Stanford University

Crime

Prison Gangs and Governance: The Hidden Order of the Criminal Underworld

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David Skarbek is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London and an Associate Member of the Extra-Legal Governance Institute at the University of Oxford. He serves on the editorial board of Global Crime. His research examines how people define and enforce property rights and engage in trade in the absence of strong, effective governments.

CISAC Conference Room

David Skarbek Lecturer in Political Economy Speaker King's College London

David Laitin

Department of Political Science
Stanford University
Encina Hall, W423
Stanford, CA 94305-6044

(650) 725-9556 (650) 723-1808
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James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science
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David Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science and a co-director of the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford. He has conducted field research in Somalia, Nigeria, Spain, Estonia and France. His principal research interest is on how culture – specifically, language and religion – guides political behavior. He is the author of “Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-heritage Societies” and a series of articles on immigrant integration, civil war and terrorism. Laitin received his BA from Swarthmore College and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

Affiliated faculty at the Center for International Security and Cooperation
Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
David Laitin James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science Commentator Stanford University
Seminars

Cyber Security in China

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There are three major components of Cyber security from China’s perspective: Internet information management, Civilian cyber security, and Cyber warfare.

The Chinese government worries that misinformation, dissent opinions and dissemination of rumors could cause social instability, and thus overthrow the regime. As a result, the government has taken many approaches to manage the information in cyberspace. Can the Chinese government fully control the information flow? If not, why?

China has 500 million netizens, more than any other country in the world. How do the government and companies deal with privacy and cyber crime?

Cyber attack from China is widely reported in US media. How do Chinese view US cyber warfare capability? Can "Pearl Harbor" happen in cyberspace?

A better understanding of these questions could be helpful for shaping US cyber policies on China.

Ting Wang is a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC. His research concerns on space debris problems, ASAT weapons, and cybersecurity in China. Before coming to CISAC in 2011, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies at Cornell University. He received a PhD at the Beihang University in China. His PhD dissertation was titled "Orbital Debris Evolution and Threat to Spacecraft." He also holds a B.A. in aerospace engineering from Beihang University and has worked at the Shanghai Institute of Satellite Engineering. He was a visiting scholar at the Union of Concerned Scientists in 2003, where he began to be interested in security issues.

CISAC Conference Room

Ting Wang Post-doctoral fellow Speaker CISAC
Seminars

Latest research examines link between violence and economic growth

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Elena Cryst
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Program on Poverty and Governance director Beatriz Magaloni, associate professor of political science and FSI senior fellow, post-doctoral fellow Gabriela Calderón and graduate student Gustavo Robles were recently featured in an Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) report for their participation in a research group for the IDB's Citizen Security Research Platform. Their project, entitled "The Economic Consequences of Drug-Trafficking Violence in Mexico," seeks to quantify the local economic impact of Mexico's drug war across the country.

The study uses electricity consumption as a proxy for per-capita gross domestic product to calculate the impact of violence on economic output in Mexico. The research team found that when municipalities become embroiled in high levels of drug violence, local electrical consumption drops. They also examined census employment statistics to measure the impact of violence on the number of people employed or actively seeking employment. Their research has suggested that citizens are increasingly hesitant to launch businesses, and may even choose unemployment over risking the daily walk to work in a highly insecure environment.

The team presented their work for a seminar at the IDB's Washington, D.C., headquarters as part of the project "The Cost of Crime and Violence in Latin America and the Caribbean" on Jan. 23-24, 2013.

Click below for a working draft of the paper available in both Spanish and English. 

