Since 1991, there have been two major phases in Russian history, corresponding roughly to the decades of the 1990s and the 2000s. Under President Boris Yeltsin (1991-1999), Russia attempted a rapid transition to a market economy and liberal democracy. Economic “shock therapy,” the transition from a planned and centralized economy to a privatized market economy in one leap, proved to be traumatic for most of the population of the Russian Federation. On the positive side, these initial years of post-Soviet Russia saw the creation of a new system of laws, a dramatic rise in political participation, the birth of new human rights institutions at the national level, and the establishment of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Yet, the political transition, liked the economic one, proved to be very turbulent, perhaps inevitably in a situation where a country with Russia’s authoritarian past attempts to introduce a multi-party democracy. The country’s political culture seemed a poor fit for its new democratic constitution.
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.
The Soviet Union advocated a conception of human rights different from the notion of rights prevalent in the West. Western legal theory emphasized the so-called “negative” rights: that is, rights of individuals against the government. The Soviet system, on the other hand, emphasized that society as a whole, rather than individuals, were the beneficiaries of “positive” rights: that is, rights from the government. In this spirit, Soviet ideology placed a premium on economic and social rights, such as access to health care, adequate and affordable basic food supplies, housing, and education, and guaranteed employment.
This is an analysis of the evolution of political actions and legal instruments imposed on indigenous peoples in Brazil since pre-colonization in the fifteenth century. Among the political ideologies that stand out are integrationism and protectionism. Integrationist ideology is seen as a beacon that lights the way and acts in the minds of Indians to constitute an ethnic nation state. However, a permanent recognition of indigenous rights is legitimated in the Federal Constitution of Brazil and in Resolution 169 of the International Labour Organization (recognized by Brazil). Both documents address the outdated Indian Statute. Discussions of the new Statute of Indigenous Peoples in National Congress began in 1991 and still show no prospect of completion. The judgment of the approval of the Raposa-Serra do Sol Indigenous Land brought conditions that, if misunderstood, threaten to set back indigenous rights, particularly in terms of their role and autonomy. This episode demonstrated that the same interests and characters that expanded the colonial frontier over the past five centuries have not relented. Nevertheless, people that were once fooled by legal maneuvers use the same tool that created this society, even in the Brazilian Supreme Court, which is dressed up to satisfy Western egalitarian expectations, but which has not lost its ethnic character. Social networking and bilingual education in the communities have strengthened indigenous societies and are making possible the organization of international legal instruments and movements that are claiming greater autonomy.
In this paper, two sets of emblematic, policy-inflected cases from the past two decades (the 1990s and 2000s)––one involving sustainable development projects and the other, agricultural crop varieties––are analyzed in an effort to document some of the complex processes through which the Brazilian federal government began to establish the “rule of law” over the issues of access to and use of indigenous knowledge and of ways of protecting if from expropriation by outside forces, a process which is far from complete.
Single Party Governance
In this lecture, Professor Okimoto explores distinctive aspects of Japan's political system, namely single-party rule. He examines the positive and negative aspects of Japan's political system and discusses topics such as the Yoshida Doctrine, nisei giin, and amakudari.
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"The Stanford Report" covered the recently launched Stanford Human Rights Education Initiative, which brings human rights curriculum into the classrooms of California community colleges to transform students into globally-conscious citizens. Piloted in partnership with the Program on Human Rights, the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (91Թ), and the Division of International Comparative and Area Studies, the Initiative appoints human rights fellows to develop new curriculum for broader application in California and beyond.
Stanford helps bring human rights to community college classrooms
Globalization has meant that the whole world is connected to the whole world's problems. Yet most of today's students live in a world no bigger than a cell phone keypad.
So how do you explain to them that the clothes on their backs may be sewn by slave labor in Asia, or how international human trafficking may be behind an Internet porn site?
Tim Maxwell, an award-winning poet who teaches at the College of San Mateo, said the basic task of reading is becoming harder each year for the Facebook generation. "To bring unpleasant and challenging ideas into their world is really difficult," he said. He described "young people's increasing use of social media and other technologies that, rather [than] widening their worlds, effectively narrows them" to what is pleasurably entertaining.
The remedy? In an unusual move, Stanford is linking arms with educators in California community colleges for a four-year project called Stanford Human Rights Education Initiative. Following a conference last June on "Teaching Human Rights in an International Context," which launched the project, Stanford has named eight new "Human Rights Fellows" from California's community colleges. Maxwell is one of them.
For more than 12.4 million young Americans, teaching takes place in one of the nearly 1,200 community colleges across the nation – and about a quarter of those community colleges are in California. But few major universities have engaged these institutions.
The new initiative will train students to be engaged as global citizens, said William Hanson, another fellow, who holds a law degree from Columbia and teaches at Chabot College. "We have to find a way to wriggle in."
