John D. Ciorciari was a Shorenstein Fellow at APARC in 2007-08 and an affiliate of APARC and SEAF in 2008-09 while a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution.   Upon leaving Stanford he took up a position as an assistant professor in the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.

A main purpose of the Shorenstein Fellowship is to enable post-docs to revise their dissertations for publication.  John did exactly that.  In 2010 Georgetown University Press will publish The Limits of Alignment in the Global South:  Southeast Asia since 1975.  Congratulations, John!

During his association with SEAF John also finished co-editing and co-authoring a monograph on the (in)famous Khmer Rouge trials in Cambodia.  In 2009 the Documentation Center of Cambodia published the result:  On Trial: The Khmer Rouge Accountability Press.

On Trial is dedicated to “the victims of [Pol Pot’s grossly misnamed] Democratic Kampuchea and to promoting a legal accountability process that will honor their memories and provide their families with justice.”

Sophal Ear, an assistant professor at the US Naval Postgraduate School (Monterey) and himself a survivor of Pol Pot’s regime praised On Trial as an “excellent,” “thoughtful,” “timely,” and “essential book.”

The renowned historian of Cambodia David Chandler—a professor emeritus at Monash University (Australia) and a former SEAF speaker—also lauded the book: 

“This invaluable collection of essays, sponsored by the Cambodian NGO that has pioneered research on the Khmer Rouge era, provides a wealth of information about the so-called Khmer Rouge Tribunal.  On Trial is accessible, well researched, and passionately engaged with the innumerable tragedies of the Khmer Rouge period.  Its authors argue that the ongoing trials may possibly lead toward deeper reconciliation and certainly a deeper knowledge of what happened throughout the country in those horrific years.”

Other publications stemming from John’s time at Stanford include these three wide-ranging titles, all published in January 2009: 

“The Balance of Great-power Influence in Contemporary Southeast Asia,” International Relations of the Asia-Pacific (9: 1), pp. 157-196; International Politics and the Mess in Myanmar, JPRI Working Paper No. 114, Japan Policy Research Institute; and An Asian Monetary Fund in the Making? SCID Working Paper No. 378, Stanford Center for International Development.

While at Stanford in 2008-09 John also gave off-campus presentations on topics including Asian security, Cambodian history, and alignment politics at Columbia, Princeton, and Chicago, among other universities, and the International Studies Association, among other professional-society venues.

Future Shorenstein Fellows take note:  John Ciorciari is a tough act to follow.  SEAF wishes him the best of success in his future endeavors.

Edited by SEAF Director Don Emmerson and co-published in 2008-09 by APARC at Stanford and ISEAS in Singapore, Hard Choices: Security, Democracy, and Regionalism in Southeast Asia continues to attract attention. Excerpted below are two differing but equally thoughtful recent reviews:

Noel M. Morada is a professor of political science at the University of the Philippines-Diliman and director of the Philippines Progamme in the Asia Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) at the University Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.

Writing in Kasarinlan: Philippine Journal of Third World Studies, 23: 2 (2008), pp. 119-122, Prof. Morada found the title of Hard Choices “apt” because its authors “ask hard questions—including philosophical ones—on the merits and demerits of pushing for a more ‘people-centered’ ASEAN, the challenges and constraints in implementing Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principles in the region, as well as the possible directions that ASEAN may take in the near future.”

A “good thing” about the book, in his view, “is that the reader is left to make his or her own conclusions” about “the issues and arguments” that it presents. He notes the variety of backgrounds of the authors: from scholars based far from Southeast Asia, through local analysts on Track II, to an official from inside the ASEAN secretariat itself. Their chapters, in his judgment, contribute significantly to current debates about what balance that ASEAN should strike between “state-centered and society-centered conceptions of security,” including “the dilemmas and constraints” that state and societal actors face in pursuing a more “participatory” kind of regionalism in Southeast Asia.

