On Feb. 1, Harold Trinkunas, associate director of research and senior research scholar at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), gave a talk on China’s growing economic engagement in Latin America – its true scope and scale – and its implications.

Fourteen Stanford researchers addressing global poverty through a range of academic disciplines are receiving a total of $4.6 million in awards from the university-wide Global Development and Poverty (GDP) initiative.

Their projects, which are the first to be funded by the GDP, deal with challenges of health, violence, economics, governance and education in the developing world.

“GDP seeks to transform scholarly activity and dialogue at Stanford around the topic of global poverty, so that the university may have a greater impact on poverty alleviation in developing economies,” said GDP faculty co-chair Jesper B. Sørensen. “By focusing on placing a small number of big bets, GDP encourages researchers to think big, and to move beyond the conventional way of doing things. We are thrilled by the inaugural set of awardees, as they demonstrate the creative, inter-disciplinary approaches that will make Stanford a leader in this area.”

The GDP initiative is part of the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies (SEED) and is administered in partnership with Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). The GDP is co-chaired by Sørensen, the faculty director for SEED and the Robert A. and Elizabeth R. Jeffe Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Graduate School of Business; and Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, senior fellow and director of FSI and the Stanley Morrison Professor at Stanford Law School.

SEED, which seeks to alleviate poverty by stimulating the creation of economic opportunities through innovation, entrepreneurship and the growth of businesses, was established in 2011 through a generous gift from Robert King, MBA '60, and his wife, Dorothy.

Through complementary areas of focus, GDP funding and other SEED research initiatives will stimulate research, novel interdisciplinary collaborations and solutions to problems of global poverty and development. GDP research aims to pursue answers to crucial questions that are essential to an understanding of how to reduce global poverty and promote economic development. That includes governance and the rule of law, education, health, and food security – all of which are essential for entrepreneurship to thrive. By contrast, other SEED research focuses on innovation, entrepreneurship, and the growth of businesses in developing economies.

Since 2012, SEED’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Developing Economies Award program also has doled out 22 awards and seven PhD fellowships to help support and scale businesses in developing economies. Among the $1 million in funded projects were studies of how to improve the livelihoods of small-holder cacao farmers throughout the tropics; how to identify startups with high job- and wealth-creating potential in Chile; how political accountability affects the ability to attract investment in Sierra Leone; and how managerial practices affect trade entrepreneurship in China.

First GDP Awards

The first 14 GDP award recipients are professors of economics, political science, law, medicine, pediatrics, education and biology, and senior fellows from FSI, the Woods Institute, and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR).

“Each of these projects cuts across disciplines, reflects innovative thinking, and has the potential to generate crucial knowledge about how to improve the lives of the poor around the world,” Cuéllar said. “These projects, along with a variety of workshops engaging the university and external stakeholders, will help us strengthen Stanford’s long-term capacity to address issues of global poverty through research, education and outreach.”

Among the award recipients is Pascaline Dupas, an associate professor of economics and senior fellow at SIEPR. Dupas, along with faculty from the Center for Health Policy and Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, will launch the Stanford Economic Development Research Initiative using GDP funds.  This initiative will focus on collecting high-quality institutional and individual-level data on economic activity in a number of developing countries over the long term, and making these data available to scholars around the world.

Beatriz Magaloni, an associate professor of political science and senior fellow at FSI, is receiving an award to lead a team focused on criminal violence and its effects on the poor in developing economies, and the practical solutions for increasing security in those regions.

Douglas K. Owens, a professor of medicine and FSI senior fellow, was awarded an award to help him lead a team that will develop models to estimate how alternative resource allocations for health interventions among the poor will influence health and economic outcomes.

Stephen Haber, a professor of political science and history and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, received an award to bring together Stanford researchers interested in examining the long-term institutional constraints on economic development. Their goal will be to provide policymakers with a framework for determining the conditions under which particular innovations are likely to have positive payoffs, and the conditions under which resources will likely be wasted.

Other projects will address the educational impacts of solar lighting systems in poor communities; identifying interventions to improve the profits and safety among poor, smallholder pig farmers in Bangladesh and China; the role of law and institutions in economic development and poverty reduction; and how to rethink worldwide refugee problems. Awards are also being provided to researchers focused on microfinance, online education and teacher training.

The project proposals were reviewed by an interdisciplinary faculty advisory council chaired by Cuéllar and Sørensen. 

“We were very encouraged by the impressive number of project proposals from a wide range of areas and are looking forward to introducing several new capacity and community-building activities in the fall,” Sørensen said.. “This wide range of research initiatives will form a vibrant nucleus for Stanford’s growing community of scholars of global development and poverty.”

Asked to summarize his biography and career, Donald K. Emmerson notes the legacy of an itinerant childhood: his curiosity about the world and his relish of difference, variety and surprise. A well-respected Southeast Asia scholar at Stanford since 1999, he admits to a contrarian streak and corresponding regard for Socratic discourse. His publications in 2014 include essays on epistemology, one forthcoming in Pacific Affairs, the other in Producing Indonesia: The State of the Field of Indonesian Studies.

Emmerson is a senior fellow emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), an affiliated faculty member of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, an affiliated scholar in the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, and director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. Recently he spoke with Shorenstein APARC about his life and career within and beyond academe.

Your father was a U.S. Foreign Service Officer. Did that background affect your professional life?

Indeed it did. Thanks to my dad’s career, I grew up all over the world. We changed countries every two years. I was born in Japan, spent most of my childhood in Peru, the USSR, Pakistan, India and Lebanon, lived for various lengths of time in France, Nigeria, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and the Netherlands, and traveled extensively in other countries. Constantly changing places fostered an appetite for novelty and surprise. Rotating through different cultures, languages, and schools bred empathy and curiosity. The vulnerability and ignorance of a newly arrived stranger gave rise to the pleasure of asking questions and, later, questioning the answers. Now I encourage my students to enjoy and learn from their own encounters with what is unfamiliar, in homework and fieldwork alike. 

Were you always focused on Southeast Asia? 

No. I had visited Southeast Asia earlier, but a fortuitous failure in grad school play a key role in my decision to concentrate on Southeast Asia. At Yale I planned a dissertation on African nationalism. I applied for fieldwork support to every funding source I could think of, but all of the envelopes I received in reply were thin. Fortunately, I had already developed an interest in Indonesia, and was offered last-minute funding from Yale to begin learning Indonesian. Two years of fieldwork in Jakarta yielded a dissertation that became my first book, Indonesia’s Elite: Political Culture and Cultural Politics. I sometimes think I should reimburse the African Studies Council for covering my tuition at Yale – doubtless among the worst investments they ever made. 

Indonesia stimulated my curiosity in several directions. Living in an archipelago led me to maritime studies and to writing on the rivalries in the South China Sea. Fieldwork among Madurese fishermen inspired Rethinking Artisanal Fisheries Development: Western Concepts, Asian Experiences. Experiences with Islam in Indonesia and Malaysia channeled my earlier impressions of Muslim societies into scholarship and motivated a debate with an anthropologist in the book Islamism: Contested Perspectives on Political Islam. 

What led you to Stanford?

In the early 1980s, I took two years of leave from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to become a visiting scholar at Stanford, and later I returned to The Farm for shorter periods. At Stanford I enjoyed gaining fresh perspectives from colleagues in the wider contexts of East Asia and the Asia-Pacific region. In 1999, I accepted an appointment as a senior fellow in FSI to start and run a program on Southeast Asia at Stanford with initial support from the Luce Foundation.

As a fellow, most of your time is focused on research, but you also proctor a fellowship program and have led student trips overseas. How have you found the experience advising younger scholars?

In 2006, I took a talented and motivated group of Stanford undergrads to Singapore for a Bing Overseas Seminar. I turned them loose to conduct original field research in the city-state, including focusing on sensitive topics such as Singapore’s use of laws and courts to punish political opposition. Despite the critical nature of some of their findings, a selection was published in a student journal at the National University of Singapore (NUS). NUS then sent a contingent of its own students to Stanford for a research seminar that I was pleased to host. I encouraged the NUS students to break out of the Stanford “bubble” and include in their projects not only the accomplishments of Silicon Valley but its problems as well, including those evident in East Palo Alto.

That exchange also helped lay the groundwork for an endowment whereby NUS and Stanford annually and jointly select a deserving applicant to receive the Lee Kong China NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellowship on Contemporary Southeast Asia. The 2014 recipient is Lee Jones, a scholar from the University of London who will write on regional efforts to combat non-traditional security threats such as air pollution, money laundering and pandemic disease.

Where does the American “pivot to Asia” now stand, and how does it inform your work? 

Events in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and now in Crimea as well, have pulled American attention away from Southeast Asia. Yet the reasons for priority interest in the region have not gone away. East Asia remains the planet’s most consequential zone of economic growth. No other region is more directly exposed to the potentially clashing interests and actions of the world’s major states – China, Japan, India and the United States. The eleven countries of Southeast Asia – 630 million people – could become a concourse for peaceful trans-Pacific cooperation, or the locus of a new Sino-American cold war. It is in that hopeful yet risky context that I am presently researching China’s relations with Southeast Asia, especially regarding the South China Sea, and taking part in exchanges between Stanford scholars and our counterparts in Southeast Asia and China. 

Tell us something we don’t know about you.

Okay. Here are three instructive failures I experienced in 1999, the year I joined the Stanford faculty. I was evacuated from East Timor, along with other international observers, to escape massive violence by pro-Indonesian vigilantes bent on punishing the population for voting for independence. The press pass around my neck failed to protect me from the tear gas used to disperse demonstrators at that year’s meeting of the World Trade Organization – the “Battle of Seattle.” And in North Carolina in semifinal competition at the 1999 National Poetry Slam, performing as Mel Koronelos, I went down to well-deserved defeat at the hands of a terrific black rapper named DC Renegade, whose skit included the imaginary machine-gunning of Mel himself, who enjoyed toppling backward to complete the scene. 

The Faculty Spotlight Q&A series highlights a different faculty member at Shorenstein APARC each month giving a personal look at his or her teaching approaches and outlook on related topics and upcoming activities.

The favelas of Rio de Janeiro are some of the most dangerous places in the world. Havens for drug lords and their booming narcotics businesses, the urban slums that are home to 20 percent of the city’s population are notorious for soaring murder rates and a dearth of public services. Police often have little or no presence in most of Rio’s 800 favelas. And when they do, their conflicts with criminals frequently result in the killing of bystanders.

Brazilian officials have tried to bring order to the favelas with a set of policies and initiatives launched in 2008. A so-called pacification program has trained special teams of police to take a more targeted approach to fighting crime. The program has increased stability and reduced violence in about 30 favelas.

But Stanford researchers have found a hitch: When criminals are put out of business in one favela, they relocate to another. And that can lead to an increase in violence in the non-pacified slums.

“The cost of violence is disproportionately felt by the poor,” said Beatriz Magaloni, an associate professor of political science and senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. “Where there is violence, there is no investment. We are working with the government and the police and the community on ways to make these places safer and reduce that poverty by improving the quality of the police and devising ways to reduce the level of lethality they tend to use.”

To support the research she’s doing and the relationships she’s building in Brazil, Magaloni is working with FSI’s International Policy Implementation Lab, a new initiative that will bolster impact-oriented international research, problem-based teaching and long-term engagement with urgent policy implementation problems around the world.