With a stipend and "visiting scholar" status, the human rights fellows will work with the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (91Թ) and the Division of International Comparative and Area Studies (ICA) to develop human rights curricula, plan human rights conferences and develop the . The human rights curriculum they design could, they hope, seed similar programs across the country and the world.
My hope is that human rights will form a central part of every college curriculum – not only as a topic, but as a lens through which to see all topics. Helen Stacy
"My hope is that human rights will form a central part of every college curriculum" – not only as a topic, but as a lens through which to see all topics, said Helen Stacy, director of the program on human rights at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
She said that human rights is typically pigeonholed as a "soft subject" in the social sciences or humanities, but such funneling "misses engineering students and IT students and math students."
For example, she said, students of computer science or statistics could be engaged in mapping human trafficking or drug smuggling. Young economists could study the supply-and-demand dynamics of crime.
The effort "to speak a language that speaks to all of the disciplines" could result in a human rights curriculum that extends into the high school and even the elementary school level, Stacy said. Moreover, the planned website with an online curriculum could help educators the world over – even an isolated educator sitting in Uzbekistan, she said.
For the Stanford faculty and staff who created the course, the beginnings go back a long way and are the fruition of years of experience, research and thought.
Gary Mukai's experience of human rights violations was firsthand: the director of 91Թ recalls a childhood as a farm worker whose Japanese-American parents, also farm workers, had been detained by their country during World War II. "I grew up puzzled about many of their stories, and their stories certainly influenced my interest in developing educational materials about civil and human rights for young students," he said.
For instance, he recalled uncles and other relatives who volunteered or were drafted by the U.S. Army from behind barbed wire. Or stories about his relatives who received posthumous medals for their sons' service while they still lived behind barbed wire.
Richard Roberts, a Stanford professor of history, remembered reading William Hinton's Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village, years ago. The questions it raised fascinated him: "Who will teach the teacher? Where do we learn? Who do we learn from? Who has the power to teach?"
He said universities typically teach an "isolated, really small segment" of the general population. Roberts, who studies domestic violence and human trafficking in Africa, said that when it comes to human rights, "That's not enough. We have to go beyond the rarefied segment."
One of the people on this frontline of teaching is Enrique Luna, a history instructor at Gilroy's Gavilan College. For him, Stanford represents something of a return: his father had been a cook at the university's dorms. Now Luna is an educator who looks for opportunities for students to participate with direct aid in their local communities and also with groups such as the Zapatistas of Chiapas and the Tarahumara of northern Mexico.
To reach his students, he said, he creates loops "back and forth between reading and doing." When students are doing, they have a reason to read, and when they read, they are able to fix their understandings through application. "They do their best work when they're doing something. That's where the other disciplines pour in," he said.
A lunchtime session last summer was popping with ideas: Hanson was enthusiastic about possibly broadcasting Stanford lectures on human rights on his college's television station.
Another human rights fellow, Sadie Reynolds from Cabrillo College in Aptos, was just happy for the time to think and reflect. "It's hard to articulate hopes this early in the planning. I have a selfish hope of learning about this model so I can apply it in the classroom." She said she will present what she's learned at Stanford to a workshop at Cabrillo.
Those on the frontline of teaching don't get such opportunities very often: "It's difficult to find time to develop this at community colleges," she said.
On June 4, 2011, 91Թ co-sponsored a conference, “Teaching Human Rights in a Global Context,” with the Program on Human Rights (Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, FSI), the Division of International Comparative and Area Studies (ICA), and the Stanford Humanities Center. Fifty community college and high school faculty attended a full day of lectures, panel discussions, and small-group work. Dr. Helen Stacy, Director of the Program on Human Rights, set the context for the conference, and her remarks were followed by a lecture on “The Globalization of Human Rights Education” by Professor Francisco Ramirez, Stanford School of Education.
Educators discussed, shared, and learned about each other’s experiences of teaching human rights in a wide range of world areas, academic disciplines, and classroom settings. The rudiments of syllabus construction, methods of incorporating a human rights component into traditional courses, sample lesson plans, best ways to make use of interdisciplinary pedagogic resources and materials, and strategies for reaching diverse student populations were topics of discussion. One panel, “Incorporating Human Rights into Your Syllabus,” was facilitated by 91Թ’s Jonas Edman. Jonas, Michael Lopez of the Program on Human Rights, and Dr. Robert Wessling, Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies, ICA, served as the primary organizers of the conference, and Dr. Laura Hubbard, Center for African Studies, ICA, served as the emcee. Megan Gorman, Center for Latin American Studies, ICA, and John Groschwitz, Center for East Asian Studies, ICA, also contributed to the organization and promotion of the conference.
As a follow-up to the conference, ICA and the Program on Human Rights will sponsor a limited number of year-long Human Rights Curricular Fellows in the coming 2011–12 academic year. Fellows must teach at an accredited California community college. Also, Jonas will be developing curricular lessons in consultation with some of the educators who attended the conference.
The conference was funded primarily by the Department of Education (Title VI) and ICA.