Potentially the most divisive issue to be addressed at the upcoming summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Bali on October 7-8, 2003 concerns the membership of Burma. Traditionally ASEAN has been regarded as among the most successful regional institutions anywhere. Since its founding in 1967, ASEAN member states have never waged war against each other. Southeast Asia has become an enduringly peaceful security community. This achievement reflects ASEAN's commitment to the norm of national sovereignty, its refusal to violate that norm by interfering in a fellow member's domestic affairs, and its consensual style of diplomacy--the confrontation-shunning "ASEAN Way." But these facilitators of regional peace have at the same time reinforced the more or less authoritarian character of the Association's ten member regimes. Nowhere in Southeast Asia is this anomaly of an "illiberal peace" more acute than in the crisis now facing ASEAN over the lack of democracy in Burma. Recently the junta in Rangoon arrested and imprisoned the leader of the Burmese opposition, Aung San Suu Kyi. The Burmese regime was able to crack down partly because of ASEAN's adherence to the principle of sovereignty and its reluctance to allow criticism of one member state by other member states. Will ASEAN's faith in sovereignty survive? Or will the Burmese dilemma force ASEAN's leaders at the Bali summit to rethink the very meaning of the Association in a globalizing and democratizing world? Erik Kuhonta recently completed his dissertation on the politics of equitable development in Malaysia and Thailand. He specializes on the comparative and international politics of developing countries with a focus on Southeast Asia. A citizen of the Philippines, he was born in Sri Lanka, grew up in Italy, and now considers Thailand his home. Kuhonta holds a B.A. magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. from Princeton University.

About the Talk: In Muslim-majority Indonesia and Malaysia, initial reactions to the American war in Iraq were overwhelmingly negative. Nor could support for American action be found among Muslim minorities in the Philippines, Singapore, or Thailand. But Southeast Asian Muslims were not equally or uniformly outraged. Complex and distinctive local contexts and agendas shaped Muslim anger and the responses to it. Dr. Emmerson will highlight these Southeast Asian settings and analyze the politics of anti-American backlash along a critical periphery of the Muslim world. Donald Emmerson is director of the Southeast Asia Forum at the Asia/Pacific Research Center at Stanford University. He teaches courses in international relations and comparative politics. His research interests focus on Islamism, regionalism, democratization, and US policy regarding Indonesia and Southeast Asia. Emmerson has testified before Congress in 1998, 1999, and 2001 on East Timor, Indonesia, and Southeast Asian topics. He assisted the Carter Center in monitoring Indonesia's national election and the UN vote on autonomy in East Timor. Members of the World Affairs Council: $5.00 Non-members: $8.00 Students with ID: Free To make a reservation, please contact the World Affairs Council at 415-293-4600. Cosponsored by the Asia/Pacific Research Center and Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation at Stanford University and the World Affairs Council of Northern California.

Educational achievement in Malaysia is racially skewed across its three main cultural groups: The Malay-Muslim majority lags behind the country's Chinese and Indian minorities. This poses a dilemma. Should the state give the majority preferential access to education in the name of group equality? Or permit such access to be decided by merit alone, in the name of fairness among individuals? Malaysia has chosen to expand opportunities for schooling while maintaining a strict policy of affirmative action for Malays, all within a centrally controlled and standardized system of national education that relies on the Malay language and includes emphasis religion and morality. After showing how this pattern evolved from the secular, English-language format adopted by the British when they ruled Malaysia, Dr. Bakri Musa will assess the costs and benefits of affirmative educational action in the country today. Bakri Musa has written extensively on Malaysia. His latest book, An Education System Worthy of Malaysia (2003), has been described as "a severe critique" and "a comprehensive proposal for reform." Earlier titles include Malaysia in the Era of Globalization (2002), and The Malay Dilemma Revisited (1999). Shorter commentaries have appeared in Asiaweek, Education Quarterly, The Far Eastern Economic Review, and The International Herald Tribune, among other print media, and been aired by National Public Radio on its program, "Marketplace." A surgeon in private practice in Silicon Valley, Dr. Musa earned his medical and graduate degrees at the University of Alberta in Canada.

