German Studies assistant professor Adrian Daub takes an interdisciplinary approach in this study of the development of the metaphysical concept of marriage.

For a full synopsis, please visit the publication website by clicking on the book title below.

Why is there so much alleged electoral fraud in new democracies? Most scholarship focuses on the proximate cause of electoral competition. This article proposes a different answer by constructing and analyzing an original dataset drawn from the German parliament’s own voluminous record of election disputes for every parliamentary election in the life of Imperial Germany (1871-1912) after its adoption of universal male suffrage in 1871. The article analyzes the election of over 5,000 parliamentary seats to identify where and why elections were disputed as a result of “election misconduct.” The empirical analysis demonstrates that electoral fraud’s incidence is significantly related to a society’s level of inequality in landholding, a major source of wealth, power, and prestige in this period. After weighing the importance of two different causal mechanisms, the article concludes that socio-economic inequality, by making new democratic institutions endogenous to preexisting social power, can be a major and underappreciated barrier to democratization even after the adoption of formally democratic rules.

The Program on Human Rights at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), together with the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, are pleased to introduce the 2013 Summer Human Rights Fellows. These four remarkable Stanford undergraduates were selected from a competitive pool of applicants to spend the summer serving in organizations advancing human rights work around the world.

The Summer Human Rights Fellowship enables undergraduate students to gain practical experience at international organizations that promote, monitor, evaluate, or advance human rights work. In order to apply, potential fellows must identify their ideal placement and work with the partner to ensure there is a viable project that allows the student to contribute meaningfully to the organization’s work. This year, the fellows will be working on the ground in India, Jordan, and Guatemala with informal workers, at-risk children, trafficking victims, and using technology to advance social justice worldwide. Upon their return to Stanford next year, each of the Human Rights Fellows will participate in campus events to describe their work.

Below are the profiles of our four fellows highlighting their summer projects, interest in human rights and some fun facts. Click here to learn more about the fellowship program.

Image

Name: Firas Abuzaid (’14)

Major: Computer Science

Hometown: Plano, Texas

Tell us about your project. I'll be working with Visualizing Justice in Amman, Jordan. The mission of Visualizing Justice is to empower people worldwide to create visual stories for social justice and human rights. My mission for the summer is to exploit new software innovations in web development to augment Visualizing Justice’s data visualization capabilities, thus making their stories more expressive and accessible worldwide.

What first sparked your interest in human rights? I think there is a disconnect between the technologies we develop and the societies we live in, and that gap is most noticeable in the area of human rights. In particular, our innovations in technology have created an information overload problem. We are now inundated with information about various human rights issues, but struggle for a more nuanced or contextualized understanding of those issues. Also, the quality of the information has not kept up with the growth in quantity. If we can invest the time to build better tools and re-couple the quality of information with its quantity, then we, as a society, can make a lot more progress in the field of human rights.

What are your post-Stanford aspirations? I want to develop new tools that make it easier for individuals to create compelling data visualizations, especially those that lie outside the traditional domains of technology.

Fun fact about yourself: I can solve a Rubik's cube in under a minute.

Image

Name: Lara Mitra (’15)

Major: Human Biology

Hometown: Washington, D.C.

Tell us about your project. I’m traveling to Ahmedabad, India to work with Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), a union of 1.4 million informal economy workers, which provide community-driven socioeconomic services, including healthcare, local banking, social security, and housing to marginalized groups. Given my interest in public health, I will focus on SEWA’s initiatives responding to people's inherent right to a healthy life, working with the health team to analyze and document the changing role of front-line health workers who deliver care to expecting mothers. I aim to assess the effectiveness of services provided by three unique classes of health workers, and identify how their knowledge and skills can be harnessed to deliver primary health care to a broad swath of the rural and urban population.

What first sparked your interest in human rights? The day of my 16^th birthday found me waiting in line at the DMV in Washington, DC. When I reached the front of the line, I was given one final form to fill out. I mindlessly scribbled my name and date of birth before I stumbled upon a question that I did not know the answer to: “Would you like to be an organ donor?” This was my first exposure to a human rights issue that I hope to pursue well into the future. Upon doing some research, I became hooked on the topic of organ donation. The future human biology major in me enjoyed reading about the dire need for kidneys in the US, but the humanitarian in me found another area of the debate more gripping – the black market for organs. 

What are your post-Stanford aspirations?  Find a job that allows me to combine my interests in medicine and human rights! 

Fun fact about yourself: My parents made me take classes in juggling and unicycling growing up in case the whole college thing didn't work out.

Image

Name: Nicolle Richards (’16)

Major: Human Biology (planned)

Hometown: Vienna, Austria

Tell us about your project. I will be traveling to Guatemala to work with Kids Alive, a nonprofit that works to rescue orphans and at-risk children. In Guatemala, they run a care home for girls who have been abandoned or abused – often in the form of forced labor and/or physical and sexual abuse. I will be working with the girls in the care home, and also evaluating a program that works to continue supporting the girls who have returned home.

What first sparked your interest in human rights? Throughout high school, I volunteered at a care home in Romania for women and girls who had experienced abuse. This first exposure to drastic poverty sparked my interest in social work and development, and led me to explore different aspects of human rights. Later in high school, I taught summer school in the Dominican Republic to at-risk children, where exposure to obvious injustice solidified my passion to fight for human rights. As a Christian, I believe that I have a responsibility to help those less fortunate – and fighting for human rights is an obvious way to do this!

