realist suspicion of multilateralism and confidence in self-help, the administration's principal foreign policy project in its first months was the unilateral pursuit of ballistic missile defense.
The Bush team was particularly critical of U.S. participation in quixotic efforts at nation building for failed states. The message was clear: The Bush administration would not engage in state-building efforts. Ironically, the Bush administration has since undertaken state-building projects that are vastly larger and more difficult than anything the Clinton administration ever attempted. It can be argued that despite the apparent about-face, the Bush administration has actually kept true to its realist principles. We argue to the contrary that the Bush administration's brand of realism has collided with post-Cold War realities that shaped the Clinton administration's foreign policy as well.
On May 11 and 13, 1998, India tested five nuclear weapons in the Rajasthan desert. By the end of the month, Pakistan had followed suit, claiming to have detonated six nuclear devices at an underground facility in the Chagai Hills. With these tests, the governments in Islamabad and New Delhi loudly announced to the world community, and especially to each other, that they both held the capability to retaliate with nuclear weapons in response to any attack.
What will be the strategic effects of these nuclear weapons developments? There are many scholars and defense analysts who argue that the spread of nuclear weapons to South Asia will significantly reduce, or even eliminate, the risk of future wars between India and Pakistan. These "proliferation optimists" argue that statesmen and soldiers in Islamabad and New Delhi know that a nuclear exchange in South Asia will create devastating damage and therefore will be deterred from starting any military conflict in which there is a serious possibility of escalation to the use of nuclear weapons. Other scholars and defense analysts, however, argue that nuclear weapons proliferation in India and Pakistan will increase the likelihood of crises, accidents, terrorism and nuclear war. These "proliferation pessimists" do not base their arguments on claims that Indian or Pakistani statesmen are irrational. Instead, these scholars start their analysis by noting that nuclear weapons are controlled by military organizations and civilian bureaucracies, not by states or by statesmen. Organization theory, not just deterrence theory, should therefore be used to understand the problem and predict the future of security in the region.
An updated Atoms for Peace program is needed to help solve problems of national and international security brought about by increased civilian use of nuclear energy.
Coherent and consistent leadership from the United States and other states is essential if the programs needed are to go forward with adequate speed.
The world's governance and enforcement machinery must be updated and strengthened if it is to be equal to the challenges.
Important leverage can be provided if the countries that have or readily could have nuclear power can reach broad agreement that nuclear terrorism must be prevented.
Gail Lapidus writes that the war in Chechnya has played a complex and highly negative role in Russia's political development. It served in some respects as a testing ground for policies that would be expanded to embrace the Russian Federation more broadly. It has been a major obstacle to the progress of reform and democratization in Russia, and has rather elicited and strengthened the more coercive and authoritarian impulses within the Russian elite. It has equally been a barometer of broader trends in Russian state-building and is highlighting many of the dramatic new departures this process is taking under President Putin.
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Speaker's Biography: Richard Garwin is IBM Fellow Emeritus at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York. After three years on the faculty of the University of Chicago, he joined IBM Corporation in 1952, and was until June 1993 IBM Fellow at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York; Adjunct Research Fellow in the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; and Adjunct Professor of Physics at Columbia University. In addition, he is a consultant to the U.S. government on matters of military technology, arms control, etc. He has been Director of the IBM Watson Laboratory, Director of Applied Research at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and a member of the IBM Corporate Technical Committee. He has also been Professor of Public Policy in the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. From 1994 to 2004 he was Philip D. Reed Senior Fellow for Science and Technology at the Council on Foreign Relations, New York.
He has made contributions in the design of nuclear weapons, in instruments and electronics for research in nuclear and low-temperature physics, in the establishment of the nonconservation of parity and the demonstration of some of its striking consequences, in computer elements and systems, including superconducting devices, in communication systems, in the behavior of solid helium, in the detection of gravitational radiation, and in military technology. He has published more than 500 papers and been granted 45 U.S. patents. He has testified to many Congressional committees on matters involving national security, transportation, energy policy and technology, and the like. He is coauthor of many books, among them Nuclear Weapons and World Politics (1977), Nuclear Power Issues and Choices (1977), Energy: The Next Twenty Years (1979), Science Advice to the President (1980), Managing the Plutonium Surplus: Applications and Technical Options (1994), Feux Follets et Champignons Nucleaires (1997) (in French with Georges Charpak), and Megawatts and Megatons: A Turning Point in the Nuclear Age? (2001) (with Georges Charpak).
He was a member of the President's Science Advisory Committee 1962-65 and 1969-72, and of the Defense Science Board 1966-69. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, of the IEEE, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the American Philosophical Society. In 2002 he was elected again to the Council of the National Academy of Sciences.
His work for the government has included studies on antisubmarine warfare, new technologies in health care, sensor systems, military and civil aircraft, and satellite and strategic systems, from the point of view of improving such systems as well as assessing existing capabilities. For example, he contributed to the first U.S. photographic reconnaissance satellite program, CORONA, that returned 3 million feet of film from almost 100 successful flights 1960-1972.
He has been a member of the Scientific Advisory Group to the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff and was in 1998 a Commissioner on the 9-person "Rumsfeld" Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States. From 1993 to August 2001, he chaired the Arms Control and Nonproliferation Advisory Board of the Department of State. On the 40th anniversary of the founding of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) he was recognized as one of the ten Founders of National Reconnaissance. In June, 2002, he was awarded la Grande Medaille de l'Academie des Sciences (France)-2002.
Cubberly Auditorium, Stanford University
For hundreds of years, dictators have ruled Russia. Do they still? In the late 1980s, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev launched a series of political reforms that eventually allowed for competitive elections, the emergence of an independent press, the formation of political parties, and the sprouting of civil society. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, these proto-democratic institutions endured in an independent Russia.
But did the processes unleashed by Gorbachev and continued under Russian President Boris Yeltsin lead eventually to liberal democracy in Russia? If not, what kind of political regime did take hold in post-Soviet Russia? And how has Vladimir Putin's rise to power influenced the course of democratic consolidation or the lack thereof? Between Dictatorship and Democracy seeks to give a comprehensive answer to these fundamental questions about the nature of Russian politics.
This book reflects the unique collaboration of Russian and American scholars. Additional contributors include: Viktor Sheinis, Mikhail Krasnov, Vladimir Petukhov, and Elina Treyger.
In the recent past the issue of covert trade in nuclear material gained public prominence when it was erroneously claimed by British intelligence sources that the former Government of Iraq under Saddam Hussein had tried to obtain uranium from Niger. The far reaching consequences of such assessments for society were clearly demonstrated by U.S. President George W. Bush in his speech on January 28, 2003, using this incorrect information as one of the reasons why terrorists and countries belonging to the "Axis of Evil" posed a potential nuclear threat. In view of the occurrence of such significant errors even in the intelligence community, it is not surprising that information in the media on the topic of illicit trafficking of nuclear material is frequently flawed by errors.
In order to avoid the pitfalls of evaluating important security-related decisions from questionable sources of information, this paper discusses only the most reliable currently available data on illicit trafficking of weapons-usable nuclear material, contained in the Database on Nuclear Smuggling, Theft, and Orphan Radiation Sources.
Normal Accidents' growing influence since 1984 on social science scholarship and across academic, business and governmental disciplines was not accidental. Author Charles Perrow intended to shake up the study of safety and bring organization theory into the forefront. This article examines ongoing debates about the management of technological systems, reviews the book's important seeds of theory, and discusses the theoretical and practical issues related to a world growing more complex and technologically hazardous.