Among the issues featured in Hard Choices, Morada cites “the thorny problem of intervention in the domestic affairs of [ASEAN] members,” including the challenge to regionalism posed by Myanmar’s rulers, and whether or not the ASEAN Charter can facilitate a response or may itself be an obstacle to reform. While highlighting the relative optimism of Mely Caballero-Anthony’s chapter on non-traditional security, he finds a consensus among the book’s authors that “ASEAN’s traditional norms—i.e., state sovereignty and non-interference—still rule.”

Prof. Morada ends his review thus: “This should be a required reading for graduate students specializing in Southeast Asia and a must have for ASEAN specialists and observers. More importantly, civil society groups would benefit immensely from reading this volume as part of their education about ASEAN, on which many remain uninformed. Many of my friends in the academic community in the region have in fact been quite disappointed with many civil society groups who simply want to push their agenda but have not done their homework on the workings of ASEAN. This book should help enlighten them further.”

Lee Jones is a lecturer in the Department of Politics at the College of Queen Mary, University of London.

Writing for a future issue of the ASEASUK Newsletter, a publication of the Association of Southeast Asian Studies in the United Kingdom, Dr. Jones, unlike Prof. Morada, misses a firmer editorial hand. “Theoretical engagement is relatively sparse,” writes Jones, “and the book would have benefited from an overarching framework to help structure and guide the contributions. Particularly given many contributors’ focus on Myanmar, ASEAN’s policies towards it, and ASEAN’s recent institutional evolution, an early chapter agreeing [to] a collective account of these matters would have left more space for analysis and argumentation.”

Jones singles out the chapter by “veteran official Termsak Chalermpalanupap” as “a highly informative overview of ASEAN’s institutional development which will be useful for all students of ASEAN.” Chapters by Simon Tay (on air pollution) and Michael Malley (on nuclear energy) are also praised by Jones as demonstrating that “democratisation does not (as other contributors imply) automatically produce either more liberal policies or enhanced regional cooperation.” On the contrary, writes Jones, “democratisation can give vent to illiberal, nationalist and uncooperative sentiments, particularly when dominated (as ASEAN polities are) by cynical oligarchs. It is disappointing, therefore, that none of the chapters engages in systematic analysis of the domestic social forces at work in ASEAN states.”

“On balance,” for Jones, “the evidence in Hard Choices seems to favour the pessimist viewpoint. The basis for concluding that civil society has shattered elites’ monopoly on policymaking is rather weak. None of the pro-intervention authors sufficiently counter[s] the pragmatist challenge that ASEAN coherence could not withstand the adoption of a more liberal-interventionist posture. However, this is a contingent judgment which should not lead us simply to endorse the status quo. … [T] he fate of individual countries and the overall direction and content of ASEAN regionalism depends ultimately on the struggles of ASEAN’s own citizens.

Concludes Jones: “A clear-sighted analysis of the respective strengths and weaknesses of the force of movement and reaction, without succumbing to the defeatism of endorsing authoritarianism or the romanticism of believing that democratic institutions alone imply the victory of civil society (or that ASEAN can do much to create such institutions), is therefore vital for understanding the region’s prospects.”

How do countries in the vast and diverse Asia-Pacific region differ in “prescribing cultures”? How do health systems in the region balance access to pharmaceuticals with incentives for innovation? How do the forces of globalization shape, and in turn are shaped by, cultural legacies about health and health care? These are the key questions addressed by the new Asia Health Policy Program book, Prescribing Cultures and Pharmaceutical Policy in the Asia Pacific.

AHPP held a book launch event September 23rd with three authors of the book detailing how pharmaceutical policies are interlinked globally and at the same time deeply rooted in local culture. 

Philosophy, Politics, Democracy: Selected Essays, released Oct 2009 (by Joshua Cohen): Over the past twenty years, Joshua Cohen has explored the most controversial issues facing the American public: campaign finance and political equality, privacy rights and robust public debate, hate speech and pornography, and the capacity of democracies to address important practical problems. In this highly anticipated volume, Cohen draws on his work in these diverse topics to develop an argument about what he calls, following John Rawls, "democracy's public reason." He rejects the conventional idea that democratic politics is simply a contest for power, and that philosophical argument is disconnected from life. Political philosophy, he insists, is part of politics, and its job is to contribute to the public reasoning about what we ought to do.