What are your post-Stanford aspirations? I hope to study international human rights law and eventually work combatting human trafficking around the world. 

Fun fact about yourself: I get to spend my vacations in Seoul, South Korea where my family currently lives.

Image

Name: Garima Sharma (’15)

Major: Economics

Hometown: New Delhi, India

Tell us about your project. I am going to be working with Apne Aap: Women Worldwide, an anti-trafficking NGO based in Forbesganj, India. Forbesganj is in close proximity to the Indo-Nepalese border, which has led to its emergence as a source, transit center, and destination for women trafficked for prostitution. I have spent the past two quarters designing an interactive human rights education curriculum focused on sex trafficking, which I will use in Forbesganj to engage with at-risk girls who are the daughters of sex workers in the red light district, as well as 12-14 year-old girls belonging to the Nutt (lower-caste) community. Simultaneously, I will be working with older men, women and community leaders, with the goal of making preliminary headway into a community-wide anti-trafficking strategy.

What first sparked your interest in human rights? I cannot count the number of times that I have been verbally harassed, whistled at or sung to by strange men in the course of my fairly “normal” existence as a middle-class girl in India. My passion for wanting to ensure that women are able to demand and access a life of dignity is a consequence of having grown up in a society that normalizes aggression against us. This prompted me to intern at the National Human Rights Commission of India, where I spent my time reading reports on trafficking, examining anti-trafficking legislation, and talking to activists and victims of human rights violations. I realized we critically need to place greater focus on the prevention of violations and develop a true, nuanced appreciation for the concept of human rights – a change I am hoping to effect through this fellowship.

What are your post-Stanford aspirations? A few years down the line, I hope to work as a policymaker advancing women’s rights in India.

Fun fact about yourself: I am one of two—I have a twin sister named Anima, who attends medical school in India.

The Europe Center, through its Program on Sweden, Scandinavia, and the Baltic Region, has forged partnerships with those who bring visionary solutions to the challenge of diversity and reconciliation in our increasingly globalized world.   “Harbor of Hope:  a special evening celebrating Sweden’s diverse cultures” held on May 6^th is the latest effort by the Europe Center to disseminate this new way of thinking.  The participation of Sweden’s leading documentary filmmaker Magnus Gertten, and Sweden’s cultural entrepreneur Ozan Sunar, resulted in an unprecedented pairing and an evening of motivating insight for a large public audience.  The program included the screening of Gertten’s documentary “Harbour of Hope”, a multi-media presentation by Sunar and an opportunity for the audience to engage in discussion with both of these special guests.

The evening opened with a welcome by the Europe Center’s director, Professor Amir Eshel, who highlighted the support of the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation for making possible the Europe Center’s Sweden Program and this research.  The center’s Associate Director, Dr. Roland Hsu then framed the thinking behind inviting these particular two guest speakers, Gertten and Sunar.

“This evening”, said Hsu,  “we gather for a special look at the challenge to meet and embrace difference.  In today’s globalized world, market economies, and educational opportunities, but also war and persecution send unprecedented numbers of peoples across borders, away from home cultures, and into new host neighborhoods. 

In the US and in Europe we share the concern and opportunity to learn what drives people far from home.  Tonight, we focus our gaze on the city of Malmo, a city whose neighborhoods contain extraordinary diversity.  Such diversity has a history, which we shall see on film, and it has a future, thanks in large part to the cultural programing we will learn about after the film. 

Our challenge is to learn from the experience of families, fathers, brothers, mothers, sisters, and children, displaced from the familiar, and replaced in new settings.  e will look at this challenge through the eyes of two visionary artists who have touched us with their works, and who are bridging divides across competing memories, and across growing diversity of today’s mobile and global West.” 

Hsu’s introduction of Magnus Gertten and Gertten’s documentary film “Harbour of Hope” included a line from a NY Times review of Gertten’s art which he felt echoed throughout the evening’s program:  “it seems as if the past is intruding on and sometimes overwhelming the present.”  “Harbour of Hope” includes footage from the original archival film shot on April 28, 1945, the day that 30,000 survivors of German concentration camps arrived in Malmo, Sweden to begin their lives over again.  This powerful and unforgettable film is about the life stories of 3 of the survivors seen on this footage:  Irene Krausz-Fainman, Ewa Kabacinska Jansson and Joe Rozenberg. 

Following the viewing of “Harbour of Hope”, Hsu introduced the next guest Ozan Sunar by saying “In Mr. Sunar’s cultural programming, we may see not the past overwhelming the present, but instead the present clearing the way for its future.” Sunar, with a long career in the fields of arts, media and integration politics, blazed a path for those seeking new ways to include artistic values from diverse origins into Sweden’s contemporary culture.  He is currently the founding and artistic director of the international cultural house Moriska Paviljongen in Malmo.  Sunar’s presentation and the subsequent discussion on his work uniting heretofore communities in conflict through culture were both inspiring and provocative.

Harbor of Hope:  a special evening celebrating Sweden's diverses cultures; May 6, 2013, Stanford University: