Join us for an inspiring conversation with Leopoldo López, General Secretary of the World Liberty Congress, Venezuelan opposition leader, and pro-democracy activist. In this talk, López will reflect on his recent TED Talk, where he passionately advocated for defending democracy worldwide and resisting the rise of autocratic regimes.

According to López, seventy-two percent of the world's population lives under some form of autocratic rule. Drawing from his harrowing personal experience of imprisonment, house arrest, and eventual exile for opposing Nicolás Maduro's regime in Venezuela, he will share his vision for uniting global efforts to champion freedom and push back against authoritarianism.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), CDDRL's Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab, and the Stanford Society for Latin American Politics.

A perspective curated by the Poverty, Violence and Governance Laboratory (PovGov) sponsored by The Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Mexico held federal, state, and municipal elections on Sunday, June 2. Sunday’s poll was historic in more than one sense. Mexico, a democracy in its mid-twenties, had never embarked on an election as large in scale with more than 20,000 vacant public offices at all levels of government to be filled by an electorate of almost 100 million eligible voters. For the first time in the country’s history, a woman, Claudia Sheinbaum, was elected to spearhead the government of the world’s most populous Spanish-speaking nation. Finally, these events took place in the shadows of record-high, albeit stable, levels of drug-related violence. 

In this piece, we have invited five scholars to break down the six main insights from Mexico’s elections and what they tell us about the state of Mexico’s democracy regarding the three things PovGov was founded to understand: poverty, violence, and governance.

The Stanford Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab is proud to announce that Director, Beatriz Magaloni, is the recipient of the 2023 Stockholm Prize in Criminology.  The Stockholm Prize in Criminology is the most important international prize awarded for outstanding achievements in criminological research or for the application of research results by practitioners for the reduction of crime and the advancement of human rights.

The international award, equivalent to the Nobel in criminology, has highlighted the contributions of the most prominent lawyers, sociologists, psychologists, economists, and criminologists in the field, including the late professor Joan Petersilia at the Stanford Law School. The jury for the award is composed of academics and practitioners from the five continents, who select nominations made by any three individual criminologists, any society of criminology and/or other organization applying or producing criminology.

The motivation for awarding the 2023 Stockholm Prize in Criminology to Professor Magaloni was summarized this way by the jury: "The 2023 winner of the Stockholm Prize in Criminology is the leading scholar in the world for demonstrating that major changes in policing can increase compliance with the rule of law under the challenges of high violence levels and strong popular demand to reduce crime" 

Under the aegis of the Swedish Ministry of Justice, the Prize sum amounts to 1,000,000 SEK, funded permanently by the Swedish Ministry of Justice, the Torsten Söderberg Foundation, The Jerry Lee Foundation, and the Hitachi Mirai Foundation. The Award Ceremony will take place at the Stockholm City Hall during the international Stockholm Criminology Symposium, June 12-14, 2023.

Dr. Vesla Weaver: We are here today to discuss an extraordinarily important, breathtaking article. The piece is “Institutionalized Police Brutality: Torture, the Militarization of Security, and the Reform of Inquisitorial Criminal Justice in Mexico.” The piece touches on so much, and we are lucky to have Beatriz Magaloni & Luis Rodriguez today.

Before we get to some of my specific questions, I just wanted to mention that the central argument and key finding is that the shift from the inquisitorial legal system to an adversarial legal system transformed the use of torture. Basically, it shifts the system so that there was much more due process for the defendants, much more protections and less reliance on confessions that often entailed torture and intimidation of witnesses. And that this single shift caused a dramatic decline in the use of police torture; but–and the second and just as important finding–that those reforms were delimited by the militarized intervention of the drug war. What puzzles or ideas or observations led you to this research? And what are some of the epiphanies you had along the way?

Please read the rest of our conversation with Dr. Vesla Weaver on the American Political Science Review's Monthly Blog: 

https://www.cambridge.org/core/blog/2020/12/15/conversations-with-authors-institutionalized-police-brutality/