Collaborating with a team of Stanford students, Magaloni is working with community groups, police organizations, government officials and other scholars to study existing policies and training procedures that could broaden the pacification program and make it more effective. The relationships have paid off with access to high-level government data, exclusive research findings and a pipeline between academics and policymakers that can improve living conditions for some of Rio’s poorest and most vulnerable people.

Her project is an example of the work being supported by the International Policy Implementation Lab, which recently awarded Magaloni’s project and those led by five other researchers a total of $210,000.

The lab, which is being supported in part by an initial $2 million gift from two anonymous donors, will grant another round of funding later this fiscal year to support projects led by Stanford faculty.

Recognizing that many Stanford scholars are engaged in international policy analysis, the Implementation Lab will help researchers who want to better understand policy implementation – a process often stymied by bureaucracy, politicking and budget constraints, but also often reflecting deliberation and experimentation by people across different countries, organizations, and cultures.

“The Implementation Lab will help us better understand health, security, poverty and governance challenges in an evolving world,” said FSI Director Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar.  “It will serve as a resource to foster communication across projects, so we can learn more about how implementation plays out in different settings and regions. Through the Implementation Lab, we can better engage faculty and students in understanding how policymakers and organizations change longstanding practices and actually execute policy.”

The Implementation Lab will support long-term projects grounded in policy-oriented research on a specific international topic. The projects must strive to connect scholarly research to interdisciplinary teaching, and will often involve long-term engagement with particular problems or international settings to better understand and inform the implementation of policy.

The first round of funding from the Implementation Lab will help shore up projects aimed at bolstering rural education in China, improving health care in India, curbing violence in Mexico and Brazil, and training government officials and business leaders in developing countries to improve economic growth and development.

And it will support a project led by political scientist Scott Sagan that uses online polling to better gauge the public’s tolerance for the use of nuclear weapons under certain scenarios – work that will lead to the collection of data that can inform how government officials craft military and diplomatic strategy.

“I can imagine two big benefits of the Implementation Lab,” said Sagan, a senior fellow at FSI and the institute’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.

“It will help pay for specific tasks that are sometimes not adequately funded elsewhere, especially in terms of student involvement,” he said. “And it will create a greater focus on policy implementation work that allows us to present our research results and see whether those results will have an impact on change.”

To encourage and support these ventures, the Implementation Lab will provide targeted funding, space for research projects and teaching, and a variety of support functions, including connections to on-campus resources that can assist with data visualization, locating interested students, and other tasks.  Those activities will be phased in during the next year based on the advice and feedback of faculty and others who are early participants.

The Implementation Lab is poised to be different from – but complementary to – other Stanford initiatives like the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. FSI’s Implementation Lab is specifically focused on supporting long-term relationships and engaging students and faculty in the study of policy implementation in different national, organizational, and cultural settings.

Image

FSI Senior Fellow Grant Miller is working on improving health care in India.

“The Stanford International Policy Lab is creating an exciting new community that will catapult our ability to have meaningful and sustained policy engagement and impact through common learning and sharing of experiences with like-minded scholars from all corners of campus,” said Grant Miller, an associate professor of medicine and FSI senior fellow whose project on improving health care in India is being supported by the Implementation Lab.

Ann Arvin, Stanford’s vice provost and dean of research, said the International Policy Implementation Lab will help and encourage faculty to make their scholarship more relevant to pressing problems.

Demands for specialized resources, narrowly focused engagement of students, the ability to consider a long-term horizon, and an understanding of the often opaque processes of policy formulation and implementation pose considerable challenges for researchers seeking to enhance the potential of their policy-oriented research to achieve real impact.

“The International Policy Implementation Lab will help our faculty and students address these obstacles,” Arvin said. “We anticipate that this novel program will bring together Stanford scholars who seek solutions to different policy-related problems at various places around the world, but whose work is linked by the underlying similarities of these challenges. The Implementation Lab will give them the opportunity to learn from each other and share ideas and experiences about what succeeds and what is likely to fail when it comes to putting policy into practice.”

That’s what attracts Stephen Luby to the lab.

“The mistake that researchers often make is that they work in isolation,” said Luby, whose work on reducing pollution caused by the brick making industry in Bangladesh is being supported by the Implementation Lab. “Then they think they’re ready to engage in the implementation process, and realize they haven’t engaged with all the stakeholders. Policy implementation is an iterative process. You need feedback from all the right people along the way.”

Luby, a professor of medicine and senior fellow at FSI and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, is working with brick makers and suppliers, as well as anthropologists and government regulators, to identify better ways to curb the pollution created by the coal-burning kilns throughout Bangladesh.

“Pneumonia is the leading cause of death among kids in Bangladesh,” Luby said. “And the brick kiln pollution is largely responsible for that. They’re using a 150-year-old technology to bake bricks, and there are better, cleaner ways to do it.”

But swapping coal-burning kilns for ones that are fired with cleaner natural gas is expensive, and there is little incentive for brick makers to change.

The government has passed regulations aimed at reducing pollution, but corruption, toothless laws and poor enforcement continue to undermine those policies.

"The country is caught in an equilibrium where people are getting cheap bricks but at a high cost to health and the environment,” Luby said. “We need to disrupt that equilibrium, and I look to the Implementation Lab to help us think this through. There’s a community of scholars who want to transform their work into implementation, and the lab will help convene them.”

For more information about FSI's International Policy Implementation Lab, please refer to this Concept Note or contact Elizabeth Gardner.

Between 2008 and 2009, approximately 25 new private engineering colleges opened in India every week—adding 2500 schools in only two years. Engineering education is also on the rise in the other so-called BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, and China). But does quantity guarantee quality? And what should government policymakers keep in mind to ensure that their higher education investments pay off?

Rafiq Dossani, a senior research scholar at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, recently collaborated with Stanford professor of education Martin Carnoy and a team of scholars in Russia, China, and India on a leading-edge comparative study of higher education systems in BRIC countries. Carnoy led the project, which focused on engineering education, and he, Dossani, and other researchers are currently writing a book coming out in 2012. Dossani speaks here about the project.

What is unique to the approach that you have taken with this study compared to anything similar previously conducted?

This is the first systematic study based on a large data collection. Over 7,000 students were surveyed in China and India respectively, and 2,300 students were surveyed in Russia. Brazil regularly collects detailed data on a very large nationwide sample of university students, and we have used this in our study. We also surveyed over 100 educational institutions, including several dozen face-to-face interviews with trustees, heads of institutions, heads of departments, faculty, administrators, and students.

We focus on engineering education in our study because it is the field that attracts the largest number of students. For example, in China, about 63% of students in 2009, or about 1.8 million students, entered through the science track, which is the route to an engineering degree. In India, 1.4 million freshmen engineering students were enrolled in 2011, which is over 40% of the total number of freshmen.

In our study, we ask how governance and finance affect outcomes in higher education. Every country’s educational system shares certain objectives: quality, access, and equity. What has not been studied for the BRIC countries is whether the governance and finance of higher education is consistent with some of these objectives but not others, and how this impacts the shape and effectiveness of the higher education system. The choice of governance and finance are themselves outcomes of the institutional settings in each country. For example, in India, the dramatic transfer of political power in the last two decades from the national government to the provinces has been the key driver of change.

As a result of this shift in political power, the states took charge of higher education and focused on increasing access and equity as their political goals. Given the extreme shortage of funds, they contracted out the actual provision of education to the private sector on attractive terms. The private sector responded briskly. Of the 1.4 million freshmen enrollees in engineering studies in 2011, 98% were enrolled in private institutions, compared with less than 5% in 1990. The rate of growth was so high that in just two years, 2008 and 2009, 2500 new engineering colleges opened their doors. That works out to about five new colleges for each working day!

There were upsides and downsides to this growth. On the positive side, the state offered attractive financial terms for new institutions located in underprivileged areas and mandated that about 50% of seats be reserved for underprivileged students (mostly identified by caste). It also kept tuition fees for the reserved seats very low at about $500 per student per year and allowed the colleges to recover costs and margins by charging a higher fee for the rest. The result was that growth has been geographically spread and access by underprivileged students is high—in our study, 55% of the students came from underprivileged categories.

The downside is that quality remains elusive. Although this does not show up in job placement rates due to pent-up demand, comparisons with the other BRIC countries suggest that the quality is low. The reason is that private providers, for the moment, find it more profitable to provide minimal infrastructure and employ inadequate faculty than to invest in building up quality for the long-term. In fact, given that the investment in long-term quality is likely to be unaffordable, one of our conclusions is that we question the sustainability of the Indian governance and finance model vis-à-vis the other countries in our study, particularly China, where the central government is taking an activist approach in trying to increase quality, at least in the elite universities.

How do your findings in India’s higher education system for engineering compare to the other BRIC countries, especially China as the study’s other Asian country?

In terms of sheer growth and the number of engineering freshmen, China exceeds India. The cost of education is lower in India. In terms of quality, China, Brazil, and Russia, do better. Part of the reason is a superior entering cohort in the case of China and Russia. But the main reason appears to be that governance in the other BRIC countries is more faculty-driven than driven by profit-oriented trustees. We found that the former model is more likely to deliver quality. In the case of China, for example, academic departments determine courses, course content, and the types of disciplines available, whereas in India, trustees make such choices, with poorer quality outcomes.

You have previously said that India’s higher education system is very politicized—how did it come to be this way?

The politicization began at the country’s independence in 1947. Prior to independence, higher education was managed by provinces to produce graduates from the upper classes who would join the colonial civil service. After independence, the state governments faced new demands for higher education from the middle classes. Since these were also important voting classes, the state responded by setting up a large number of public universities. The state controlled all aspects of the university to ensure that their priorities were met, in terms of location, fees, and personnel hired. For example, the state government was represented in the senate of every university and public college. Every senior-level hire needed to be approved by the state government. State government nominees on the senate also reviewed textbook selections and disciplinary choices.

As may be imagined, educational quality suffered and continues to do so in the public colleges. In the mid-1990s, the states faced demands from new voter categories, particularly lower-caste groups. These were earlier excluded from political power but acquired power in the federalization of politics that took place from 1990 onwards. This time around, though, the states decided to subcontract the work to the private sector rather than set up public colleges. This was largely a matter of cost management—the state thought that the private sector would respond to the incentive of providing technical education to those willing to pay full-cost, and invest the needed capital. This would free up the state’s capital for other demands, including for education, such as for primary and secondary education. To ensure that the lower-caste groups were part of the expansion, the state mandated quotas and subsidized fees. In the name of preserving quality—although, in fact, it preserves quality only at low levels—the state continued to exercise other controls. For example, it imposes common curricula and assessment, and, in most cases, certifies a private college only if it is part of a publicly owned university system.

The state’s policies also led to a shift in the profile of the graduates towards technical and professional education, since these were the fields in which the private sector was willing to establish new institutions. This was greatly stimulated by rising income payoffs to higher education engineering and business training. Private colleges account for 60% of the growth in educational provision between 1995 and 2011, and almost all of that growth is in engineering, management, and other professional fields. The value of this is debatable: it reflects the “market” but, deprived of state support, some fields that may be considered to be socially valuable, such as the liberal arts, are in steep decline.

Has the state of higher education in BRIC countries, such as India, led students to seek education opportunities abroad?

In China and India, these are important reasons for student migration to the West. For example, 500,000 students enroll as freshmen overseas from India alone every year. They come mostly from elite families, since the costs of an overseas education are very high.

