May 9, 5:00 p.m - 6:30 p.m. PT / May 10, 9:00 a.m. - 10:30 a.m. JT

Economic security has emerged as a key foreign policy issue in Japan in recent years. Arguably one of the most active players in this field, the Japanese government has developed a comprehensive policy on economic security that seeks to protect its economy from the vagaries of geopolitical disruptions. Recent legislative efforts have centered around supply chain risks, critical infrastructure, and sensitive technologies and patents. Prompted by risks associated with business with China and intensified further by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, concerns about economic security require governments and businesses to adjust their reliance on market mechanisms in international trade and compel them to formulate new policies and frameworks that would address these concerns. Featuring two leading experts on economic security and trade in Japan and the United States, this panel will discuss what those new policies might look like and what roles the US-Japan alliance should play in building resilient economic frameworks that would mitigate the economic damages of geopolitical disruptions.

Panelists
 

 

Kazuto Suzuki is a Professor of Science and Technology Policy at the Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Tokyo, Japan, and senior fellow of Asia Pacific Initiative (API), an independent policy think tank. He graduated from the Department of International Relations at Ritsumeikan University and received a Ph.D. from Sussex European Institute, University of Sussex, England. He has worked in the Fondation pour la recherche stratégique in Paris, France, as an assistant researcher, Associate Professor at the University of Tsukuba from 2000 to 2008, and served as a Professor of International Politics at Hokkaido University until 2020. He served as an expert in the Panel of Experts for the Iranian Sanction Committee under the United Nations Security Council from 2013 to July 2015. 

Suzuki currently serves as the President of the Japan Association of International Security and Trade. His research focuses on the conjunction of science & technology and international relations; subjects including space policy, non-proliferation, export control, and sanctions.  His recent work includes Space and International Politics (2011, in Japanese, awarded Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities), Policy Logics and Institutions of European Space Collaboration (2003), and many others.

 

 

Mireya Solís is director of the Center for East Asia Policy Studies, Philip Knight Chair in Japan Studies, and a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. Prior to her arrival at Brookings, Solís was a tenured associate professor at American University’s School of International Service.

Solís is an expert on Japanese foreign economic policy, U.S.-Japan relations, international trade policy, and Asia-Pacific economic integration. She is the author of "Banking on Multinationals: Public Credit and the Export of Japanese Sunset Industries" (Stanford University Press, 2004) and co-editor of "Cross-Regional Trade Agreements: Understanding Permeated Regionalism in East Asia" (Springer, 2008) and "Competitive Regionalism: FTA Diffusion in the Pacific Rim" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Her most recent book, “Dilemmas of a Trading Nation: Japan and the United States in the Evolving Asia-Pacific Order” (Brookings Press, 2017), offers a novel analysis of the complex tradeoffs Japan and the United States face in drafting trade policy that reconciles the goals of economic competitiveness, social legitimacy, and political viability. “Dilemmas of a Trading Nation” received the 2018 Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Award.

Moderator
 

 

Kiyoteru Tsutsui is the Henri H. and Tomoye Takahashi Professor, Professor of Sociology, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Deputy Director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, where he is also Director of the Japan Program. He is the author of Rights Make Might: Global Human Rights and Minority Social Movements in Japan (Oxford University Press, 2018), co-editor of Corporate Responsibility in a Globalizing World (Oxford University Press, 2016) and co-editor of The Courteous Power: Japan and Southeast Asia in the Indo-Pacific Era (University of Michigan Press, 2021). 

Erin A. Snider joins ARD to discuss her recently released book, Marketing Democracy: The Political Economy of Democracy Aid in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

For nearly two decades, the United States devoted more than $2 billion towards democracy promotion in the Middle East with seemingly little impact. To understand the limited impact of this aid and the decision of authoritarian regimes to allow democracy programs whose ultimate aim is to challenge the power of such regimes, Marketing Democracy examines the construction and practice of democracy aid in Washington DC and in Egypt and Morocco, two of the highest recipients of US democracy aid in the region.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork, novel new data on the professional histories of democracy promoters, archival research and recently declassified government documents, Erin A. Snider focuses on the voices and practices of those engaged in democracy work over the last three decades to offer a new framework for understanding the political economy of democracy aid. Her research shows how democracy aid can work to strengthen rather than challenge authoritarian regimes. Marketing Democracy fundamentally challenges scholars to rethink how we study democracy aid and how the ideas of democracy that underlie democracy programs come to reflect the views of donors and recipient regimes rather than indigenous demand. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER 

Erin A. Snider is an assistant professor at Texas A&M University’s Bush School of Government and Public Service. Her research and teaching focus on the political economy of aid, democracy, and development in the Middle East. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University’s Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance, a Fulbright scholar in Egypt, a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge, and a Carnegie Fellow with the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. Her first book, Marketing Democracy: The Political Economy of Democracy Aid in the Middle East was published with Cambridge University Press. Other research has been published in International Studies Quarterly, PS: Political Science and Politics, and Middle East Policy, among other outlets. She holds a PhD in politics from the University of Cambridge and an MSc in Middle East Politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

This event is co-sponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies and the Center for African Studies at Stanford University.​

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The fundamental reason for the extreme leverage today in China’s banks, enterprises and the state itself is found in the decentralized fiscal arrangements of highly self-reliant local governments. This problem has been compounded by the excessive stimulus lending over the past decade. As a result Beijing has promoted the creation of an extensive shadow banking system designed to protect the stability of the major state banks. Stepping back this has led to the state’s growing leverage. This presentation focuses on the impact of the shadow banking system on the state’s finances and compares the costs of China’s response to the global financial crisis with the US response.

Carl Walter joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) as visiting scholar with the China Program for the 2021-2022 academic year. Prior to coming to APARC, he served as independent, non-executive Director at the China Construction Bank. He was also previously a visiting scholar with APARC during the winter and spring terms of the 2012–13 academic year after a career in banking spent largely in China. 

His research interests focus on China's financial system and its impact on financial and political organizations. During his time at Shorenstein APARC Walter will continue his book project on how fiscal reforms in China have impacted the banking system, the overall economy and the prospect for financial reform going forward. Walter has contributed articles to publications including Caijing, the Wall Street Journal and the China Quarterly. He is also the co-author of Red Capitalism: The Fragile Financial Foundations of China's Extraordinary Rise (2012) and Privatizing China: Inside China's Stock Markets (2005).

Walter lived and worked in Beijing from 1991 to 2011, first as an investment banker involved in the earliest SOE restructurings and overseas public listings, then as chief operation officer of China's first joint venture investment bank, China International Capital Corporation. Over the last ten years he was JPMorgan's China chief operating officer as well as chief executive officer of its China banking subsidiary.

Walter holds a PhD in political science from Stanford University, a certificate of advanced study from Peking University and a BA in Russian Studies from Princeton University.

 

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This event is part of the 2022 Winter webinar series, The Future of China's Economy, sponsored by the APARC China Program.

 

Khalid Mustafa Medani joins ARD to discuss his recently released book, Black Markets and Militants Informal Networks in the Middle East and Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Understanding the political and socio-economic factors which give rise to youth recruitment into militant organizations is at the heart of grasping some of the most important issues that affect the contemporary Middle East and Africa. In this book, Medani explains why youth are attracted to militant organizations, examining the specific role economic globalization, in the form of outmigration and expatriate remittance inflows, plays in determining how and why militant activists emerge. The study challenges existing accounts that rely primarily on ideology to explain militant recruitment.

Based on extensive fieldwork, Medani offers an in-depth analysis of the impact of globalization, neoliberal reforms, and informal economic networks as a conduit for the rise and evolution of moderate and militant Islamist movements and as an avenue central to the often violent enterprise of state-building and state formation. In an original contribution to the study of Islamist and ethnic politics more broadly, he thereby shows the importance of understanding when and under what conditions religious rather than other forms of identity become politically salient in the context of changes in local conditions.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER 

Dr. Khalid Mustafa Medani is currently associate professor of political science and Islamic Studies at McGill University, and he has also taught at Oberlin College and Stanford University. Dr. Medani received a B.A. in Development Studies from Brown University, an M.A. in Development Studies from the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the political economy of Islamic and Ethnic Politics in Africa and the Middle East.

Dr. Medani is the author of Black Markets and Militants: Informal Networks in the Middle East and Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and he is presently completing another book manuscript on the causes and consequences of Sudan’s 2018 popular uprising and the prospects and obstacles for Democracy in that country. In addition, he has published extensively on civil conflict with a special focus on the armed conflicts in Sudan and Somalia. His work has appeared in Political Science and Politics (PS), the Journal of Democracy, the Journal of North African Studies, Current History, Middle East Report, Review of African Political Economy, Arab Studies Quarterly, and the UCLA Journal of Islamic Law.

Dr. Medani is a previous recipient of a Carnegie Scholar on Islam award from the Carnegie Corporation of New York (2007-2009) and in 2020-2021 he received a fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars to conduct research on his current book manuscript on the democratic transition in Sudan.

This event is co-sponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies and the Center for African Studies at Stanford University.

This is a virtual event. Please click here to register and generate a link to the talk. 
The link will be unique to you; please save it and do not share with others.

 

Once considered incapable of innovation, China’s contribution to technological advancement has become impossible to ignore as it continues its historic rise. Now home to such tech giants as Alibaba, Tencent, and Huawei, China is competing in the global market. But what does this technological success mean in the context of China's internal and international politics, particularly its tense relationship with the United States? Will efforts to decouple help or hinder progress in tech? Can China’s educational system produce the next generation of innovators and propel them to the forefront of technology? What effects, if any, is the recent tightening on tech giants having on the sector at large? In this program, experts Denis Simon, Senior Adviser to the President for China Affairs at Duke, and Dan Wang, technology analyst for Gavekal Dragonomics, will be discussing the status and consequences of decoupling for the US and China and their technological sectors.  

 

Denis Fred Simon is Senior Adviser to the President for China Affairs at Duke and Professor of China Business and Technology at Duke's Fuqua School of Business.  He also serves as Executive Director of the Center for Innovation Policy at Duke.  Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, Simon has more than four decades of experience studying business, competition, innovation and technology strategy in China. In 2006, he was awarded the China National Friendship Award by Premier Wen Jiabao in Beijing.  Prior to returning to Duke, Dr. Simon served as Executive Vice Chancellor at Duke Kunshan University in China (2015-2020).  Simon’s career included spells as senior adviser on China and global affairs in the Office of the President at Arizona State University; vice-provost for international affairs at the University of Oregon; and professor of international affairs at Penn State University’s School of International Affairs. He also has had extensive leadership experience in management consulting having served as General Manager of Andersen Consulting in Beijing (now Accenture) and the Founding President of Monitor Group China.

Simon is the author of several books including Corporate Strategies Towards the Pacific Rim; Techno-Security in an Age of Globalization; and China’s Emerging Technological Edge: Assessing the Role of High-End Talent.

 

Dan Wang is the Shanghai-based technology analyst for Gavekal Dragonomics, the China economics research firm. He tracks the prospects for China's industrial policy, US regulatory measures and the activities of multinationals in China. He has given keynotes for a variety of organizations and his work is widely cited in the press. Dan previously worked in Silicon Valley and studied philosophy at the University of Rochester. Dan's essays have been published in Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, and he is a contributor to Bloomberg Opinion

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This event is part of the 2022 Winter webinar series, New Frontiers: Technology, Politics, and Society in the Asia-Pacific, sponsored by the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.

 

 

This event is part of the 2022 Winter webinar series, The Future of China's Economy, sponsored by the APARC China Program.