While Islam is commonly portrayed as a Middle Eastern religion, the majority of the world's Muslims reside in Asia. Indonesia is home to the world's largest Muslim population, with India following close behind. Millions of Muslims are scattered throughout South, Southeast, Central and Northeast Asia. In the wake of the horrific terrorists attacks on September 11th, many non-Muslims have mistakenly identified Islam with political violence. The need to distinguish moderate Islam practiced by the Muslim majority in Asia and the radical extremism used by terrorists has never been greater. In an effort to create a more comprehensive understanding of these complex issues and address misconceptions linking Islam and terrorism, the Asia Society and the Shorenstein Forum will convene a panel of experts to explore Muslim thought and practice in several key Asian countries, namely Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia and China. Among the questions that will be addressed by the panel is how recent events will impact the future of Islam in Asia and what role extremist and other groups may play in this process.

Physically aligned as they are toward Mecca, the daily prayers and lifetime pilgrimages of Muslims around the world--hundreds of millions of spokes of religious practice--surround and sustain the Arabian hub of Islam as religious practice. Yet the demographic center of gravity of the Muslim world could hardly be farther from the Middle East. For it is in the vast arc of Asia, in countries such as Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Malaysia, that the great majority of the world's Muslims live. How, if at all, does this striking difference between ritual focus and social fact affect the outlooks and actions of Asian Muslims? What, roughly, is the balance of militancy and toleration in this Asian context, especially in ethnically and religiously plural societies such as Malaysia? Is it realistic to think that Asian attitudes and behaviors could form the basis for a 21st-century reformation and renaissance of Islam in which the jihadist passions of Al Qaeda and the purist strictures of the House of Saud would be refuted and shunned in favor of intercultural cooperation and liberal democracy? Or has the American-Afghan crisis, on the contrary, ignited a chain reaction of sympathy for Arab (and Pashtun) resentments that will inflame Asian Muslims against unbelievers? Finally, what relevance do these questions have for the people and policies of the United States? Karim Raslan is one of Southeast Asia's leading public intellectuals. His diverse interests run from constructing fictional plots to restructuring all-too-real bankruptcies. When he is not writing short stories and newspaper commentaries, or appearing on CNN or the BBC, he partners a highly regarded Malaysian law firm, Raslan Loong. His first novel, Desire--the first of four planned volumes about a family of Malay Muslims--will be published next fall. A third collection of his short stories should be out next spring. His syndicated column, "Eye in Asia," appears weekly in newspapers in Malaysia and Singapore, and is often reprinted elsewhere in Asia and Australia. The specialties of his law firm include corporate finance, capital markets, and information technology. He is presently a visiting scholar at Columbia University. When he is not traveling, Mr. Raslan lives in Malaysia.

This seminar addresses developing an analytical framework for a comparative study of the emergence and growth dynamics of regions of high tech industrial clusters in different national contexts. We review the empirical and theoretical literature on determinants of national and regional competitiveness in high tech industries. We conclude that, while innovation and entrepreneurship have both been given increasing attention in various international benchmarking studies in recent years, their interaction and joint effects on economic dynamism -- especially at the regional and specific industrial cluster level -- have not been well-investigated. Moreover, while the number of empirical studies of specific high-tech regions has increased, especially in the United States, the influence of different national contexts and international linkages has received inadequate attention. To address these gaps, we propose the development of conceptual measures and empirical benchmark indicators that focus specifically on the regional nexus of innovation and entrepreneurship, and identify possible secondary data sources and primary data collection methodology for deriving these indicators. Some preliminary benchmarking findings comparing a number of Asian nations/regions with Silicon Valley are presented.

Poh-Kam Wong is an associate professor at the Business School, National University of Singapore, where he directs the Centre for Management of Innovation and Technopreneurship. He obtained his BSc., MSc. and Ph.D. from MIT. His current research interests include management of technological innovation, S&T policy, and high tech entrepreneurship. His publications have appeared in, among others, Information Systems Research, International Journal of Technology Management, Journal of Asian Business, and Industry and Innovation, as well as chapters in books published by Stanford University Press, MIT Press, and Oxford University Press. He has consulted widely for international agencies, government agencies in Singapore, and high tech firms in Asia. He has co-founded three technology companies and currently serves on the advisory board or board of directors of several high tech start-ups in Singapore and Malaysia. He is an advisor to two VC funds and chairman of the Business Angel Network (South East Asia). He was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley in 1984 and is currently on sabbatical leave as a visiting scholar at Shorenstein APARC.