When the People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation: All over the world, democratic reforms have brought power to the people, but under conditions where the people have little opportunity to think about the power that they exercise. In this book, James S. Fishkin combines a new theory of democracy with actual practice and shows how an idea that harks back to ancient Athens can be used to revive our modern democracies. The book outlines deliberative democracy projects conducted by the author with various collaborators in the United States, China, Britain, Denmark, Australia, Italy, Bulgaria, Northern Ireland, and in the entire European Union. These projects have resulted in the massive expansion of wind power in Texas, the building of sewage treatment plants in China, and greater mutual understanding between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. The book is accompanied by a DVD of "Europe in One Room" by Emmy Award-winning documentary makers Paladin Invision. The film recounts one of the most challenging deliberative democracy efforts with a scientific sample from 27 countries speaking 21 languages.

Coethnicity: Diversity and the Dilemmas of Collective Action, released Aug 2009 (edited by James Habyarimana, Macartan Humphreys, Daniel N. Posner, Jeremy M. Weinstein): Ethnically homogenous communities often do a better job than diverse communities of producing public goods such as satisfactory schools and health care, adequate sanitation, and low levels of crime. Coethnicity reports the results of a landmark study that aimed to find out why diversity has this cooperation-undermining effect. The study, conducted in a neighborhood of Kampala, Uganda, notable for both its high levels of diversity and low levels of public goods provision, hones in on the mechanisms that might account for the difficulties diverse societies often face in trying to act collectively. Research on ethnic diversity typically draws on either experimental research or field work. Coethnicity does both. By taking the crucial step from observation to experimentation, this study marks a major breakthrough in the study of ethnic diversity.

Political Liberalization in the Persian Gulf: The countries of the Persian (or Arab) Gulf produce about thirty percent of the planet's oil and keep around fifty-five percent of its reserves underground. The stability of the region's autocratic regimes, therefore, is crucial for those who wish to anchor the world's economic and political future. Yet despite its reputation as a region trapped by tradition, the Persian Gulf has taken slow steps toward political liberalization. The question now is whether this trend is part of an inexorable drive toward democratization or simply a means for autocratic regimes to consolidate and legitimize their rule. In this volume, Joshua Teitelbaum addresses the push toward political liberalization in the Persian Gulf and its implications for the future, tracking eight states as they respond to the challenges of increased wealth and education, a developing middle class, external pressures from international actors, and competing social and political groups.

Promoting Democracy and the Rule of Law: American and European Strategies, released Aug 2009 (edited by Amichai Magen, Thomas Risse, and Michael A. McFaul): European and American experts systematically compare US and EU strategies to promote democracy around the world -- from the Middle East and the Mediterranean, to Latin America, the former Soviet bloc, and Southeast Asia. In doing so, the authors debunk the pernicious myth that there exists a transatlantic divide over democracy promotion.

Democracy and Authoritarianism in the Postcommunist World, ships Dec 2009 (edited by Valerie Bunce, Michael A. McFaul, Kathryn Stoner): This volume brings together a distinguished group of scholars working on Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to examine in depth three waves of democratic change that took place in eleven different former Communist nations. The essays draw important conclusions about the rise, development, and breakdown of both democracy and dictatorship in each country and together provide a rich comparative perspective on the post-Communist world.

Advancing Democracy Abroad: Why We Should and How We Can, ships Nov 2009 (by Michael A. McFaul): This book offers examples of the tangible benefits of democracy – more accountable government, greater economic prosperity, and better security – and explains how Americans can reap economic and security gains from democratic advance around the world. In the final chapters of this new work, McFaul provides past examples of successful democracy promotion strategies and offers constructive new proposals for supporting democratic development more effectively in the future.