In addition to his scholarly endeavors, Dr. Fukuyama has been actively involved in various institutions and associations dedicated to public service and administration. He served in the US Department of State on two occasions and is currently on the board of the Volcker Alliance, an organization founded by Paul Volcker dedicated to promoting public service. His notable engagements, including the Donald C. Stone Lecture at the 2023 ASPA Annual Conference, have resonated deeply with the public administration community.

Please join us in offering our heartfelt congratulations to Dr. Fukuyama on his well-deserved honor. It is a testament to his hard work, dedication, and enormous international contributions to public administration and policy. He will receive the award on April 12, 2024, at ASPA’s annual conference in Minneapolis, MN.

the Taiwanese cables to the Matsu Islands have been cut 27 times, most recently in spring 2023. Our final report and presentation will analyze Taiwan’s current emergency management and resiliency plans, identify areas of improvement, and present solutions to fix these gaps. All of us care deeply about democracy and the rule of law, and the security of Taiwan against PRC aggression is central in the fight for those ideals. Our hope is that this work helps in some small way to improve the security of Taiwan and its people.

need resources to be aware of online risks and the best measures to protect themselves. Netsafe has yet to find the most effective way to appeal to this demographic group.

We aim to understand the demographic's most frequently used online platforms, the most common types of online harms, cultural factors, and relevant stakeholders.

disinformation operations with near impunity. We’re particularly interested in how the development of new tools and tactics – like commercial firms’ use of paid influencers, or generative AI – will aid in further obscuring attribution and scaling operations. Our policy recommendations will address how governments, international organizations, and platforms can tackle this issue.

tools. Our research focuses on how the different state PDOs in Brazil can collaborate and share AI tools to help reduce their demand and better serve their clients. The goal is for AI to be a "shared public infrastructure" that multiple PDOs can use to serve their clients.

integrating solutions available at scale for the public. We aim to recommend policy interventions which reflect local demand, ensuring sustainable, efficient, and accessible transportation solutions for the community.

government interventions, local control of stock numbers, or strong market incentives, herds exceed the grassland carrying capacity in pockets that are becoming increasingly degraded. This threatens nomadic pastoralism, a traditional way of life. With such complex and interlinked drivers to this problem, it has been challenging to isolate the causes we should focus on. We have been working with our partners at The Asia Foundation who are in the early stages of piloting a solution.

these interventions have not led to a widespread growth in mini-grid development, as the industry continues to struggle. We hope to further explore the market and regulatory landscape and learn how sub-interventions including cross-subsidization, de-risking investment, demand creation, and other innovative and locally-based solutions may help improve the industry’s viability and aid in increasing access to affordable, renewable energy in Sierra Leone.

Follow the link for a full transcript of "Global Threats: What's at Stake and What We Can Do About It."

Reform the Electoral College |  Didi Kuo

One of the major problems people feel right now in American politics is that their voices aren’t heard. We live in what my colleague Francis Fukuyama calls a "vetocracy," meaning there are a lot of veto points in our system.

In a lot of other democratic institutional configurations, you have rule by the majority. But in the United States, we have an institutional configuration that allows a very small group — for example, 15 people in the House of Representatives — to hold up government in various ways. We see this in dramatic examples on the national level, but it also trickles down to the local level where you see it in issues like permitting hold-ups.

Reforming the Electoral College would be a very direct way of changing that vetocracy. The United States is one of the only advanced democracies that has this indirect system of elections. If all the votes counted equally and all the presidential candidates had to treat all of us the same and respond to us equally in all 50 states, it would do a lot to show the power of the popular vote and realign us more closely to the principle of majoritarianism that we should seek in our institutions.

Allow Taiwan to License Weapons Production |  Larry Diamond

My recommendation is deterrence, deterrence, deterrence. It is not inevitable that the People's Republic of China is going to launch an all-out military assault on Taiwan. But if the United States does not do more to make that a costly decision, the likelihood it will happen are exponentially higher.

Deterrence works. The United States deterred the Soviet Union from moving against West Berlin and much of Europe for decades. But it only works if you have a superior force.

To that end, the United States needs to pre-position more military force in the region. There's now a $12 billion backlog of weapons that Taiwan has ordered and paid for but hasn't received yet. That’s because the American defense production system is completely broken. This is the same reason why we can’t get weapons to Ukraine at the pace we need there.

This issue could be fixed, at least in part, if we licensed the production of some of these weapon systems directly to Taiwan. Their ability to build plants and produce these systems is much more agile than our own, and so licensing the rights to production would dramatically increase the deterrence factor against China, in addition to deepening our cooperation with allies throughout the region.

Pursue Climate Mitigation AND Adaptation |  Marshall Burke

There are three things we can do in response to climate change: we can mitigate, we can adapt, or we can suffer. We’re off to a good start, but we have decades of long slog ahead of us to get that right. And it's not just us; even if we do a good job, we depend on other countries to also do a good job. The Biden administration has already been engaged on some of that front, but there’s more work to do there.

And even with our best efforts, we are not going to be able to move as fast as we want or mitigate our greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as we need to avoid climate change. So, we're going to have to live with some climate change, which means adaptation. And if we can't adapt, then we're going to suffer. 

The key point is that we are very poorly adapted to today's climate, much less the climate we're going to have 30 or 50 years from now. The West Coast and California are prime examples of this. There have been monumental wildfire seasons there the last few years, and there are significant negative health impacts from smoke exposure. I see it in my own home, even as someone who studies this and should know better and do more to reduce those risks.

The point is, we're really poorly adapted to the current climate, and things are going to get a lot worse. We need to focus on mitigation; it’s still really important and we need to get it done. But at the same time, we need to figure out how to adapt and live with the changing climate that we're going to experience.

Weapons for Ukraine, Sanctions on Russia |  Michael McFaul

When I was in Kyiv this September, I had a chance to meet with President Zelenskyy, and he pointed out an absolutely crazy reality. Companies in the United States and Europe are still making tens of thousands of dollars in profits from selling various technologies that ultimately end up in Russia. It’s getting in through places like Hong Kong and Kazakhstan and Belarus and Georgia, and it allows Russia to keep waging its horrific war.

At the same time, the United States is spending millions of dollars to arm Ukraine with systems to shoot down the Russian rockets that were built using the components they got from the West. That’s completely illogical, bad policy. I know it’s hard to control technology, but we have to find a better way than what we’re doing right now. If you're an American taxpayer, that is your money being wasted.

That means more and better weapons for Ukraine, faster. And that means more and better sanctions on Russia, faster. That is the way to speed the end of this war.

Be Confident in America |  Amichai Magen

Just a few short years ago, we were all talking about the decline of the United States. I think that is far from inevitable. People speak about the 20th century as the “American Century.” The 21st century can also be the American Century. It's in our hands.

Be bullish on America. Be confident in America. Rediscover the spirit of America for adaptation and innovation and entrepreneurship. We need to wake up from the break we’ve taken from history in the post-Cold War era and rally once again in our spirit, our research, and our intellect.

We need to find new solution structures to the great challenges of our era: environmental challenges, AI, biotechnological challenges, nuclear challenges. And we can do it. China is on the verge of demographic decline and economic decline. Russia is a very dangerous international actor, but it is not a global superpower. We must reinvent the institutions and the alliances that we need for the 21st century in order to make sure that we continue a journey towards greater peace and prosperity for all of mankind.

The entire discussion, including the audience Q&A, is available to watch on FSI's YouTube channel. To stay up to date on our content, be sure to like, subscribe, and turn on notifications.