Stanford University

Governance

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.

Predictability of Human Behavior

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     Vast resources are devoted to predicting human behavior in domains such as economics, popular culture, and national security, but the quality of such predictions is usually poor. It is tempting to conclude that this inability to make good predictions is a consequence of some fundamental lack of predictability on the part of humans. However, our recent work offers evidence that the failure of standard prediction methods does not indicate an absence of human predictability but instead reflects: 1.) misunderstandings regarding which features of human dynamics actually possess predictive power, and 2.) the fact that, until recently, it has not been possible to measure these predictive features in real world settings.
 
     This talk introduces some of the science behind this basic observation and demonstrates its utility through three case studies. We begin by considering social groups in which individuals are influ- enced by the behavior of others; in these situations, social influence is known to decrease the ex ante predictability of the ensuing social dynamics. We show that, interestingly, these same social forces can increase the extent to which the outcome of a social process can be predicted in its very early stages. This finding is then leveraged to design prediction methods which outperform existing techniques for predicting social group dynamics.
 
     The second case study involves analysis of the predictability of adversary behavior in the coevo- lutionary “arms races” that exist between attackers and defenders in many domains, including cyber security, counterterrorism, fraud prevention, and various markets. Our analysis reveals that conventional wisdom regarding these coevolving systems is incomplete, and provides insights which enable the development of proactive cyber defense methods that are much more effective than standard techniques. Finally, we consider the task of predicting human behavior at the level of individuals. In particular, we show that a given individual’s mobility patterns can be predicted with surprising accuracy, and conversely that knowledge of even a small portion of a person’s travel patterns permits reliable identification of that individual. 
About the speaker: Rich Colbaugh received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from The Pennsylvania State University in 1986. He presently holds a joint appointment with the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, where he is Chief Scientist of ICASA and a Professor in both the Mechanical Engineering and Management Departments, and Sandia National Laboratories, where he is a member of the Analytics and Cryptography Department. His research activities have focused on the modeling, analysis, and control of dynamical systems of importance in nature and society. Much of this work involves the study of very large, complex networks, including those of relevance to national security, socioeconomic systems, advanced technology, and biology.
 
Dr. Colbaugh spent 2001-2006 with the U.S. Intelligence Community in Washington DC advising senior leadership on counterterrorism and counterproliferation programs. Since 2007 he has concentrated his research and development efforts on social media analytics, attracting support for this program from agencies such as the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Rich Colbaugh Sandia National Laboratory; Chief Scientist, Institute for Complex and Adaptive Systems, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology Speaker
Seminars

Terror Queues and the Duration of Terror Plots

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About the topic: What could queueing theory, the science of customer flows and delays in service systems, possibly offer towards understanding and countering terrorism? In terror queue models, newly hatched terror plots correspond to newly arriving customers, the number of ongoing terror plots corresponds to the queue of customers waiting to receive service, undercover agents or informants correspond to service providers, customer service is initiated when a terror plot is detected, and service is completed when the plot is interdicted. Not all plots are interdicted; successful terror attacks correspond to customers who abandon the queue without receiving service! Building upon these ideas, we will focus our attention upon a simple observation: other things being equal, the number of ongoing terror plots increases with the duration of time from plot initiation until execution or interdiction (whichever comes first), yet no estimate of the probability distribution governing terror plot duration has appeared in the open literature. Starting with a review of US terrorism-related indictments, lower and upper bounds for the initiation date of 30 distinct Jihadi plots were identified in addition to the date of arrest or an attempted/actual terror act. Accounting for the censoring and truncation effects inherent with these data; the estimated mean duration equals 9 months, while 95% of all plots are estimated to fall between 1 and 25 months. These estimates suggest that in the United States, on average approximately three ongoing Jihadi terror plots have been active at any point in time since 9/11/2001.

About the Speaker: Edward H. Kaplan is the William N. and Marie A. Beach Professor of Management Sciences, Professor of Public Health, and Professor of Engineering at Yale University’s School of Management who is currently on sabbatical as Distinguished Visiting Professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. The author of more than 125 research articles, Kaplan received both the Lanchester Prize and the Edelman Award, two top honors in the operations research field, among many other awards. An elected member of the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine of the US National Academies, Kaplan’s current research focuses on the application of operations research to problems in counterterrorism and homeland security. 

CISAC Conference Room

Edward H. Kaplan Professor of Management Sciences, Professor of Public Health, and Professor of Engineering, Yale; Distinguished Visiting Professor, Graduate School of Business, Stanford Speaker
Seminars

2012 Payne Distinguished Lecture: The Future of the American Military

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Karl Eikenberry is the Payne Distinguished Lecturer at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Within FSI he is an affiliated faculty member with the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), and an affiliated researcher with the Europe Center. Before coming to Stanford, he served as U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan from May 2009 to July 2011, where he led the civilian side of the surge directed by President Obama to reverse Taliban momentum and help set the conditions for transition to full Afghan sovereignty.

Prior to his appointment as Chief of Mission in Kabul, Ambassador Eikenberry had a 35-year career with the U.S. Army, retiring with the rank of Lieutenant General in 2009.  His operational posts include service in the continental U.S., Hawaii, Korea, Italy, and Afghanistan, where he served as Commander of the American-led Coalition Forces from 2005-2007.

Ambassador Eikenberry also served in various political-military positions, including service as Deputy Chairman of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Military Committee in Brussels.

His military awards include the Defense Distinguished and Superior Service Medals, Legion of Merit, Bronze Star, Ranger Tab, Combat and Expert Infantryman badges, and master parachutist wings. He has received numerous civilian awards as well.

Amb. Eikenberry is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, holds master's degrees from Harvard University in East Asian Studies and Stanford University in Political Science, and was a National Security Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

He is a trustee of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Council of American Ambassadors. He recently received the George F. Kennan Award for Distinguished Public Service from the National Committee on American Foreign Policy. He has published numerous articles on U.S. military training, tactics, and strategy and on Chinese military history and Asia-Pacific security issues.

Koret Taube Conference Center
Gunn SIEPR Building
366 Galvez Street

Karl Eikenberry Payne Distinguished Lecturer; Retired United States Army Lieutenant General; Former United States Ambassador to Afghanistan Speaker
Lectures

French nuclear idiosyncrasy: how it affects French nuclear policies towards the United Arab Emirates and Iran

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Abstract:

This article elaborates the notion of ‘nuclear idiosyncrasy’ as a specific understanding of what nuclear weapons and energy are, what they stand for and what they can do. It then assesses the persistence of nuclear idiosyncrasy over time and its effects on French nuclear policies in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Iran. Based on interviews in France, Geneva and the UAE, this article contributes to three debates within foreign policy analysis and nuclear history. Is a regional approach necessary to understand the framing of foreign policies in the twenty-first century? Does a change in leadership fundamentally affect the orientations of nuclear policies? Are the risks of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East and the measures to prevent it similarly understood by all the players in the international community? First, it shows that French nuclear policies in the Middle East are not shaped by dynamics specific to the region as the often invoked notion of an ‘Arab policy of France’ would suggest. Secondly, in-depth analysis leads one to reject the idea of a major change between the nuclear policies of Presidents Chirac and Sarkozy. Thirdly, persistent French nuclear idiosyncrasy leads also to rejection of the idea of convergence towards a shared understanding of the proliferation threat in the Middle East.

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Journal Articles
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Cambridge Review of International Affairs
Authors
Benoît Pelopidas
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Does Repression Reduce Terrorist Attacks? Evidence from Israel

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Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Erica Chenoweth Visiting Scholar, CISAC; Assistant Professor of Government, Wesleyan University Speaker

James D. Fearon

CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

(650) 725-1314
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences
Professor of Political Science
james_fearon_2024.jpg PhD

James Fearon is the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and a professor of political science. He is a Senior Fellow at FSI, affiliated with CISAC and CDDRL. His research interests include civil and interstate war, ethnic conflict, the international spread of democracy and the evaluation of foreign aid projects promoting improved governance. Fearon was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002. Some of his current research projects include work on the costs of collective and interpersonal violence, democratization and conflict in Myanmar, nuclear weapons and U.S. foreign policy, and the long-run persistence of armed conflict.

Affiliated faculty at the Center for International Security and Cooperation
Affiliated faculty at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law
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James Fearon Professor of Political Science and Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford University Commentator
Seminars

The Strategic Logic of Nuclear Proliferation

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Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Alexander Montgomery Associate Professor of Political Science, Reed College Commentator
Alexandre Debs Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow, CISAC; Assistant Professor of Political Science, Yale University Speaker
Nuno P. Monteiro Assistant Professor of Political Science, Yale University Speaker
Seminars

Insurgency, Counterinsurgency, and Civil War: Insights from the Philippines

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Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Joseph Felter Senior Research Scholar, CISAC; Formerly US Army Colonel and Director of the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point Speaker

James D. Fearon

CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

(650) 725-1314
0
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences
Professor of Political Science
james_fearon_2024.jpg PhD

James Fearon is the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and a professor of political science. He is a Senior Fellow at FSI, affiliated with CISAC and CDDRL. His research interests include civil and interstate war, ethnic conflict, the international spread of democracy and the evaluation of foreign aid projects promoting improved governance. Fearon was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002. Some of his current research projects include work on the costs of collective and interpersonal violence, democratization and conflict in Myanmar, nuclear weapons and U.S. foreign policy, and the long-run persistence of armed conflict.

Affiliated faculty at the Center for International Security and Cooperation
Affiliated faculty at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law
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James Fearon Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, Professor of Political Science, Stanford University Commentator
Seminars

Secretary or General? The U.N. Secretary-General's Diplomatic Interventions in International Conflicts

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Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Lonjezo Frank

Not in residence

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Predoctoral Fellow
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Lonjezo Peter Mpinganjira Frank (formerly Lonjezo Hamisi) was a predoctoral fellow at CISAC for the 2011-2012 academic year. While at CISAC, he was a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Stanford. His doctoral dissertation focused on the diplomatic role of the United Nations Secretary-General since 1945 and used a variety of quantitative techniques to assess the autonomy of his Office vis-à-vis the U.N. member states, especially the powerful Security Council P5 states.

In 2004, Lonjezo earned an M.A. in Diplomacy & International Relations and also an MBA from Seton Hall University. At Stanford, Lonjezo has served as a teaching assistant in several international security and foreign policy classes, as well as assisted Prof. Kenneth Schultz with research on African boundary conflicts. 

Prior to enrolling at Stanford, Lonjezo worked in private sector consulting and academia. He also completed internships and developed affiliations with several public sector organizations, including, inter alia, the Office of the United Nations Under-Secretary-General and High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States; the Office of the Chairman of the Group of 77 and China, and the Office of Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, Director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute.

Last updated March 2024.

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Lonjezo Hamisi Predoctoral Fellow, CISAC Speaker
Toshihiro Higuchi Postdoctoral Fellow, CISAC Commentator
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Dynamics of Change in Military Organizations

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Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Gil-li Vardi

Not in residence

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Lecturer
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Gil-li Vardi joined CISAC as a visiting scholar in December 2011. She completed her PhD at the London School of Economics in 2008, and spent two years as a research fellow at the Oxford Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War at the University of Oxford, after which she joined Notre Dame university as a J. P. Moran Family Assistant Professor of Military History.

Her research examines the interplay between organizational culture, doctrine, and operational patterns in military organizations, and focuses on the incentives and dynamics of change in military thought and practice.

Driven by her interest in both the German and Israeli militaries and their organizational cultures, Vardi is currently revising her dissertation, "The Enigma of Wehrmacht Operational Doctrine: The Evolution of Military Thought in Germany, 1919-1941," alongside preparing a book manuscript on the sources of the Israeli Defence Forces’ (IDF) early strategic and operational perceptions and preferences.

Gil-li Vardi Visiting Scholar, CISAC Speaker

Lynn Eden

Not in residence

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Affiliate
rsd15_078_0365a.jpg PhD

Lynn Eden is a Senior Research Scholar Emeritus. She was a Senior Research Scholar at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation until January 2016, as well as was Associate Director for Research. Eden received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan, held several pre- and post-doctoral fellowships, and taught in the history department at Carnegie Mellon before coming to Stanford.

In the area of international security, Eden has focused on U.S. foreign and military policy, arms control, the social construction of science and technology, and organizational issues regarding nuclear policy and homeland security. She co-edited, with Steven E. Miller, Nuclear Arguments: Understanding the Strategic Nuclear Arms and Arms Control Debates (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989). She was an editor of The Oxford Companion to American Military History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), which takes a social and cultural perspective on war and peace in U.S. history. That volume was chosen as a Main Selection of the History Book Club.

Eden's book Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004; New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2004) explores how and why the U.S. government--from World War II to the present--has greatly underestimated the damage caused by nuclear weapons by failing to predict damage from firestorms. It shows how well-funded and highly professional organizations, by focusing on what they do well and systematically excluding what they don't, may build a poor representation of the world--a self-reinforcing fallacy that can have serious consequences, from the sinking of the Titanic to not predicting the vulnerability of the World Trade Center to burning jet fuel. Whole World on Fire won the American Sociological Association's 2004 Robert K. Merton Award for best book in science, knowledge, and technology.

Eden has also written on life in small-town America. Her first book, Crisis in Watertown (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), was her college senior thesis; it was a finalist for a National Book Award in 1973. Her second book, Witness in Philadelphia, with Florence Mars (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), about the murders of civil rights workers Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman in the summer of 1964, was a Book of the Month Club Alternate Selection.

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Lynn Eden Senior Research Scholar and Associate Director for Research, CISAC Commentator
Seminars

Public Goods Provision and the Efficacy of Governance

On May 18-19, the Program on Poverty and Governance will host a two-day conference on the provision of public goods and good governance throughout the world. This conference, co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies, will bring together an interdisciplinary group of economists, political scientists, policymakers, and public health researchers examining these questions. Public goods—goods and services such as education, healthcare, sanitation, potable water, and other benefits provided by the government—are intrinsically tied to issues of governance, which we broadly define as the exercise of political authority and the use of institutional resources to manage society’s problems and affairs. More specifically, factors such how political leaders get elected, the way in which government projects get funded, whether the community participates in decision-making, and the extent to which the distribution of government benefits is done through clientelistic networks, among others, play an important role in the quality and coverage of public goods that governments provide. Additionally, a critical question in large parts of the developing world relates to the role of international players and foreign aid in the provision of public goods –does external provision of public goods enable or hinder governmental capacity to deliver public services in poor communities? Through two days of presentations and panel discussions, the conference will explore how various facets of governance affect the provision of public goods and services throughout the world.

The conference will be held in Encina Hall at Stanford University May 18th and 19th, 2012. Guests are encouraged to RSVP by May 16th. Any questions may be addressed to the Program on Poverty and Governance program associate Elena Cryst.

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CISAC Conference Room

Beatriz Magaloni

Dept. of Political Science
Encina Hall, Room 436
Stanford University,
Stanford, CA

(650) 724-5949
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations
Professor of Political Science
beatriz_magaloni_2024.jpg MA, PhD

Beatriz Magaloni Magaloni is the Graham Stuart Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science. Magaloni is also a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, where she holds affiliations with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She is also a Stanford’s King Center for Global Development faculty affiliate. Magaloni has taught at Stanford University for over two decades.

She leads the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (Povgov). Founded by Magaloni in 2010, Povgov is one of Stanford University’s leading impact-driven knowledge production laboratories in the social sciences. Under her leadership, Povgov has innovated and advanced a host of cutting-edge research agendas to reduce violence and poverty and promote peace, security, and human rights.

Magaloni’s work has contributed to the study of authoritarian politics, poverty alleviation, indigenous governance, and, more recently, violence, crime, security institutions, and human rights. Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006) is widely recognized as a seminal study in the field of comparative politics. It received the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations, as well as the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section. Her second book The Politics of Poverty Relief: Strategies of Vote Buying and Social Policies in Mexico (with Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estevez) (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores how politics shapes poverty alleviation.

Magaloni’s work was published in leading journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Criminology & Public Policy, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, Latin American Research Review, and others.

Magaloni received wide international acclaim for identifying innovative solutions for salient societal problems through impact-driven research. In 2023, she was named winner of the world-renowned Stockholm Prize in Criminology, considered an equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of criminology. The award recognized her extensive research on crime, policing, and human rights in Mexico and Brazil. Magaloni’s research production in this area was also recognized by the American Political Science Association, which named her recipient of the 2021 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review, the leading journal in the discipline.

She received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University and holds a law degree from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.

Director, Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab
Co-director, Democracy Action Lab
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