Jeremy Weinstein is an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University and an affiliated faculty member at CDDRL and CISAC. Previously, he was a research fellow at the Center for Global Development, where he directed the bi-partisan Commission on Weak States and US National Security. While working on his PhD, with funding from the Jacob Javits Fellowship, a Sheldon Fellowship, and the World Bank, he conducted hundreds of interviews with rebel combatants and civilians in both Africa and Latin America for his forthcoming book, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence. He has also worked on the National Security Council staff; served as a visiting scholar at the World Bank; was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; and received a research fellowship in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution. He received his BA with high honors from Swarthmore College, and his MA and PhD in political economy and government from Harvard University.

Patrick Johnston is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University and a CISAC predoctoral fellow. His dissertation, "Humanitarian Intervention and the Strategic Logic of Mass Atrocities in Civil Wars," asks why ethnic cleansing and genocidal violence frequently increase dramatically after international actors threaten to intervene militarily or deploy significant numbers of troops in coercive interventions. Johnston received a BA in history and a BA in political science, both with distinction, from the University of Minnesota, Morris and an MA in political science from Northwestern University.

Page Fortna (Ph.D. Harvard University 1998) is a member of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. Her research focuses on the durability of peace in the aftermath of both civil and interstate wars. She is the author of, Peace Time: Cease-Fire Agreements and the Durability of Peace (Princeton University Press, 2004) and has published articles in World Politics, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, International Studies Review, and the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs. She is currently finishing a book evaluating the effectiveness of peacekeeping in civil wars (forthcoming, Princeton University Press), and is beginning a project on long-term historical trends in war termination. She has been a Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University (2004-2005) and a Visiting Fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, MA (2002-2003). Before coming to Columbia, Fortna was a pre-doctoral and then a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Her graduate work was done in the Government Department at Harvard University (Ph.D. 1998). Before graduate school, she worked at the Henry L. Stimson Center, a think tank in Washington DC. She is a graduate of Wesleyan University.

Jeremy Weinstein is an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University and an affiliated faculty member at CDDRL and CISAC. Previously, he was a research fellow at the Center for Global Development, where he directed the bi-partisan Commission on Weak States and US National Security. While working on his PhD, with funding from the Jacob Javits Fellowship, a Sheldon Fellowship, and the World Bank, he conducted hundreds of interviews with rebel combatants and civilians in both Africa and Latin America for his forthcoming book, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence. He has also worked on the National Security Council staff; served as a visiting scholar at the World Bank; was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; and received a research fellowship in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution. He received his BA with high honors from Swarthmore College, and his MA and PhD in political economy and government from Harvard University.

Major economic reforms are often politically difficult.  They may cause pain to voters and provoke unrest.  They may be opposed by politicians whose time horizons are shortened by electoral cycles.  They may collide with the established ideology and long-standing practices of an entrenched ruling party.  They may be resisted by bureaucrats who fear change, and by vested interests with stakes in the status quo.  Obstacles to major economic reform can be daunting in democratic and autocratic polities alike. 

And yet, somehow, past leaders of today's Asian dragons did manage to get away with critical and creative economic reforms.  Sly political foxes nudged their countries onto high-growth paths toward global renown as economic dragons.  What lessons can be learned from their experiences?  Are tactics that worked in authoritarian systems applicable to democratic ones, and vice versa?  Can one identify a set of stratagems that would amount to an equivalent, for economic reformers, of the advice Machiavelli gave political princes? 

Arroyo will recount the crafty political maneuvers used by leaders of economic reform in Asia during these pivotal eras:  China under Deng Xiaoping; India in the 1990s; Thailand under General Prem Tinsulanonda; Vietnam's Doi Moi; South Korea under Park Chung Hee; Malaysia under Mahathir Mohamad; and Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew.  Arroyo's remarks will be drawn from the paper he has been writing at Stanford on "The Political Economy of Successful Reform: Asian Stratagems," which he describes as "a playbook of useful maneuvers for economic reformers."

Dennis Arroyo is presently on leave from his government post as a director of the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) of the Philippines.  He has held consultancies with the World Bank, the United Nations, and the survey research firm Social Weather Stations, and has written widely on socioeconomic topics.  His critique of the Philippine development plan won a mass media award for "best analysis."  He has degrees in economics from the University of the Philippines.  

Lant Pritchett is Professor of the Practice of Economic Development at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (as of July 1, 2007).

In addition he works as a consultant to Google.org, is a non-resident fellow of the Center for Global Development, and is a senior fellow of BREAD. He is also co-editor of the Journal of Development Economics.

He graduated from Brigham Young University in 1983 with a B.S. in Economics and in 1988 from MIT with a PhD in Economics.

After finishing at MIT Lant joined the World Bank, where he held a number of positions in the Bank's research complex between 1988 and 1998, including as an adviser to Lawrence Summers when he was Vice President 1991-1993. From 1998 to 2000 he worked in Indonesia. From 2000 to 2004 Lant was on leave from the World Bank as a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In 2004 he returned to the World Bank and moved to India where he worked until May 2007.

He has been part of the team producing many World Bank reports, including: World Development Report 1994: Infrastructure for Development, Assessing Aid: What Works, What Doesn't and Why (1998), Better Health Systems for Indias Poor: Findings, Analysis, and Options (2003), World Development Report 2004: Making Services Work for the Poor, Economic Growth in the 1990s: Learning from a Decade of Reforms (2005).

In addition he has authored (alone or with one of his 22 co-authors) over 50 papers published in refereed journals, chapters in books, or as articles, as least some of which are sometimes cited. In addition to economics journals his work has appeared in specialized journals in demography, education, and health. In 2006 he published his first solo authored book Let Their People Come.

Lant, an American national, was born in Utah in 1959 and raised in Boise Idaho. Perhaps because of this, he has worked in, or traveled to, over forty countries and has lived in three other countries: Argentina (1978-80), Indonesia (1998-2000), and India (2004-2007).

During the past 40 years, Professor Hu has been teaching and conducting research in health economics, particularly in healthcare financing and the economics of tobacco control.  Hu was a Fulbright scholar in China. He has served as consultant or advisor to the World Bank, the World Health Organization, the National Institutes of Health, the Institute of Medicine, the Rand Corporation, the Ministry of Health in the People's Republic of China, Department of Health and Welfare in Hong Kong, Department of Health in the Republic of China (Taiwan), and many private research institutions and foundations. 

Professor Hu will speak to us immediately after an April trip to China, sharing his research and perspectives on the economics of tobacco control and the debate about healthcare system reforms in China (including a possible link between the two through financing expansions in coverage through increased tobacco taxation).