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Citizen Insecurity in Latin America: a Regional Challenge

Following the highly successful conference "Violence, Drugs and Governance: Mexican Security in Comparative Perspective", the Program on Poverty and Governance is partnering with the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to host a new conference on violence, crime and citizen insecurity in Latin America. The greater objectives of this two day conference are to:

  • Deepen the critical analysis of insecurity in Latin America through an interdisciplinary dialogue and the creation of methodological tools
  • Create an interdisciplinary network of academics focused on the study and comprehension of insecurity in the Western Hemisphere
  • Share the findings and recommendations from this network with key actors and decision makers of the region

  • Develop a program of annual Forum-Conferences on citizen security in Latin America, with a high degree of academic analysis, and open to dialogue with government officials and authorities

  • Launch a new collaborative database for crime and violence research among the networks of scholars

Presenters will speak on four thematic areas:

  1. Citizen Insecurity Tipping Points
  2. Costs and Impacts of Insecurity
  3. Drug Trafficking and Drug Regimes
  4. Interventions and Best Practices to Decrease Violence

The conference will be held at ITAM's Santa Teresa campus in Mexico City on March 11-12.

Anuncio del evento en español via ITAM: haz click aquí.

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Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México
Mexico City, Mexico

Conferences

ICC Speaker Series- Shamila Batohi

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Ms. Shamila Batohi is Senior Legal Advisor to the Prosecutor at the ICC, and former Director of Public Prosecutions in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. In 1995, Ms. Batohi was part of a multi-disciplinary team mandated by President Mandela to investigate hit squad activities in the police during the apartheid years. As head of the Directorate of Special Operations, the unit that is better known as the ‘Scorpions’, Batohi was tasked with investigating serious organized crime. Famously, in 2000, Batohi was appointed to lead evidence in the King Commission hearings to investigate cricket match-fixing allegations involving Hansie Cronje.

Bechtel Conference Center

Shamila Batohi Senior Legal Advisor Speaker Office of the Prosecutor, ICC
Lectures
Sanela Diana Jenkins Human Rights Series on the International Criminal Court
Program on Human Rights

The Folly of Technological Solutionism

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Abstract
He will preview some of the main arguments about the temptations of "solutionism" from his upcoming book "To Save Everything, Click Here." Now that everything is smart, hackable and trackable, it is very common to see big technology companies (as well as ordinary tech enthusiasts and geeks) embark on ambitious projects to "solve all of the world's problems." Obesity, climate change, dishonesty and hypocrisy in politcs, high crime rate: Silicon Valley can do it all. But where does this solutionist quest lead? What are the things that ought to be left "dumb" and "unhackable"? How do we learn to appreciate the imperfection - of both our lives and our social institutions - in a world, where it can be easily eliminated? Do we even have to appreciate it? 
 
 Evgeny Morozov is the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. In 2010-2012 he was a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Liberation Technology program and a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation. In 2009-2010 he was a fellow at Georgetown University and in 2008-2009 he was a fellow at the Open Society Foundations (where he also sat on the board of the Information Program between 2008 and 2012).  Between 2006 and 2008 he was Director of New Media at Transitions Online.  Morozov has written for The New York Times, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, Financial Times, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and other publications. His monthly Slate column is syndicaetd in El Pais, Corriere della Sera, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Folha de S.Paulo and several other newspapers. 

Wallenberg Theater

Evgeny Morozov Author and former Stanford Visiting Scholar Speaker
Seminars
Liberation Technology Seminar Series

Crime, Violence and Governance in Latin America: Sharing Data and Building a Web-Based Research Network to Expand Knowledge

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Despite some interesting research on crime and violence in Latin American countries (particularly Colombia), there is still a relative dearth of policy-oriented research. People interested in these subjects lack a convenient means to access the emerging research in these areas, or to pool data across countries and contexts.  Scholars within particular sub-fields are routinely engaged in separate conversations that do not sufficiently leverage complementarities in methods and substantive areas. This project will addres these gaps by delivering a first-rate electronic resource making it easy to pool data, to share research, and to engage audiences within and beyond academia. We also want to make it easier for policymakers in the United States and Latin America to learn about cutting-edge, policy-oriented research addressing the problems before them. 

CISAC Conference Room

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar Professor and Deane F. Johnson Faculty Scholar at Stanford Law School; Co-Director of CISAC; FSI Senior Fellow; CDDRL Affiliated Faculty;FSE Affiliated Faculty Speaker

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
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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.

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Beatriz Magaloni Associate Professor of Political Science, FSI senior fellow, Director of Program on Poverty and Governance Speaker
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