What long-term policy changes are you hoping to influence through this study and your forthcoming book?

First, we show that the evolution of higher education in the BRICs can be explained by the role of the state (the government sector) and the policy choices it makes in governance and finance.

Second, we show that private provision can substitute for public provision, but with certain disadvantages in terms of quality and educational diversity. In this context, we show that state policy can still influence some outcomes positively, such as access, equity, and cost-control. However, the long-term implications for quality are much more negative through such a model. 

Third, we show that the provincial governance of education offers certain advantages and disadvantages over national regulation. This is a hotly debated topic in China and India. In India, the national regulators seek greater control out of concern about the implications of too politicized an environment created by the states and the poor quality emerging from private colleges. However, we argue that there may be downsides to centralized control, as was witnessed in an earlier period (during the tenure of Indira Gandhi).

Finally, we make the case that the current ”trend” among governments in developing countries of focusing on the creation of a few world-class universities can succeed in the limited sense of creating a few high-quality teaching and research institutions. However, it comes at a very high cost and in no sense guarantees a trickle-down of quality to the remaining institutions. This is particularly the case in the current model in China and Russia, where the emphasis on world-class universities is greatest and these high-cost elite institutions are given increasing funding per student. At the same time, mass universities absorb increasing numbers of students at low and possibly declining per-student funding.

1. Eight U.S. presidents have said that the United States wants China to be strong, secure, and prosperous. Do you share that objective and what consequences, positive and negative, has China’s rise had for the United States?

2. What is the best way for the United States to respond to the rise of China, India, Brazil, and other large and rapidly growing countries?

3. Do you consider China a partner or an adversary of the United States -- and what should U.S. policy toward China seek to accomplish?

4. Given the importance of defense industry jobs, especially in Republican-leaning states, is it politically necessary for the U.S. to have an enemy to justify a U.S. military budget larger than the total military budgets of most other nations, many of which are allies of the United States. In other words, do we “need” to depict China as an adversary?

5. Robert Zoelleck, when he was deputy secretary of state, urged China to become a "responsible stakeholder" in the international system.  What did he mean by that and, in your opinion, is China a responsible participant in the international system

While it is known as a leading center for the study of contemporary Northeast Asia, the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) has also conducted significant research and publishing activities about South Asia for more than a decade. Rafiq Dossani, a senior research scholar at Shorenstein APARC and a former director of Stanford's Center for South Asia (CSA), serves as the executive director of the Center's South Asia Initiative. Addressing key South Asia issues, his diverse research interests range from entrepreneurship and technology to economics and security.

"In a liberal democracy with a functioning rule of law, the socioeconomic condition of Muslims [in India] has, relative to the population, steadily declined.

-Rafiq Dossani

Most recently, Dossani launched a research project with Shorenstein APARC's Henry S. Rowen and CSA's Thomas Blom Hansen to study the socioeconomic conditions faced by Muslims in India. He is currently working on an article on the subject for the March 2011 inaugural edition of Avicenna, Stanford's new journal on Muslim affairs. "In a liberal democracy with a functioning rule of law," says Dossani, "the socioeconomic condition of Muslims [in India] has, relative to the population, steadily declined." He emphasizes that since Independence in 1947, Muslims, who make up 13 percent of India's population, have had equal access to power in the Congress Party-led national government. One difference, however, is that special provisions have been made to provide jobs and education for members of lower-caste Hindu and tribal groups. "Generally speaking, Muslims have lost out," states Dossani. India's government demonstrated its concern about this growing issue by publishing a 2005 report acknowledging clear cases of discrimination against Muslims, even at the government level. Discrimination, says Dossani, has led to a ghettoization of Muslims and a movement towards a religion-based identity, which he suggests will not only work against Muslims but also has security implications for the country. "It is understood at the top level by policymakers, and yet the situation persists," he cautions.

In addition to South Asia-specific research, Dossani has participated in several interdisciplinary, multi-country studies, including a project examining higher education in the "BRIC" countries of Brazil, the Russian Federation, India, and China. Led by Martin Carnoy, the Vida Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford's School of Education, members of the research team interviewed approximately seven thousand students and studied one hundred colleges and universities in India, focusing on engineering education. "It is one of the most globally comparable [disciplines]," says Dossani. For India, the findings indicate that the cost of education, which is approximately twelve hundred dollars per year for tuition, is affordable for many families and it has a high rate of return in terms of how quickly students find employment and recoup tuition costs. On a global level, however, the quality of education does not measure up to many other countries, such as the United States. Dossani cites the highly politicized nature of India's university system as a major reason for this. While 95 percent of India's colleges are now private, government-run universities confer degrees, set the curriculum, and direct appointments to high-level positions. There is a certain degree of corruption, and teacher and student unions are tied to political parties. According to Dossani, states tend to emphasize the quantity of campuses—particularly in poor, rural areas—over the quality of curriculum and instruction, in order to garner votes. "[The university system] is in a state of stasis," he says, "so the quality does not improve."

Dossani is actively engaged in numerous other research projects, including studies of telecommunications in India, and outsourcing, private equity, security, and regional integration in relation to South Asia. He is also currently serving as the co-chair of the 2011 conference held by the Industry Studies Association, which annually convenes a large interdisciplinary academic conference. Scholars participating in the 2011 conference will discuss findings in their areas of specialization within the broader themes of general industry studies; energy, power, and sustainability; globalization; innovation and entrepreneurship; labor markets, organizations, and employment relations; and transportation and logistics.

In addition to his research, Dossani is an avid volunteer. A recipient of the 2011 Asian American Heroes Award for Santa Clara County, he has volunteered for many years with Hidden Villa, a San Francisco Bay Area-based nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching about the environment and social justice. He also chairs the United States branch of Focus Humanitarian Assistance (FOCUS USA), an international non-profit group that conducts disaster preparedness and response activities in developing countries. Dossani traveled last summer to Taijikistan to visit villages where FOCUS USA is supporting the training of emergency-response volunteers, the earthquake retrofitting of schools, the installation of early-warning systems, the stockpiling of supplies, and the building of shelters. The area is close to the border of Afghanistan and surrounds Lake Sarez, which at over ten thousand feet is one of the world's highest glacial lakes. In addition to earthquakes caused by frequent seismic activity in the area, flooding of Lake Sarez and its adjoining rivers due to heavy glacial melt is an issue of major concern. 

Through his work with FOCUS USA, Dossani has learned about techniques that work to successfully address nontraditional security issues, such as the economic hardship and the displacement of people due to natural disasters. Non-governmental organizations and governments can successfully collaborate, he maintains, and nothing, in fact, can be done in a country without the support of its government. Effective results are less about policy than about focusing on establishing trust over a period of time, especially at a local level, states Dossani. "Being effective requires partnerships and trust," he says. He points to the United Nations, a globally respected entity, as a successful organization for smaller or new non-profit groups to partner with. Dossani's group has also found that disaster-preparedness measures, such as paying emergency-response volunteers, can actually offer significant economic benefits. For example, in the area where they operate, where the per capita income is two hundred and thirty dollars, the additional six dollars per day that volunteers receive is a major boost to a family's income. The work of such groups could potentially serve as a model for governments looking for more effective ways to address nontraditional security issues. 

In conjunction with his Shorenstein APARC work to address key South Asia issues, Dossani frequently speaks at events in the San Francisco Bay Area and worldwide. More information about his research and publishing activities and about Shorenstein APARC's vibrant South Asia Initiative, including publications such as Does South Asia Exist? Prospects for Regional Integration (Shorenstein APARC, 2010) and Prospects for Peace in South Asia (Stanford University Press, 2005), can be found on the Shorenstein APARC website.