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Abstract:

Subnational conflict is the most widespread, enduring, and deadly form of conflict in Asia. Over the past 20 years (1992-2012), there have been 26 subnational conflicts in South and Southeast Asia, affecting half of the countries in this region. Concerned about foreign interference, national governments limit external access to conflict areas by journalists, diplomats, and personnel from international development agencies and non-governmental organizations. As a result, many subnational conflict areas are poorly understood by outsiders and easily overshadowed by larger geopolitical issues, bilateral relations, and national development challenges. The interactions between conflict, politics, and aid in subnational conflict areas are a critical blind spot for aid programs. This study was conducted to help improve how development agencies address subnational conflicts.

Speaker Bios:

Ben Oppenheim is a Fellow (non-resident) at the Center on International Cooperation at New York University. His research spans a diverse set of topics, including fragile states, transnational threats (including pandemic disease risks and terrorism), and the strategic coherence and effectiveness of international assistance in fragile and conflict-affected areas.

Oppenheim has consulted for organizations including the World Bank, the United Nations, the Asia Foundation, the Institute for the Future, and the Fritz Institute, on issues including organizational learning, strategy, program design, foresight, and facilitation. In 2009, he served as Advisor to the first global congress on disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration, supported by the World Bank and the UN.

In 2013, Oppenheim was a visiting fellow at the Uppsala University Forum on Democracy, Peace, and Justice. His research has been supported by a Simpson Fellowship, and a fellowship with the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. He was also a research fellow with UC Berkeley's Institute of International Studies, affiliated with the New Era Foreign Policy Project.

Nils Gilman is the Executive Director of Social Science Matrix. He holds a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley. Gilman’s first scholarly interest was in American and European intellectual history, with a particular focus on the institutional development of the social sciences, the lateral transfer and translation of ideas across disciplinary boundaries, and the impact of social scientific ideas on politics and policy.

Gilman is the author of Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), the co-editor of Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2003) and Deviant Globalization: Black Market Economy in the 21st Century (Continuum Press, 2011), as well as the founding Co-editor of Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development. He also blogs and tweets.

Prior to joining Social Science Matrix in September 2013, Gilman was research director at Monitor 360, a San Francisco consultancy that addresses complex, cross-disciplinary global strategic challenges for governments, multinational businesses, and NGOs. He has also worked at a variety of enterprise software companies, including Salesforce.com, BEA Systems, and Plumtree Software. Gilman has taught and lectured at a wide variety of venues, from the Harvard University, Columbia University, and National Defense University, to PopTech, the European Futurists Conference, and the Long Now Foundation.

Bruce Jones is a senior fellow and the director of the Project on International Order and Strategy in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. He is also the director of the Center on International Cooperation at New York University.

Jones served as the senior external advisor for the World Bank’s 2011 World Development Report, Conflict, Security and Development, and in March 2010 was appointed by the United Nations secretary-general as a member of the senior advisory group to guide the Review of International Civilian Capacities. He is also consulting professor at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and professor (by courtesy) at New York University’s department of politics.

Jones holds a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics, and was Hamburg fellow in conflict prevention at Stanford University.

He is co-author with Carlos Pascual and Stephen Stedman of Power and Responsibility: Building International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats (Brookings Press, 2009); co-editor with Shepard Forman and Richard Gowan of Cooperating for Peace and Security (Cambridge University Press, 2009); and author of Peacemaking in Rwanda: The Dynamics of Failures(Lynne Reinner, 2001).

Jones served as senior advisor in the office of the secretary-general during the U.N. reform effort leading up to the World Summit 2005, and in the same period was acting secretary of the Secretary-General’s Policy Committee. In 2004-2005, he was deputy research director of the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. From 2000-2002 he was special assistant to and acting chief of staff at the office of the U.N. special coordinator for the Middle East peace process. 

Abstract:

The Tahrir and Gezi Park protests were, amongst many other things, moments of energetic artistic creativity, in the sound world as well as other domains. Though well documented, and clearly a vital component of the political energies and transformations of the moment, they have proved difficult to think about. This talk, a musicologist's perspective, will explore them in the light of some recent thinking about crowds and social movements. 

Bio:

Martin Stokes  is King Edward Professor of Music at King's College, London. He is an ethnomusicologist, working primarily on the questions of ethnicity, identity, emotions, globalization in the context of the Middle East. His most recent book,  The Republic of Love: Cultural Intimacy in Turkish Popular Music (University of Chicago Press, 2010), has received the Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. Among his other publications are Celtic Modern: Music on the Global Fringe (Scarecrow 2004), Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place (Berg 1994), and The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey (Oxford 1992).

Co-sponsored by the Mediterranean Studies Forum, the CDDRL Program on Arab Reform and Democracy, Department of Music, and Department of Anthropology

The Korea Colloquium on History and Culture

One of the most important developments in the modern global economy is financial globalization. This has raised threats to the stability of political regimes in two ways: (1) by enhancing the possibility of a financial crisis that could cause political turmoil; and (2) by easing access to foreign sources of financing for opposition political groups. I argue that state capitalism – defined as state-owned publicly listed corporations -- has risen disproportionately among single party regimes as a way to address these dual threats. Single party regimes have both the motivation and a greater institutional capacity for addressing these threats in comparison to other regimes. Tests are conducted on 607 firms in 1996 and 856 firms in 2008 across seven East Asian economies, and are supplemented with case studies of Malaysia and South Korea.  The evidence suggests that financial globalization is contributing to the rise of the state as a counter reaction.

Richard W. Carney is a Fellow in the Department of International Relations located in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. His research and teaching are in the areas of international and comparative political economy with a focus on corporate governance and finance in East Asia. He has published articles in many academic journals including the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of East Asian Studies, and Business and Politics. He is also the author of the book Contested Capitalism: The Political Origins of Financial Institutions, and editor of the book Lessons from the Asian Financial Crisis. He was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Fiesole, Italy (2003-04), and has held visiting positions at INSEAD. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science (UCSD 2003). Before joining the ANU in 2011, he was an Assistant Professor in Singapore.

The digital Information Technology (IT) revolution currently underway is profoundly reshaping economic activity, influencing politics, and transforming societies around the world. It is also forcing a reconceptualization of the global and local; many of the technologies, platforms, and fundamental disruptions are global in nature, but national or local contexts critically influence the uses and effects of IT.

Digital media— broadly conceived as digital platforms for information creation, transmission, and consumption—is a core driver of the IT revolution. Information is the very essence of civilization itself, and the advent of digital media fundamentally transforms our relationship to information. We have already seen: 1)  the Internet maturing as a platform for posting, disseminating, and consuming information, such as online news startups, video such as Youtube, microblogs to evade censorship, and a global marketplace for selling software, advertising and even personal information; 2) the diffusion of mobile communications, making information available across  geographic and socio-economic boundaries, and 3) the widespread adoption of social networking services that represent exploration into the next stage of relationships between people, groups, firms, and other entities.

Digital media is also at the crux of the “global meets local” dynamic, since digital media is by nature global, but differences in economic, political, and social conditions across countries lead to wide variation in its impact. For example, digital media is argued to have been a catalyst in the Arab Spring demonstrations that led to regime shifts in Tunesia, Egypt, and then Syria, but digital media in itself may not lead directly to a regime shift in China— due to government success in sophisticated censorship and physical network design.

The Asia-Pacific provides a fascinating array of countries for examination of the political, economic, and socio-cultural effects of digital media on the modern world. Economies range from developing to advanced. Governments include varied democracies as well as one party regimes. The press enjoys relative freedom in some countries, undergoes limited constraints in others, and is tightly controlled in a few. Populations range from dense to sparse, and from diverse to relatively homogenous.

The panels were divided to discuss four major themes:

Digital Media versus Traditional Media
Around the world, digital media is disrupting traditional media such as newspapers and television. Traditional business models are undermined, new entrants proliferate, and experimentation abounds with no end-game in sight. Questions for countries with well-established traditional media include: what are the patterns for the emergence of new players? To what degree do they threaten the traditional? In countries with less diffused traditional media, what are the opportunities enjoyed by digital media? 

Beyond business models, the social and political functions of digital media may differ from those of traditional media—particularly where traditional media is subject to close governmental control. Who are the new entrants, and what new functions do they provide?  Have traditional media failed as sources of information? What shifts have occurred in how people get information, and how does this differ across countries?

Digital Media and Political Change in Asia
Digital media opens up vast new information flows that can influence political change. From the perspective of grass-roots movements and civil society, digital media provides new tools to congregate, coordinate, and demonstrate. Governments that strongly control civil society, such as China and Vietnam, were alert to the role digital media played in the Arab Spring. What is the potential for digital media in civil society and democratization? In democratic countries such as Japan, South Korea, or India, how is digital media transforming civil society? For example, Japan’s peaceful anti-nuclear demonstrations, coordinated through digital media, displayed an entirely new pattern.

From the perspective of governments, digital media presents not only challenges, but new opportunities to monitor, gather information, and respond to the public. In strong state countries, control of information flows to the people, and gathering of information about people are the cornerstones of state control. How are these states adapting their attempts at controlling media in the face of pervasive digital media? In democratic systems, deciding what information to channel to which voters at what point in election cycles is a critical part of any electoral strategy. How are governments and parties using digital media to reach their constituencies, and what is their effectiveness?

Social Change and Economic Transformation
As a core part of the IT revolution, digital media has opened up new domains of innovation that transforms industries and economies. For advanced countries, it raises serious questions about how best to profit from digital platforms whose underlying technology is increasingly controlled by American multinational firms. For developing countries, the question is how to best take advantage of the world-class computing resources, global markets, and extensive reach enabled by the technological platforms underlying digital media. Instruments such as smartphones and the digital content conveyed on those devices are altering interpersonal relations and even the struggle against poverty in societies such as India.

The advent of social network services is also altering how we conceive of social connections. How do these networks affect groups such as the Korean or Filipino diasporas, and what are the implications for identity, “imagined communities,” and group identification. In what ways is the cohesiveness of groups enhanced by connections such as Facebook or Twitter, and in what ways are groups fragmented along interest cleavages, with people exposed to only ideas and groups of their choice. How does digital media impact social change and how does that impact lead to economic transformation in both developed and developing countries?

Digital Media and International Relations
The growth of digital media produces a powerful and sometimes troubling impact on international relations in the Asia-Pacific region. It can provide greater cultural understanding and regional integration but also aggravate tensions.  Cultural phenomenon such as the wildly popular Korean pop star Psy (of “Gangnam Style” fame) arise from the availability of digital media allowing a video to ‘go viral’ on a global scale in weeks. Conversely, tensions over territorial and historical issues in Northeast and Southeast Asia gain credence and momentum from discussion on digital media platforms, often pushing governments to act in ways detrimental to peace and stability. How does digital media influence international relations in the region? Is it a force for positive change or a source of instability? Finally, the rules governing critical parts of the physical infrastructure upon which digital media depend, such as governance of the Internet are increasingly contested in the international domain.

The fifth Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue focused on these issues surrounding the impact of digital media. The Dialogue brought together scholars, policy experts, and practitioners from the media, from Stanford University and from throughout Asia. Selected participants will start each session of the Dialogue with stimulating, brief presentations. Participants from around the region engaged in off-the-record discussion and exchange of views. The final report from the Dialogue will be published on this page as soon as it has been completed.

The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) established the Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue in 2009 to facilitate conversation about current Asia-Pacific issues with far-reaching global implications. Scholars from Stanford University and various Asian countries start each session of the two-day event with stimulating, brief presentations, which are followed by engaging, off-the-record discussion. Each Dialogue closes with a public symposium and reception, and a final report is published on the Shorenstein APARC website.

Previous Dialogues have brought together a diverse range of experts and opinion leaders from Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, India, Australia, and the United States. Participants have explored issues such as the global environmental and economic impacts of energy usage in Asia and the United States; the question of building an East Asian regional organization; and addressing the dramatic demographic shift that is taking place in Asia.

The annual Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue is made possible through the generosity of the City of Kyoto, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, and Yumi and Yasunori Kaneko.

Professor Yu Keping will systematically survey the dominant processes and key issues of China’s governance changes over the last 30 years since reform. His talk will summarize the major achievements and the ongoing problems of this 30 year long process. It will offer a brief analysis of the underlying reasons for these reforms and the main characteristics of China’s governance model. After enumerating an array of factual evidence, Yu will show that the drive behind China’s governance reforms stems from unitary governance to pluralist governance, centralization to decentralization, rule of man to rule of law, regulatory government to service oriented government, and from internal party democracy to the people’s democracy.

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Dr. YU Keping is the Deputy President of the Central Compilation & Translation Bureau (CCTB), and the founding Director of the China Center for Global Governance and Development (CCGGD). He also serves as Prof. and Director of the Center for Chinese Government Innovations at Peking University, and Prof. and Director of the Institute of Political Development at Tsinghua University. He was a visiting professor or senior fellow at many top universities, including Harvard University, Duke University in the US and Free University in Berlin. His fields of expertise include political philosophy, comparative politics, globalization, civil society, governance and politics in China. Among his many books are Governance and Rule of Law in China (ed., Brill, 2012) and Democracy Is A Good Thing (Brookings, 2010).  As a leading intellectual in China, Professor Yu was selected as one of the “30 most influential figures in the past 30 years since the reform in China” in 2008 and ranked 19 in “2011 Global Top 100 Thinkers” by Foreign Policy in the US.

Faculty and students of Peking University have been at the forefront of China’s modern history.  The social impact of the university has been enormous.  Its educational philosophy needs to continually evolve, especially as China has developed in the last few decades at historically unprecedented rates.  President Wang will discuss these changes, how the university copes with new challenges, and how the globalization of Peking University fits into his vision for the future.

Wang Enge was appointed President of Peking University in 2013. He obtained his B.S. and M.S. in theoretical physics from Liaoning University in 1982 and 1985 respectively and received his Ph.D. from Peking University in 1990. He served as Director of the Institute of Physics (CAS) (1999-2007), Founding Director of the International Center for Quantum Structures (2000), Director of the Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics (2004-2009), CAS Deputy Secretary-General (2008-2009), and Executive President of CAS Graduate University (2008-2009).  President Wang is a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS), as well as a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics (UK). He has been a JSPS professor of Tohoku University (Japan), an AvH Scholar of Fritz-Haber Institute der MPG (Germany), a KITP Visiting Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara (USA), a Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley (USA), a Visiting Professor at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (Italy), and a GCEP Scholar at Stanford University.

A reception will follow immediately afer this talk

More information TBA. 

Speaker bio: